London Screenings 2022

Murder: First on Scene

Type: Factual
Length: 10 x 60 minutes
Producer: Phoenix Television
Broadcaster: CBS Reality (UK)

The audience appetite for true-crime documentaries shows no sign of waning, and producers are working hard to find new angles and perspectives. Murder: First On Scene adds to the oeuvre by focusing on the variety of professionals who respond to the crime in the first instance.

This isn’t just the story of the first police responders at the scene after a crime has been committed; it also covers the people who staff the emergency services phone-lines, the initial experts called in, and the first prosecuting lawyers, among others.

Murder: First On Scene was ordered by CBS Reality from Hampshire-based Phoenix Television and follows the timeline of 10 murder cases – five from the UK, five from the US. Employing personal testimonial and stylised reconstruction, the series explores the ingenious methods used by police to catch a killer, via the help of criminologists, forensics officers, cyber-security experts and entomologists.

BossaNova came on board to bridge the funding gap for Phoenix and this is the first time the nascent distributor has worked with the five-year-old indie. The series launched in November 2021, with an overnight audience of 163,000, comfortably outperforming its slot average.

BossaNova acquisitions and co-production executive Olivia Morgan emphasises the “new way into true crime” the series offers. “It’s not sensationalist, it’s investigative,” she says.

“There have been many crime stories that start at the end and work backwards – that’s a well-known storytelling technique both in scripted and unscripted. What’s unique about this show is that it starts at the end of the beginning.”

Including US murders alongside UK cases adds to the show’s appeal, Morgan says, adding that reports of homicides from the States can be outlandish and horrifying. The initial sales strategy is to target linear broadcasters on a market-to-market basis, and BossaNova is already attracting interest in the series.

Murder: First On Scene is part of a carefully crafted BossaNova slate, and will sit alongside another high-quality true-crime documentary, The Ripper Speaks. The latter revisits the Yorkshire Ripper case by focusing on audio recordings of conversations between Peter Sutcliffe and a female researcher that were carried out while he was incarcerated.

“Ours is a heavily curated slate – it’s not just grab, grab, grab what you can,” explains Morgan. “We’re always looking for a point of difference, and this wasn’t acquired because others have got something like this. If the editorial matches up with what the need is in the market, then we’ll go for it.”

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The Ripper Speaks

Type: Factual
Length: 1 x 90 minutes
Producer: Content Kings
Broadcaster: Channel 5

Ever since his capture in 1981, Peter Sutcliffe – who killed 13 women between 1975 and 1980 during a reign of terror in northern England – has been a staple of the true-crime TV genre.

But The Ripper Speaks promises a whole new level of insight into Sutcliffe’s sadistic and violent crimes.

The 90-minute special for ViacomCBS-owned Channel 5 features exclusive, never-before-heard audio recordings of Sutcliffe. The 90-minute programme is based on conversations between the criminal and a female researcher, secretly recorded in prison in the years before he died, which provide new insights into his motivations.

Unaware he was being recorded, Sutcliffe talks openly about crimes he has never formally confessed to, how he evaded the police for so long, and the reasons behind his controversial not guilty plea – on the basis of a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.

Armed with these tapes, investigative journalist and ex-detective Mark Williams-Thomas expands on the audio transcripts by talking to members of Sutcliffe’s family, ex-police officers, witnesses and doctors.

The film provides a view of Sutcliffe not as the mythical Ripper but as he really was – a lorry driver from West Yorkshire who was a lonely, isolated coward.

Williams-Thomas is best-known for exposing former BBC star Jimmy Savile as a paedophile in ITV’s 2012 Exposure doc The Other Side Of Jimmy Savile, and as the presenter of ITV’s The Investigator: A British Crime Story, which is now available internationally on Netflix.

“For the Sutcliffe doc, Williams-Thomas teamed up with new indie group Content Kings, which was launched earlier this year by Brighter Pictures co-founder Gavin Hay, executive producer Jonathan Levi, who specialises in complex access projects such as ITV’s Broadmoor, and post-production specialist Simon Green, founder of Green Rock.

Williams-Thomas began working on the film before diabetes sufferer Sutcliffe died from Covid-19 last year.

Explaining the unique access the documentary had to Sutcliffe, Levi says: “She [the researcher] wrote to him in 2006 in Broadmoor, then followed up with years of letters. Then, finally, after four years, she made a visit and it went from there. It’s a 15-year project.”

The Ripper Speaks is the first project that distributor BossaNova took on when it was formed last year. The sales house signed a partnership deal with Content Kings in April and is also representing its ITV true-crime show Accused Of Murdering Our Son – The Steven Clark Story.

“There have been loads of Ripper documentaries, but they have never been in his own words,” says Paul Heaney, chief exec of distributor BossaNova.

While the doc is very UK-focused, Heaney thinks it is such a global story that many other territories will be interested. As a 90-minute film, the doc may suit international digital platforms better than linear channels. “But linear primetime often takes 90 minutes now,” he says.

King of Tigers With Ross Kemp

Type: Factual
Length: 2 x 60-minutes
Producer: Honey Bee TV
Broadcaster: ITV

When the Netflix phenomenon raced around the world much of the talk was focused on the characters or ‘talent’ involved. In Britain's Tiger Kings – On the Trail with Ross Kemp (the title of the UK show), BossaNova has a host as captivating as Joe Exotic and co. BossaNova was drawn to the title because of Kemp's proven track record of selling all over the world.

The show centres on UK citizens who harbour dangerous big cats and animals in their backrooms and bedrooms. The UK's lax dangerous animal laws mean that British suburbia is home to over four thousand privately owned tigers, lions, leopards, pumas, wolves, bears, crocodiles, zebras, primates and poisonous snakes among other species.

In the series, Ross Kemp goes on the trail of the larger-than-life characters that are Britain's very own tiger and lion kings and queens. In spending time with these individuals, Kemp wants to find out what on earth the attraction of keeping these deadly animals is, and what is the relationship between them and their keepers.

After a limited high-profile run on primetime for ITV, the two-parter has picked up international attention, having already sold into the Nordics. The global hype of the Netflix docuseries has, understandably, helped the title pick up further steam.

It marks the first time Bossanova has worked with Honey Bee, a partnership BossaNova hopes will leads to more productions.