Love Island’s Kiwi Bafta winner
Having helped one British reality series to win a Bafta, Kiwi television editor Josh Bridgman is working on another award-winning show.
Preparing for the final live weeks of the 2018 edition of Britain’s Got Talent, the Dunedin-born, Christchurchraised Bridgman already has a return to Love Island lined up for later in the northern summer.
Set in a villa on Mallorca, the dating reality series picked up the award for Best Reality and Constructed Factual Series at last weekend’s Bafta TV Awards (for the record, Britain’s Got Talent won the Lew Grade Award for Entertainment Programme).
Delighted to have been a part of Love Island’s success, Bridgman says that only the executive producers attended the star-studded ceremony at London’s Royal Festival Hall on May 13. However, the rest of the crew watched a live feed on a party boat on the Thames and then they all met up to ‘‘celebrate the night’’.
A graduate from the Ilam School of Fine Arts, Bridgman’s first job was with Peter Young at the Christchurch-based Fisheye Films. He then moved to Auckland, working on projects like Marae DIY.
‘‘But I always found it a struggle to get consistent postproduction work in New Zealand. It wasn’t until I shifted to Australia and got work over there on shows like MasterChef Australia that I began to start working my way up.’’
After four years on the other side of the Tasman, Bridgman upped sticks to London, where he’s found one job pretty much leads to another.
‘‘As you can guess, it’s all about the contacts. If you work in entertainment television – reality TV – in the UK, you do end up working with the same people, which is great.
‘‘Everyone knows each other, so if they know about work going, they’re naturally going to put you forward for the next one as well. It’s like a big family – I’ve made some really good lifelong friends through this work.’’
Bridgman admits though that while he enjoys his work, the hours are long.
‘‘You’ve got to have people in your life who understand the job you do, otherwise you could be in for a hard time,’’ he says, paying tribute to his fiance Carl, Sydney-based parents and Christchurch-based grandparents.
Last year’s Love Island was particularly intensive, with 12-hour days, six days a week the norm throughout the two-month summer shoot in order to produce the six ‘‘daily shows’’ and once-a-week catch-up programme.
Bridgman says while he was one of the lucky ones in the story editing team (whose numbers varied between 10 and 15 each shooting day) because he mostly worked days, others worked all night.
‘‘That’s because the people [contestants] in the villa would argue or have fights until around 3am or 4am in the morning and that’s where the main ‘stories’ come out of.
‘‘Then you have to turn them around [edit the footage] so that the ‘important people’ can watch them in the morning and then decide from there what will screen that night.
‘‘Basically, you’ve got a day and a night and a day to turn around a show – that’s why so many people are involved in the process.’’
Assistants and post-producers also find suitable footage by ‘‘going through the logs and that kind of stuff’’ to help editors like himself ‘‘kind of put the story together’’.
‘‘The story producers up at the villa keep a track of everything and then hand it down to us and we put it together.’’
While lamenting that ‘‘you do miss out on a lot of sleep’’, Bridgman says he adored the Love Island work because he could go and have a look around the island on his days off and, ‘‘at the end of the show, I went with my partner and a friend and drove around for a few days, which was great fun’’.