‘Dreaming Whilst Black’ EP Says Buzzy Comedy Attracted Record Share Of Black Viewers To BBC – MIA Market
10.10.2023 - 06:49
/ deadline.com
Dreaming Whilst Black brought a new, diverse audience to the BBC in droves, according to the buzzy comedy’s EP Dhanny Joshi, who was speaking on a panel of diverse creatives at MIA Market.
According to Big Deal Films founder Joshi, the A24-distributed comedy has now notched up one of the highest shares of Black viewers for a BBC comedy of all time, around one quarter.
Joshi in part put this down to “creative choices” made throughout the making of the series, which took more than five years to get from web series to screen.
“We were offered deficit financing from huge distributors [early on] but said ‘Let’s not do that,” he told a panel in Rome. “Our overdraft facility may have been just £3,000 ($3,670) but we didn’t want to be tied to a distributor who may view creative choices as risky. So we were protecting ourselves and went on to get a huge Black audience.”
Execs from the public broadcaster have told Joshi’s team they “brought an audience that otherwise wouldn’t have come to the BBC,” he added.
Dreaming Whilst Black launched in August and has garnered highly favorable reviews, while being picked up by Showtime in the U.S. It follows Kwabena, played by Salmon, an aspiring filmmaker stuck in a dead-end recruitment job who takes the first step to achieving his dream of creating a TV show.
Joshi reflected on how the UK TV broadcasting ecosystem has improved its diverse make-up since the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, including hiring more commissioners from under-represented backgrounds.
“In the early days of Big Deal I asked to pitch a show and got told [by commissioners], ‘We’re not taking pitches for another eight months’,” he said. “Then more diverse people came in and suddenly we had four shows within a