Alisa Pomeroy, commissioning editor, documentaries, Channel 4

Channel 4’s commitment to current affairs and documentary programming has been key ammunition in its ongoing fight against the threat of privatisation.

This pillar of its public service remit would, the broadcaster claims, be one of the first things to suffer at the hands of a profit-hungry owner that values ratings over C4’s legacy of investigative journalism.

Since she was appointed just over a year ago, documentaries commissioning editor Alisa Pomeroy, who heads up the channel’s flagship Cutting Edge documentary strand, has been working to preserve this legacy by taking inspiration from another keystone of C4’s public service remit: innovation.

Specifically, Pomeroy has been commissioning projects that try to stretch the boundaries of traditional documentary in the hope, she says, of convincing mainstream audiences to “switch off Doctor Foster”.

Forward-looking

Under Pomeroy’s watch, Cutting Edge will never be allowed to sit still.

Among its traditional, human-interest narratives, experimental and topical films must have their place. “Cutting Edge is about the zeitgeist,” she explains. “Every year, from month to month, it needs updating and rethinking. It’s something that should never stop evolving or be set in stone – I don’t commission to a blueprint.”

In her latest refresh, Pomeroy has been filling the strand with projects that take “big, meaty subject matters” and treat them with “an observational documentary sensibility”.

Which brings us to The Secret Life Of Prisons. The commission came about after production company Shine TV discovered a series of leaked videos online, filmed inside UK prisons by inmates using smuggled-in mobile phones.

It led to a year of “painstaking research” in which director Tom Barrow and Shine tracked down the inmates in the clips, traced their families and told their stories. “It’s a completely different way of making an observational documentary,”

Pomeroy explains. “A third of the material is already shot, you have no idea who’s in any of the clips, and you use that to tell a different story about the state of our prisons.”

Rogan Productions’ The Gun Shop, which aired last week to an overnight audience of 1.3 million, had a similarly innovative streak, she argues.

By installing a fixed rig inside a family-owned, Michigan gun shop and capturing the comings and goings of staff, customers and their purchases, the producers explored the wider argument around gun ownership in the US. “The fixed rig of The Gun Shop and the user-generated content of Prisons have been brought together into coherent pieces of work,” Pomeroy says. “This is not the only direction

Cutting Edge is going in, but it’s a way of taking those meaty subject matters and using a documentary treatment in innovative ways.”

The Secret Life Of Prisons took more than a year to come to fruition and was formally announced only a week prior to its 10 November TX due to its “sensitive nature”.

Pomeroy says it was never clear whether completing it would be possible, and she is on the lookout for similarly risky projects. “Prisons was very hard to pull together, but I really like that,” she says. “When something is pitched and you’re not quite sure whether it’s make-able or not, I think that defines a lot of the stuff on the strand.”

True North’s upcoming medical experiment Breaking the Silence: Live continues to straddle the line of possibility by merging live fixed-rig TV with documentary – a television first.

The show will screen the moment that the cochlear implants of a group of profoundly deaf people are turned on – which should mean the indie captures the moment when many of them hear for the first time. “This is an experiment, and none of us is 100% sure it will work as a piece of TV, but the idea of trying a live documentary – which is completely uncharted water – is what’s exciting. It might work and it might not.”

True North is now cooking up bigger plans for the live documentary genre and has stoked Pomeroy’s appetite for more cross-genre experimentation.

Mixing genres “I would like to see more fusion of genres,” Pomeroy says. “C4 does cross-genre programming very well. We all sit close to each other and there’s an overlap, and that’s absolutely right because, in the case of Cochlear Live, I do not have the skills to do live TV.”

Like The Secret Life Of Prisons, Breaking the Silence: Live was originated from, and pitched with, online videos – specifically, a YouTube clip of a young woman hearing for the first time.

True North creative director Andrew Sheldon says the doc is an attempt to recapture the emotional impact of that moment. “Our initial thought was to do a live rig in a clinical and ethical way,” he says. “The idea is to get the human side of the story with that edge you get with a live transmission.”

Pomeroy is keen for more indies to explore online video in development. “The internet is an unmined source of partially made films,” she says. “Brilliant access is always going to be a winner, but for more experimental ideas, one route is to think about that footage and how it could be made into a thoughtful, long-form documentary that goes beyond it.”

Lest it be thought that it’s all about messing with form, Pomeroy stresses she is still on the lookout for more ‘traditional’ documentaries.

One of these is Ricochet’s ambitious Patient 31 – a “classic documentary about a modern subject matter,” she says. It follows the journey of multiple sclerosis patient Mark Lewis on a groundbreaking MS medical trial in Israel.

The Ricochet team’s passion and urgency to make the film resonated with Pomeroy after they flew a team out to Israel to film Lewis’s consultation for a taster tape. “A lot of companies want to make series rather than singles and the upside of that is people come to me with passion projects,” Pomeroy says. “There’s a weird upside in that they don’t fi t into everyone’s business model. It means that when they do, they really cherish them.”