Sumi Connock, Creative Director, Formats at BBC

Sumi, you are the creative director of formats at BBC, is it very difficult nowadays to come up with new ideas for TV formats?
We work with a lot of brilliant creatives, we've got a lot of independent producers we work with and BBC Studios and both come up with amazing ideas all the time. We've won the Best Multiplatform Award for the past 2 years running at MIPTV - last year with Stupid Man, Smart Phone from Kalel Productions where a comedian goes on an adventure with a social media influencer and they get dropped in a country in the middle of nowhere, and they are given a challenge, so it's like the art of survival but they can only use their mobile phone. It's really funny. We've had some really creative formats coming in the last few years, and obviously we've got all the new ones for Showcase, so I think British creativity is still at its best.

What are the latest format releases for this Showcase?
The Generation Game will launch fully at MIPTV, because it doesn't air in the UK until spring, but that was a really big show. It was the number 1 show on Saturday nights for 30 years in the UK. There's been a lot of reboots, heritage formats coming back, so we're really excited that Generation Game is returning. You have two families competing, two teams of two people, but they represent different generations of the family, so you might have a grandma and granddaughter or mother and son-in-law, or father and daughter, and they compete in a series of funny physical games and then at the end of the show the winning couple face a big conveyor belt of prizes. They watch all the prizes go past and then they have 20 seconds on the clock to remember as many as they can in order to win them. Every prize they remember they win. But for the reboot we've supersized it, so it's much bigger.

We also have a quiz show called Impossible - it actually launched a year ago, it's a daytime show where you've got a right answer and a wrong answer but also an impossible answer, so it's really fun to play along. It's been the highest rating daily game show since 2015, so it's doing really really well. It's had over 100 episodes commissioned in the UK, but now BBC One are going to launch into Peak Time with celebrities, so we'll do Impossible Celebrities later this year which we are incredibly excited about.

Do you think that the industry is at the crossroads now and that is in a kind of creative crisis with not many new original formats appearing these days, rather reboots of old formats?
I think that obviously there have been reboots of the classic formats but they're normally given a bit of a new spin, a little twist - we did the same with The Weakest Link - it has come back in quite a few territories and it's done really well. But definitely there are also lots of new shows, we have got a daily baking show that we're launching here as well, so you know cooking is always really popular. You would have thought "Oh, everything has been done with cooking", but we are launching King of Cakes. Rather than being about a baker that can do everything, this show is all about finding the perfect cake, whether it's a family recipe or your own creation - it is just about one perfect cake, and the winning cake gets sold in a store in the territory. This means, with your casting you can go really broad because you don't need to be able to bake everything, you just need to be able to do one cake really well.

Talent shows continue to be popular around the world, as are cooking formats, as you mentioned. What are the other trends on the market?
Obviously, the big talent shows are still huge, but we've seen a lot more factual entertainment coming through, precisely because those big talent shows are still doing really well. Factual entertainment can be more cost-effective for the broadcasters, it tends to be a little bit cheaper. I think the audience have wanted to maybe have a bit more authenticity, so with factual entertainment, it is set against real backdrops, it is real stories - real lives, so maybe that for the viewer makes it feel a little more authentic. You wouldn't have thought that baking was going to be so popular, but at its heart it is really also a talent show - just done in a completely different way. You've still got your judges, you still have contestants with a talent - the talent is baking - and they are going on that journey to prove that they are the best baker, so there are lots of different ways of doing talent shows.

Will big VOD services change the TV landscape in the foreseeable future in terms of formats?
It will be really interesting to see what they do, obviously they're already doing some unscripted formats but it's different depending on the platform. Facebook Watch want to encourage more engagement online, whereas Netflix is more about binge-watching, but actually when you see what they're doing, I would say they are definitely looking towards linear TV, because they've got Bear Grylls on Facebook Watch - he came from Channel 4, The Grand Tour has all the Top Gear talent for Amazon and Netflix have brought back Queer Eye, so I think they want that broad mainstream entertainment. But it will be interesting to see what happens there and what new unscripted formats they pursue.

What are your personal favorites right now?
When we were talking about trends, the younger, youth-skewing trends is a big one, and we've got two that we're launching here at Showcase that I really love. Blink is really fun, it's cost effective to make and I love the fact that it's the fastest gameshow in the world - blink and you miss it. Two celebrities compete in 4 games based around pop culture and trivia, but you could also do it with sports trivia, you could do natural history, you can have families competing - it's very versatile. You could also produce it either as a long-form show or as smaller, short-form for a digital platform, so it's really fun and a very unique format. It's from Zig Zag, they're brilliant creatives - they made it for Channel 4 in the UK and then they just made it for Fuse TV in the US, so we love that one.

The other one I really love is Phone Dater which is a new fresh take on the dating show. You've got two singles, who turn up for a date and what they do is they swap phones and they can look through everything on the other person's phone, so you're looking at pictures, messages, who you have been calling, what is on your social media, you know and it's really fun when they are filming it, the production team have phone mirroring technology, so the production team can see everything that the couple are looking at on their phones and they incorporate that into the finished show. There's lots of humor in it, so they use lots of emojis to bring it to life. Say they are on the date and one of them goes to the toilet, the other one could update their status, they can find an old picture and post it on there, so they can have a little bit of fun with it. I love Phone Dater and that's from Nick Parnes at Kalel Productions, who did Stupid Man Smart Phone, so he's brilliant when it comes to these youth-skewing, younger demographic shows. ▪