Documentary Unit: Ideas Lab

Today, Danny and I started to think more about some ideas we had researched and see if they were viable.
My idea was to have our hero be a female footballer player called Casey Stoney. Casey plays for Arsenal Ladies and is Captain of England Women's team. Recently she announced that she was gay making history as the only high profile active footballer in the country to do so. I felt this was a very courageous act and especially as in football many issues such as racism are all but eradicated from the game in the UK but homophobia is still a big issue.
Danny also mentioned about his own experience of going to football matches and hearing homophobic chants in particular against Brighton & Hove Albion FC. His main concern with this idea was getting Casey to agree to an interview and how much access we would be able to have in terms of filming her playing football and her life outside of football. I decided to ring her agent and see what she had to say. The conversation was really positive and she said it would be fairly likely that Casey would be interested dependent on her availability but she would run the idea past her and get back to us ASAP. We then thought we should speak to a charity such as Stonewall to see about getting an interview with them as it is important for us to have others speak on the impact this will have had. I spoke to Stonewall on the phone and they only have 2 media representatives for 3 countries but they are hopeful that we could interview someone if the schedule is right. We are also going to email a few other gay rights charities just incase it falls through with them. Another issue we may have is finding a young person who feels strongly about Casey's story and the effect this has had on them. Andre mentioned he has some friends who play for Gillingham Ladies FC and that he could put us in contact with them as he thinks they would be interested in speaking about the story. Hopefully with the right research and if all things go well this could turn into a good starting point for the documentary.

Danny came up with the idea from our time on Top Dog, where he worked as a runner for the Dog Trainer Roy. We all love dogs and he has a good relationship with Roy. He thought it would be interesting if the hero was a dog, as their are plenty of dogs that help people as we saw through our time on the show. The main idea was that we could speak to Roy and a few charities about finding some people who have dogs. The arc of the story could be following 2 people one who already has a dog and one on the run up to the first time they get their dog. It may prove a challenge to find these people but we are willing to put the research in and find them.

When we discussed our ideas with the class and Helen we had really good feedback and everyone seemed interested to hear about them which is a good sign as our classmates are the key age range for the audience of BBC Three. Helen said our only issue would be access to Casey and making sure the programme was not solely about interviews and with the dog idea it would be finding the right people to make the show a success. We know from experience that Roy is perfect for our show as he has a fantastic personality and thanks to Danny's friendship with him we are very hopeful of being able to have him on board with that idea.

Without Chris being at the Idea's lab it is difficult to pick one idea outright as he may have a good idea of his own but at the moment we are really pleased to have found 2 equally strong ideas that both will work well for the BBC Three channel.

I think i will now start to research more about BBC Three as a channel and the time slots our shows would fit into.

Stay safe,

Helen