Factual Entertainment

The Factual Entertainment team commissions for ITV primetime and for ITV’s digital channels. They look for premium, aspirational, optimistic, entertaining, dramatic, bold, exciting, big-hearted programming with broad appeal.

The priority is the 9pm slot where the team are looking for a wide variety of ambitious, scaled-up and schedule bursting events, strips, access-docs, returnable series and singles.

Events that have worked well for the channel include The Real Full Monty, A+E Live andThe Queen's Green Planet.

The department are interested in privileged-access documentaries about well-known institutions, brands and individuals such as Diana Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy, Heathrow Britain's Busiest Airport, Easy Jet Inside The Cockpit. 9pm documentary formats and story machines (such as Long Lost Family ) are desired as are singles which announce/promote themselves.

The Factual Entertainment team look after Love Island for ITV2 and are interested in finding an idea with similar scale, impact, talk-ability for the main channel. Finding a big new 9pm Factual or Factual Entertainment Strip is currently a priority.

Big talent, diversity, and gripping titles are really important to the team. They are not interested in niche subject matters or group-think ideas, and are very keen to reinvent and innovate within the mainstream and within established genres like Travel, Crime, Health, Intelligence, Family, and Access documentaries.

The team welcome pitches that speak to the priorities above and ask producers to consider how programmes will make the audience ‘feel’, as well as ‘think’.

Pre- watershed wise, the department are interested in documentary formats which can work as story machines, entertaining formats such as What Would Your Kid Do and funny, entertaining factual which can play between the Soaps. Also transactional formats.

Paragraphs can be emailed to the team at Factual.Commissioning@ITV.com.

A few pointers:

Titles matter. What title will hook a big ITV audience?

Taster tapes always help, particularly for character-led ideas.

Come prepared with thoughts for off-screen talent.

Simple direct propositions that feel inherently noisy.

What's the story, the rationale? Why now?

Please note we only accept submissions from production companies.