Cultivating an eye for a ripping good yarn

Richard Driver says he steers clear of other documentary channels by focusing on people. Photo / Greg Bowker

Documnetary Channel founder Richard Driver says he was rescued from a life in rock'n'roll.

Brent Hansen - the former Radio With Pictures producer who went on to head MTV Europe - gave Richard Driver a job presenting the influential music show in the 1980s.

He says he has never looked back and two decades later the former rocker is delivering the most consistently intelligent channel on television. At the time, Driver had been on the road with his band the Hip Singles for about seven years.

"Brent picked me up out of the gutter and put me into the wonderful world of the TV business," Driver said, with a chuckle. "Television has the same fizz and buzz as the music industry - but it's a lot more professional and it deals in a much bigger range of life experience - it's great."

Having headed cornerstone television production companies Screentime and Visionary Film & Television, he decided in about 2004 that it was time to move out of production.

With some risks to his family finances, he found a new forte as creator and independent owner of the Documentary Channel - one of a handful of independently owned New Zealand channels that are a part of the basic Sky Television package.

The Documentary Channel started on Sky in November 2006 and recently renewed its carriage agreement with Sky for another three years.

At its third birthday in November the cumulative audience of people who had watched a Sky programme over the month passed one million.

Sky chief executive John Fellet has said that the Documentary Channel has been a clear-cut success for the pay television platform.

Now, two decades after being given his entree into television, Driver is looking at ways to export his unique format for the Documentary Channel into other territories.

The channel shares offices in Epsom with a broadcast partner which sends programmes by a fibre optic line to Albany where they are up-loaded on to the Sky satellite. Driver said that it was important the channel did not become caught up in a technological investment.

"Our cornerstone is content and acquisition. Sky pays us a fee based on subscriber base and viewership for the channel so we grow with Sky - it has worked well so far," he said.

Sky growth slowed last year but it is in nearly 50 per cent of homes.

Sky pays Driver a share of revenue from the advertising that it schedules on the Documentary Channel.

Driver says there are no great secrets to the success of the arrangement and it comes down to the fact that there was an unquenched demand for the content he was supplying.

He negotiated with Sky - not after years of higher education and a communications degree - but having followed a basic "how to" book on pay TV that he bought from Amazon.com.

"At the time I had (veteran television executive and former Prime TV programmer) Andrew Shaw on my payroll and he had a relationship with Sky from the days when Sky bought Prime."

He played a role in pitching and brokering the original deal.

"It was incredibly quick - Sky tell me one of the quickest negotiations they have ever had."

Why did he choose a channel of documentaries? He had made docos at Visionary Film and Television - a company that had been backed by significant investors in the Huljich family - including the critically acclaimed New Zealand music retrospective series Give It a Whirl.

At an international level New Zealand television had drawn attention for attracting good-sized commercial audiences to one-off, commercially focused documentaries in branded series like Inside New Zealand.

Driver says: "Documentaries were always in the top 20 popular shows.

"Market research had showed there was an appetite for them and when I was considering the idea there was a perception that documentaries were not receiving as much interest from the networks commissioning shows.

"It became clear that there was a market there," he said.

A quick glance at a list of Sky Channels and it's obvious that the channel does not hold a monopoly over documentaries.

Sky runs US or Australian-based entities such as National Geographic, Animal Planet, History, and Crime and Investigation channels. Driver says one of his key disciplines is ensuring the Documentary Channel does not stray into territory dominated by the seven other Sky information channels. He keeps the focus for programming on people.

"I always said that if this was a magazine, it would be with Vanity Fair - for connoisseurs of the human experience," he said. He includes mainstream - even slightly tabloid - fare about subjects like royalty and happily shows some programming that has already been run on free-to-air TV.

But the secret of the channel - which has about three hours each night of first-play pay-TV content - is Driver's eclectic programming mix, incorporating unique independent fare.

He often visits international markets and has relationships with distributors, many of whom know Documentary Channel is the only avenue via which they will be seen in this country. An example was a lengthy documentary The Monastery: Mr Vig and the Nun, the uplifting story of a dishevelled Danish man who donates and renovates a dilapidated castle for the Russian Orthodox church.

"It is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen. This is a programme that would never make it on to TVNZ or TV3, yet it was brilliant television."

The channel often runs repeats so he has to find three to four hours of first-run material each day.

Having made documentaries, there are limited commercial returns.

And the sort of prices Documentary Channel can offer are not going to make a boost to doco makers - whether in New Zealand or overseas.

Yet he says he has been amazed when buying shows that some documentary makers are much less worried about the money as ensuring that their beloved projects get shown in a New Zealand market where the free-to-air television has ignored all but commercial fare.

Freeview is focused on local content and has shown little interest in overseas material that would fit a public service remit.

Driver says that Sky TV had the only valid format for Documentary Channel to survive as a business.

"I wanted to find something that is not on ordinary TV - a place where customers felt they were being treated with respect - no business ever failed by treating its customers with respect," he said.