The head of drama reveals how she is carving out a brand, her obsession with heroes, and how she measures success
Anne Mensah is ready to show her hand. From an eight-part series set in a London fire station to an Ian Fleming biopic starring Dominic Cooper, the Sky head of drama's commissions will premiere in the next few weeks and months.
This month Mensah hands the reins to drama commissioner Cameron Roach while she takes a six-month sabbatical, after spending the past two years since joining BSkyB developing new shows to expand the range and depth of its UK-originated drama offering.
The slate of programmes Roach will inherit from her reflect a strategy of doing for drama what Sky has already tried with comedy, pumping tens of millions of pounds into homegrown series to convince viewers that the broadcaster is not just about movies and sport. "What we are talking about is the start of a journey that will last five or 10 years," says Mensah, a former executive at the BBC where her credits included Bodies, Wallander and Waterloo Road. "Everything we are doing is about carving out our own space and our own brand. I can only fail here if I'm not bold."
Lucy Kirkwood's The Smoke, destined for Sky 1, about the White Watch crew in a London fire station and starring Battlestar Galactica's Jamie Bamber, may not sound the boldest commission to viewers who remember ITV's London's Burning. "She is in quite a mainstream space with firemen but Lucy has a particular tone to her voice that possibly we haven't seen on television before," argues Mensah. "The fires are absolutely huge but often it is to one side.What she is doing is telling quite an important story about what it means to be a man, what masculinity means, what it means to be a hero in the modern world."
This idea, of what it means to be an everyday hero, is a "slight obsession" of Mensah. And anyway, she says, "we are also doing a show in the Arctic Circle. There are literally no rules."
Mensah's brief encompasses drama across all of Sky's entertainment channels – the new season will also feature a five-pilot season called Drama Matters featuring Anna Friel and Suranne Jones, part of the rebrand of Sky Living – as well as its burgeoning international co-productions which now account for around half of its drama output.
They include Dracula with NBC (starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Jessica De Gouw, coming soon to Sky Living) and Sky Atlantic's The Tunnel, its much anticipated (among media types at least) remake of Scandinavian drama hit The Bridge, a collaboration with Canal+.
Sky's latest co-production is Showtime's psychological thriller Penny Dreadful, made by Sam Mendes' Neal Street Productions and Desert Wolf Productions and starring Josh Hartnett, Eva Green, Rory Kinnear and the latest addition to the cast, Billie Piper. Created by John Logan, who worked with Mendes on the latest James Bond movie Skyfall, it unites various fictional figures – Dr Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, characters from Dracula – in Victorian London. Filmed in Ireland, it is Sky's first collaboration with the US cable and satellite network.
"It's important these shows can sit alongside the big expensive American shows … like Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones … and that our customers will feel they are Sky-originated shows," says Mensah. "With a predominantly British cast … it will it feel like a British show."
As, she will hope, will The Tunnel, made by UK producer Kudos and Shine France Films with a budget of around £15m. "I like to call it an adaptation rather than a remake," says Mensah. "[Spooks writer] Ben Richards took the original and used it to say it something subtle about what it means to be British, what it means to be French, and what it means to be European. It's a brilliant thriller, but it makes you think."
Sky is no stranger to homegrown drama, with a track record that includes Strike Back and Mad Dogs, and its Terry Pratchett and Martina Cole adaptations and football soap, Dream Team. Like another Sky drama, it's been a bit Hit and Miss to date.
Now, says Mensah, the broadcaster is "moving to a space where we have consistent drama across all the channels, all year. It's about creating a drama habit on Sky." If 2012 was a year of consolidation, then 2013 is time to "go over the parapet", she has said. Most of it will air at 9pm.
How they rate remains to be seen. A first run episode of Mad Dogs the black comedy drama starring John Simm and Philip Glenister, was watched by more than half a million viewers on its first outing earlier this year on Sky 1 (and many more on repeat viewings and on-demand). But Hey Diddly Dee, in Sky Arts' latest Playhouse Presents season, could only manage 71,000 viewers, despite the combined star power of Kylie Minogue, David Harewood, Peter Serafinowicz and Mathew Horne.
Attracting talent has not been a problem for big-spending Sky; viewers, occasionally more so. Such is the scale of Sky Arts' ratings that the audience for Hey Diddly Dee was still 650% up on its three-month slot average.
"I measure success over a number of different criteria," says Mensah. "Number one is what the customers think, did it achieve our goals, did we do something different? It's definitely not a ratings question, you have to look at the totality. If we are going to try to break new ground, we can't wobble just because we are not pleasing everybody all at the same time."
So does Mensah still pay attention to the overnights? "Oh gosh, totally, because that's another measure of what the customers are doing. You are just arrogant if you don't pay attention. I just don't think it's the only measure."
Mensah knows what viewers think because she calls them. Well, some of them, part of a company-wide practice of speaking to customers once a month. "I have to tell you, they don't spare your blushes just because you tell them you are head of drama," she said at a Broadcasting Press Guild lunch earlier this year.
Mensah began her career as a graduate management trainee at Carlton, spending a year on its ITV soap London Bridge, before switching to the independent sector and then a decade at the BBC. She fell in love with drama growing up and "made a lot of bad short films" at school. "What I do know is I am not a director."
With a father from Ghana and a mother from Canada, she is a rare non-white face in the upper echelons of the British TV industry. "I think it's tricky because as an industry, the stakes are quite high and people hire people they already know," she says. "That's not necessarily a bad thing but it does mean that friendship circles are quite closed.
"The diversity question is a really tough, tough question," she adds. "I'm not ducking it, it is one of those things that I spend quite a lot of time thinking about, we have to properly tackle it head on." She points to the casting of Elliot Knight in Sky 1 drama Sinbad, which she says had a "very mixed cast … I thought that was incredible, that is the way you do it".
"I have been very lucky and it's something I take very seriously, and I think Sky takes very seriously, but I would hate to boil it down to a nugget because I think it is such an important issue," says Mensah. "It is something we all need to tackle together."
From her time at the BBC, Mensah is most proud of the school drama, Waterloo Road. Her other credits included Zen, Single Father, Sweeney Todd and BBC3's Bodies, whose creator, Jed Mercurio, she is talking to about creating another medical drama, with a working title Critical, for Sky.
"I am really super-proud of the things we accomplished at the BBC, but 10 years is probably enough time to need a different challenge," she says. She made the switch to Sky after its director of entertainment channels, Stuart Murphy, called up to say there "might be an opportunity, would she be interested?".
"One of the very first meetings I had here was with Sophie [Turner Laing, BSkyB's managing director, content] and then [BSkyB chief executive] Jeremy Darroch," she recalls. "Both of them sat me down and said 'be bold'. That's amazing. That's a mandate to go out there and try and change," she says. "We don't make as much as the BBC – they make a huge number of hours - we complement rather than compete. We're not even in the same game; we're doing something different." Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 days ago.
Anne Mensah is ready to show her hand. From an eight-part series set in a London fire station to an Ian Fleming biopic starring Dominic Cooper, the Sky head of drama's commissions will premiere in the next few weeks and months.
This month Mensah hands the reins to drama commissioner Cameron Roach while she takes a six-month sabbatical, after spending the past two years since joining BSkyB developing new shows to expand the range and depth of its UK-originated drama offering.
The slate of programmes Roach will inherit from her reflect a strategy of doing for drama what Sky has already tried with comedy, pumping tens of millions of pounds into homegrown series to convince viewers that the broadcaster is not just about movies and sport. "What we are talking about is the start of a journey that will last five or 10 years," says Mensah, a former executive at the BBC where her credits included Bodies, Wallander and Waterloo Road. "Everything we are doing is about carving out our own space and our own brand. I can only fail here if I'm not bold."
Lucy Kirkwood's The Smoke, destined for Sky 1, about the White Watch crew in a London fire station and starring Battlestar Galactica's Jamie Bamber, may not sound the boldest commission to viewers who remember ITV's London's Burning. "She is in quite a mainstream space with firemen but Lucy has a particular tone to her voice that possibly we haven't seen on television before," argues Mensah. "The fires are absolutely huge but often it is to one side.What she is doing is telling quite an important story about what it means to be a man, what masculinity means, what it means to be a hero in the modern world."
This idea, of what it means to be an everyday hero, is a "slight obsession" of Mensah. And anyway, she says, "we are also doing a show in the Arctic Circle. There are literally no rules."
Mensah's brief encompasses drama across all of Sky's entertainment channels – the new season will also feature a five-pilot season called Drama Matters featuring Anna Friel and Suranne Jones, part of the rebrand of Sky Living – as well as its burgeoning international co-productions which now account for around half of its drama output.
They include Dracula with NBC (starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Jessica De Gouw, coming soon to Sky Living) and Sky Atlantic's The Tunnel, its much anticipated (among media types at least) remake of Scandinavian drama hit The Bridge, a collaboration with Canal+.
Sky's latest co-production is Showtime's psychological thriller Penny Dreadful, made by Sam Mendes' Neal Street Productions and Desert Wolf Productions and starring Josh Hartnett, Eva Green, Rory Kinnear and the latest addition to the cast, Billie Piper. Created by John Logan, who worked with Mendes on the latest James Bond movie Skyfall, it unites various fictional figures – Dr Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, characters from Dracula – in Victorian London. Filmed in Ireland, it is Sky's first collaboration with the US cable and satellite network.
"It's important these shows can sit alongside the big expensive American shows … like Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones … and that our customers will feel they are Sky-originated shows," says Mensah. "With a predominantly British cast … it will it feel like a British show."
As, she will hope, will The Tunnel, made by UK producer Kudos and Shine France Films with a budget of around £15m. "I like to call it an adaptation rather than a remake," says Mensah. "[Spooks writer] Ben Richards took the original and used it to say it something subtle about what it means to be British, what it means to be French, and what it means to be European. It's a brilliant thriller, but it makes you think."
Sky is no stranger to homegrown drama, with a track record that includes Strike Back and Mad Dogs, and its Terry Pratchett and Martina Cole adaptations and football soap, Dream Team. Like another Sky drama, it's been a bit Hit and Miss to date.
Now, says Mensah, the broadcaster is "moving to a space where we have consistent drama across all the channels, all year. It's about creating a drama habit on Sky." If 2012 was a year of consolidation, then 2013 is time to "go over the parapet", she has said. Most of it will air at 9pm.
How they rate remains to be seen. A first run episode of Mad Dogs the black comedy drama starring John Simm and Philip Glenister, was watched by more than half a million viewers on its first outing earlier this year on Sky 1 (and many more on repeat viewings and on-demand). But Hey Diddly Dee, in Sky Arts' latest Playhouse Presents season, could only manage 71,000 viewers, despite the combined star power of Kylie Minogue, David Harewood, Peter Serafinowicz and Mathew Horne.
Attracting talent has not been a problem for big-spending Sky; viewers, occasionally more so. Such is the scale of Sky Arts' ratings that the audience for Hey Diddly Dee was still 650% up on its three-month slot average.
"I measure success over a number of different criteria," says Mensah. "Number one is what the customers think, did it achieve our goals, did we do something different? It's definitely not a ratings question, you have to look at the totality. If we are going to try to break new ground, we can't wobble just because we are not pleasing everybody all at the same time."
So does Mensah still pay attention to the overnights? "Oh gosh, totally, because that's another measure of what the customers are doing. You are just arrogant if you don't pay attention. I just don't think it's the only measure."
Mensah knows what viewers think because she calls them. Well, some of them, part of a company-wide practice of speaking to customers once a month. "I have to tell you, they don't spare your blushes just because you tell them you are head of drama," she said at a Broadcasting Press Guild lunch earlier this year.
Mensah began her career as a graduate management trainee at Carlton, spending a year on its ITV soap London Bridge, before switching to the independent sector and then a decade at the BBC. She fell in love with drama growing up and "made a lot of bad short films" at school. "What I do know is I am not a director."
With a father from Ghana and a mother from Canada, she is a rare non-white face in the upper echelons of the British TV industry. "I think it's tricky because as an industry, the stakes are quite high and people hire people they already know," she says. "That's not necessarily a bad thing but it does mean that friendship circles are quite closed.
"The diversity question is a really tough, tough question," she adds. "I'm not ducking it, it is one of those things that I spend quite a lot of time thinking about, we have to properly tackle it head on." She points to the casting of Elliot Knight in Sky 1 drama Sinbad, which she says had a "very mixed cast … I thought that was incredible, that is the way you do it".
"I have been very lucky and it's something I take very seriously, and I think Sky takes very seriously, but I would hate to boil it down to a nugget because I think it is such an important issue," says Mensah. "It is something we all need to tackle together."
From her time at the BBC, Mensah is most proud of the school drama, Waterloo Road. Her other credits included Zen, Single Father, Sweeney Todd and BBC3's Bodies, whose creator, Jed Mercurio, she is talking to about creating another medical drama, with a working title Critical, for Sky.
"I am really super-proud of the things we accomplished at the BBC, but 10 years is probably enough time to need a different challenge," she says. She made the switch to Sky after its director of entertainment channels, Stuart Murphy, called up to say there "might be an opportunity, would she be interested?".
"One of the very first meetings I had here was with Sophie [Turner Laing, BSkyB's managing director, content] and then [BSkyB chief executive] Jeremy Darroch," she recalls. "Both of them sat me down and said 'be bold'. That's amazing. That's a mandate to go out there and try and change," she says. "We don't make as much as the BBC – they make a huge number of hours - we complement rather than compete. We're not even in the same game; we're doing something different." Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 days ago.