Idris Elba, BBC Youth Network Team on Drama Shorts to Develop New Talent

BBC Three, the U.K. public broadcaster’s youth network that is going online-only next month, has revealed new programming plans.

They include a collaboration with Idris Elba’s Green Door Pictures, new drama Clique from Skins writer Jess Brittain, and documentary Black Power.

On Feb. 16, BBC Three, whose target audience is people aged 16-34, will end its linear TV channel and focus on its offers online.

The collaboration between BBC Drama and Elba’s production company is scheduled to produce a series of short dramas “from new writers featuring new on-screen talent working alongside established on-screen talent.” Said Elba: “I’m looking forward to working with BBC Three and giving new writers and actors a chance to show what they can do.”

Meanwhile, Clique focuses on two friends whose lives become increasingly complicated after they start university in Edinburgh. And Black Power is Dan Murdoch’s follow-up to his documentary KKK: The Fight for White Supremacy. It will see the filmmaker “revisit the USA and meet the Ku Klux Klan and Black Panther movements.”

Among the other BBC Three programming plans are documentaries on attitudes toward sex and prostitution in Turkey, Brazil and Russia and a short film about the New Year’s Eve attacks on women in Cologne.

The online network will also feature the previously announced Class, a Doctor Who spin-off from young-adult author Patrick Ness set in contemporary London. “Incredible dangers are breaking through the walls of time and space, and with darkness coming, London is unprotected,” according to a show description.

Said Damian Kavanagh, controller of BBC Three: “BBC Three is a badge of quality and shorthand for content that will stimulate emotions and provoke reactions. It’s the same award-winning programs freed from the constraints of linear TV, and because we’re freed from the schedule we can use whatever format and platform is most appropriate. The majority of what we will make is TV…but we’ll make short-form video, blogs and picture-led stories as well. We’ll be on YouTube, Snapchat, Facebook and our new site The Daily Drop.”

He added: “New talent is at the core of BBC Three. We’re working with Idris Elba’s Green Door Pictures on a series of London-set drama shorts featuring chance encounters between two people. A co-development with BBC Drama in-house, these will focus on developing new and up-and-coming writing talent as well as giving opportunities for new actors to work with established talent.”

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