In a TV studio on the banks of the Thames in London, a crew of comedians attempt — and nearly absolutely failing — to get enjoyable out of a gameshow viewers.
It feels significantly unsettling at first. Studio audiences aren’t usually basically probably the most comically discerning. Nevertheless proper right here, that’s the whole stage. Each time an viewers member lots as sniggers or sneezes, money is docked from a prize pot of £250,000 ($330,000), the slightest noise costing them as a lot as £10,000 ($13,000) each time. Sadly for them, all 75 are on digicam and mic’d up, with a crew of stern-looking officers on the side monitoring fluctuating amount ranges and in a position to press a buzzer.
“Silence is Golden” — as a result of it’s known as — launches on UKTV on May 5. In a single factor of a rarity, the format has already been provided to 4 completely different worldwide areas all through Europe and Latin America sooner than it’s even aired a single episode.
The current marks the first out of the gate for Positive Positive Media, the indie manufacturing agency launched in 2023 that, and never utilizing a second of televised content material materials to its determine, managed to attract a formidable — and eclectic — array of patrons. Amongst them are Elisabeth Murdoch’s ingenious powerhouse Sister (which produced the likes of “Black Doves” and “Chernobyl”) and French unscripted TV huge Satisfaction. Then there’s former “Associates” star Courtney Cox, Snow Patrol musician Johnny McDaid and pop genius and frequent Ariana Grande collaborator Savan Kotecha (an Oscar nominee for “Eurovision Music Contest: The Story of Fireplace Saga” music “Husavik”).
“Silence is Golden” could be the brainchild of Positive Positive founder Richard Bacon, who simply currently returned to London to spearhead his agency after a 9-year spell in LA .
As a result of the Brit — biggest recognized inside the U.Okay. as a TV and radio host for the proper part of 20 years starting inside the late 90s — enthusiastically explains from the Positive Positive workplaces inside the well-heeled neighbourhood of Primrose Hill, the concept for the current received right here to him one morning.
“I wakened with this image in my head of [Brit comedian and TV host] Jimmy Carr standing in entrance a studio viewers who weren’t allowed to make any noise — within the occasion that they did they started dropping money,” he says whereas eyeing up a bowl of croissants. “And I merely thought: that’s a format. So then I spent three hours writing it.”
Bacon, as he freely admits, lives and breathes ideas. “They make me happy,” the 49-year-old says with a beaming smile, noting that his recently-diagnosed “sturdy strand” of ADHD permits him to benefit from “hyper-focusing” on every. “I’ll be occupied with ideas and refining ideas at 9pm on Saturday night or on Christmas Day and I’ll be waking up at 4am and inserting notes on my cellphone.”
It’s Bacon’s penchant for ideas — and by no means merely these involving an awkwardly silent studio — that his patrons (which had been, for basically probably the most half, mates sooner than they turned enterprise companions) have all bought into.
He’s a “uniquely gifted ingenious” with an “extraordinary capability to generate genuine, scalable ideas that resonate globally,” says Murdoch (who herself organize “Masterchef” producer Shine sooner than launching Sister with Jane Featherstone). Satisfaction founder Arther Essebeg (who, like Bacon, started his occupation on native radio) merely notes that, “Richard truly does suppose in one other means.”
Bacon’s ideas are on the beating coronary coronary heart of Positive Positive, which has itself blossomed from an idea proper right into a bustling ingenious outfit the place, he proudly asserts, there’s “fairly a bit taking place abruptly.”
Definitely, he’s speaking in entrance of a wall on which a neatly displayed grid of A4 sheets operate fast blurbs for almost 30 concepts spanning experience, quiz, actuality, relationship and cooking displays, plus dwell events. Most are lined in vibrant Publish-It notes on which updates have been scribbled.
Among the many concepts are just a few phrases with a screen-grabbed image from a film — a unfastened idea that almost certainly needs some principal padding out, nevertheless others are fully-fledged duties which is likely to be transferring forward at tempo. Three go into pilot this summer season, along with a quiz current, a severe experience current being developed for a U.S. neighborhood and an journey actuality assortment “on a Survivor-type scale, nevertheless with absurdity in it,” for a streamer. Bacon says one different experience current and one different actuality current have merely gone into funded development with streamers.
A sizeable number of the A4 sheets level out the names of very recognizable figures from the world of TV and music (most of whom, likes his patrons, are, or have change into Bacon’s mates). One current in late-stage development is about to mark the first small show outing for a severe Hollywood star, who will — hopefully — entrance a very high-concept recreation current straddling TV and video gaming.
A number of the ideas sound hilarious. “We are going to’t do one thing that isn’t humorous,” laughs Bacon. “It’s obtained to have a story in it, and an excellent story. Nevertheless basically, it should most likely’t not be humorous.”
Bacon inside the studio for “Silence is Golden” with host Dermot O’Leary ({Photograph} by Positive Positive Media)
For all Bacon’s passionate descriptions of each current, be it a “hybrid of Big Brother and the X-Concern,” a format merely known as “The Finest Quiz Current inside the World” or one different with the topline “One Lady, One Draw back: Too Many Males,” plus some very spectacular sizzle reels, little can — however — be formally launched.
Nevertheless what could also be talked about is Positive Positive’s proprietary know-how, the WOMI, nonetheless in test mode and various different months away from its official launch.
A major foundation of Bacon’s imaginative and prescient for Positive Positive being a “codecs agency that straddles TV and tech,” the WOMI seems and looks like an iPhone in a considerably cumbersome, military-grade case. However it absolutely could shake up and simplify unscripted programming by inserting, as he explains, “a actuality TV crew in your pocket”.
Primarily, when the WOMI cellphone is picked up, a TV-quality digicam on the doorway instantly begins recording an in depth up of the buyer — in panorama — as they take a look on the show whereas the one on the once more concurrently information whatever the cellphone is pointing at. Within the meantime, any on show train harking back to textual content material messaging or video calls is captured. After which as quickly because the cellphone is put down, each of these explicit individual recordings is modified into info and despatched to the cloud to permit them to immediately be edited remotely.
“It’s not a shopper product, because of that’s a crazy funding,” says Bacon. “What we’ve carried out is a B2B issue — it’s by producers for producers, it’s for television, it’s for producers, it prints content material materials for YouTube and it’s going to be in quite a few our displays.”
It moreover received right here to Bacon all through one different brainwave, this time whereas hanging out with three-time Oscar nominee Stephen Daldry. “We had been watching a Christopher Nolan film collectively, and he suggested me that the important thing to all show drama is the shut up,” he says. “And it merely obtained me pondering how all an important info you research in your life is in your cellphone, so that you just’re actually inserting your self in shut up for all an important info you’ll ever research.” Bacon reached out to software program program engineer mates in LA, now part of Positive Positive, and challenged them to assemble one factor that might harness this.
To showcase the WOMI’s capabilities by means of actuality filmmaking, Positive Positive has produced an early test of a “self-shot” assortment via which a gaggle of school school college students received WOMI telephones and requested to go about their days. The footage offers what Bacon describes as “real, raw content material materials,” highlighting a scene from the promo via which we see one in every of many girls writing to a boy she’s been flirting with on her cellphone as her excited mates watch on, the animated ellipses exhibiting that he was writing once more and the gasps from the group learning the show as he does so.
“I checked out their reactions and I assumed, okay, with WOMI, one thing is a drama,” Bacon says. “The way in which through which I take into account it’s the method that, like ‘Planet Earth’ captured bats flying at night, that’s capturing kids inside the wild.”
Positive Positive now plans to self-finance “The College Women of Liverpool” as a 10-15 minute episode dimension assortment, which it’ll put straight onto YouTube with sponsorship, adopted by a U.S. mannequin “The College Women of Miami.”
Nevertheless that’s merely the start. There are numerous — many — completely different plans for the WOMI that embody incorporating it not merely into Positive Positive codecs, nevertheless using it in pre-existing displays produced elsewhere and offering it to producers. WOMI was used inside the agency’s first step into dwell events, the Purple Bull Custom Battle, a head-to-head music battle held in London’s huge Drumsheds that it broadcast dwell. Using the WOMI — which he says will shortly be able to live-stream — people inside the crowd or backstage can efficiently change into part of the crew.
The “crazy issue,” Bacon elements out, is that he simply currently secured the patent for the know-how, one factor he admits he wasn’t anticipating. “We’ve obtained completely the monopoly, through U.S. patent regulation, to assemble a software that information the show and your reactions to the show on the an identical time.”
Nevertheless the WOMI — which Bacon counsel is “in some strategies our largest problem, and as well as barely the slowest” — isn’t solely a flowery gizmo that gives a model new close-up personal contact to unscripted TV. It’s one factor that might moreover help drive Positive Positive’s fortunes all through an uncertain time for the leisure sector.
“I don’t want to merely depend upon getting 10% of a producing cost, because of this generally is a declining market — and other people expenses get capped anyway,” claims Bacon. With the know-how — if leased out to TV producers or supplied to producers with a earnings share system — the company will get to open up full new earnings streams, as a result of it does through discovering sponsoring for its self-made YouTube displays.
“It’s warning in direction of the reality that the enterprise is in a bit of little bit of a humorous place,” says Bacon. “So truly we’re merely attempting to suppose in one other means.”
Even with little to level out for it by means of exact tangible content material materials in the marketplace to see correct now, all of it genuinely sounds very spectacular (presuming you’ll be capable to maintain with Bacon as he pinballs haphazardly — and charmingly — from one thought to the next). Nevertheless for Brits of a positive age, turning right into a hyper-creative tech-focussed innovator on this planet of unscripted TV almost certainly wasn’t what they’d been anticipating from him.
Starting out on BBC radio on the age of 17 inside the early Nineties, a 21-year-old Bacon landed a life-changing TV break as a quantity on iconic kids current “Blue Peter” in 1997. Nevertheless this may end in infamy 18 months later, when he was sacked following a tabloid info report of him taking cocaine. “12-hour drugs romp shame of kids’ TV idol,” blasted the (now defunct) Data of the World (funnily enough, run by Murdoch senior). Such was the seriousness of the matter, the BBC’s then children’s head was compelled to go on air to awkwardly make clear the firing to its youthful viewers.
Bacon’s cancellation didn’t remaining prolonged, and just a few months later he was among the many many buzzy youthful faces fronting the groundbreaking and anarchic 90s morning current “The Big Breakfast” (a job he says first obtained him “into the mindset of ideas”). Many additional TV and radio gigs would observe, sooner than an extended run as a result of the host of his private focus on radio current with the BBC. Nevertheless in 2014 he jacked all of it in, transferring to LA alongside along with his partner and two children.
Richard Bacon when he joined the U.Okay.’s Capital FM’s as a DJ operate in 2005. ({Photograph} by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Photographs)
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When a U.S. travelogue TV thought fell through (actually sooner than Bacon had even left the U.Okay.) what adopted was an nearly year-long interval of unemployment, broken when he landed a gig as presenter of the Nationwide Geographic Channel’s “Explorer.” The debut current: mountaineering through Yosemite with Barack Obama inside the final days of his presidency. “And that was my first day’s work in America!” he says. There might be completely different jobs, most on U.S. daytime TV, after which, within the summertime of 2018, Bacon expert a kind of seismic life-altering moments.
“I went proper right into a coma — and I was anticipated to die,” he considerably nonchalantly explains. A lung an an infection — first felt whereas on a flight once more to London from LA — compelled medical medical doctors to position Bacon into an induced coma, which he solely wakened from 9 days later.
“And that changed all of the issues. As soon as I received right here out of that I assumed: I’m going to do what I presupposed to do, which is give you codecs,” he says. And so, prompted by this “near demise issue,” that’s what he did, quitting a job and over the following yr writing three codecs that went to pilot after which to assortment. NBC signed him up on an common deal, sooner than he would received all the way down to chart his private course inside the unscripted world with Positive Positive Media.
In spite of everything, it helped that by this stage the naturally gregarious and really likeable Bacon had, over a near three-decade occupation in every the U.Okay. and U.S., amassed an enormous circle of influential enterprise mates. Amongst them, Elisabeth Murdoch, who “bought into the imaginative and prescient” for Positive Positive through Sister when it was merely an idea. “They’re glorious at backing creatives,” he says.
By means of a friendship with Snow Patrol’s McDaid, he had obtained to know his affiliate Cox — “merely truly such a nice particular person” — whereas moreover turning into shut with Kotecha (“we truly talk day by day”). All three moreover joined as patrons. As did Essebeg’s Satisfaction.
“Sure, I do know all these people, nevertheless they’re all proficient they often’re all fascinating — it’s, selfishly, about having patrons that I get on with, that I’m comfortable with socially, however as well as are strategically helpful to the company,” he says, together with that he’s been writing codecs with every McDaid and Kotecha.
There’s moreover the Positive Positive creatives that Bacon has assembled spherical him. As he explains, with zero bravado, “all ideas start with me, all of them.” It’s not all the way in which all the way down to conceitedness or any sense of megalomania, nevertheless considerably Bacon’s ADHD. “It’s truly arduous to elucidate, nevertheless I’m merely not that good with completely different people’s ideas, even after they’re good,” he says. “For me to really care about it a way or one different the thought has to start out out with me, in every other case I don’t truly know what to do with it.”
Whereas an unorthodox ingenious course of for any manufacturing agency, what Bacon does have is an “elite crew that ship these ideas into life.” Amongst them are his two large league hires, launched on board in late 2023. Head of leisure Mark Sidaway, generally called “Sid,” is a five-time BAFTA-winning exec producer and served as showrunner on “The X Concern” for 10 seasons. Sidaway is principal Positive Positive’ “large push” into dwell events. Then there’s director of producing Lydia Arding, poached from Hilary and Chelsea Clinton’s label Hidden Delicate. Arding was beforehand head of factual manufacturing at producer-agency huge “Avalon.”
It’s this crew’s job, alongside receiving random emails late on a Saturday night with each lightbulb second, to hone down regardless of ideas Bacon comes up with proper right into a manageable selection of exact workable codecs. Because of with ADHD, he warns, it’s “quite simple to have an excessive amount of ideas and by no means finish them.”
Bacon elements to a room on the completely different end of the office the place they accumulate to reinforce concepts and “assemble the deck and write and refine, write and refine,” many times until they’re happy. “At one stage there have been 4-fucking-9 in there, nevertheless now there are 12 that we’re rising,” he says. “12 continues to be relatively lots when you say it out loud, nonetheless it’s not 49!”
With its patented proprietary tech, A-list patrons, a format that’s now hitting screens and has already been provided globally and plenty of additional coming down the pipeline, Positive Positive Media seems and looks like a high-concept startup that hit the underside working and has solely accelerated since. And it fully is that.
Nevertheless there’s moreover a delightfully frenzied and unpredictable energy to agency, as if it could abruptly, out of nowhere — and fully casually — uncover the next principal globe-spanning format in leisure. It would already have it — it is likely to be someplace on the wall, possibly merely three phrases printed on an A4 sheet and awaiting refinement.
Nevertheless regardless of this subsequent principal globe-spanning format in leisure is, it’s extraordinarily susceptible to have first come to Positive Positive’ creatively-charged mad genius founder as an idea at 4am inside the morning and quickly written into his cellphone.
As Bacon excitedly explains, “I want to put chaos in all of the issues, truly.”
