QUEEN OF DAYTIME TV
Boss behind the shows
WHEN not making television programmes, Jo Street can typically be found watching television, thinking about television or talking about television. Or as she succinctly puts it: “My grandad used to say: ‘You would watch the dustbins being emptied if they put it on the telly’.”
That childhood love has grown into a passionate vocation. As a BBC commissioning editor, her remit covers daytime and entertainment television made in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Street currently has a 14-strong slate that includes Eggheads, Homes Under The Hammer and Antiques Road Trip, while recent high-profile projects include the rebooted Robot Wars – filmed at a purpose-built arena in Renfrew – which returned to BBC Two last night after a 12-year hiatus.
It is eight years since Street, 45, arrived in Glasgow, coinciding with the BBC’s pledge that 50 per cent of network spend would be made outside London by 2016 (the most recent figures put it at 48.1 per cent and reportedly on target to match or exceed this by the end of the year).
Overseeing both in-house and independent commissions, Street was adamant from the outset she didn’t want to be a faceless executive who parachuted in every now and again before hotfooting it back to her ivory tower.
“That felt crucial to me,” she says. “I wanted to be part of a production community and be effective in growing it. You could see there was real potential for growth. When I started the BBC did three programmes from Scotland.
“My current slate has 14 titles on it and I’m working with about 10 production companies. There is more in development. When I started no one knew me from Adam. You rock up and start from scratch.”
Street has the air of someone with no qualms about rolling her sleeves up and getting stuck in. When we meet in the canteen at BBC Scotland’s Pacific Quay headquarters where she is based, Street orders a mug of builder’s brew darker in hue than the nearby Clyde.
Her Yorkshire lilt hasn’t faded much in the decades since Street left her home town of Doncaster. She is gregarious with a wry sense of humour and in between sips of tea regales with tales about adventures in television.
There was the time she cooked Sunday lunch for former Weakest Link presenter Anne Robinson and on another occasion had the entire Eggheads cast including Chris Hughes, Judith Keppel and Jeremy Vine round her kitchen table for homemade haggis on Burns’ Night.
But the winner has to be the time Street toured the west coast of Scotland in a soft-top convertible Bentley with the legendary John Craven eating langoustines.
When not dishing up culinary-themed anecdotes (“I would apply to go on MasterChef in a heartbeat,” she asserts), Street would happily bend your ear for hours about “telly” as she refers to it.
After completing a sociology degree at Birmingham Polytechnic, she landed a fortnight of work experience at BBC Radio 4 on Farming Today which Street juggled alongside working night shift in a factory making car sunroofs.
A few weeks later came a telephone call: they needed an office PA, Street had made a good impression and did she want the job? “I knew nothing about farming and nothing about Radio 4 but I said ‘yes, please!’” she recalls.
Her role involved general admin such as answering listeners’ letters. Street soaked it all up. “I found out quite quickly I was a terrible PA and learned that the hard way.”
It was on Farming Today she met her husband David Street, the award-winning director behind documentary film Battle Mountain: Graeme Obree’s Story. They were job rivals first, then friends and, some years later, a couple.
“Farming Today was advertising for a producer and clearly as the new PA who had been in the job for about five minutes, I believed I was fully qualified – even though I had no background whatsoever in farming or agriculture,” she laughs. “Then David, who at the time was a farmer and an agricultural journalist, strides in and got the job.”
Having cut her teeth on Farming Today, Street moved on to Countryfile as a researcher where she worked her way up to director. It was around this time she got hooked on a new quiz show called the Weakest Link.
“I used to have a telly on my desk and became obsessed with it ,” she says .“I would watch it at 5.15pm each day. They advertised for an edit producer, which in many ways was a step down because I was directing films on Countryfile, but I wanted to work on that show.”
Street sent off a quirky application and landed the job. That was 2001. “Again, I went through the ranks: I started in the edit, became producer, series producer and then the exec,” she says.
Since taking on her current remit, among Street’s early projects was Antiques Road Trip, which she commissioned from STV Productions. “They hadn’t made a show for the BBC before which is ironic considering we’re neighbours [at Pacific Quay in Glasgow],” she says.
“It is always nice to have a hit off the bat with the first show you have commissioned. I think everyone else thought ‘Ooh, we want a bit of that.’ Success begets success.”
Street has established strong working relationships with Scottish independent production companies such as Friel Kean Films, who pitched and developed the idea for bespoke upcycling show Money For Nothing, and Hello Halo TV which makes nature series Into The Wild fronted by Gordon Buchanan.
Equally, she is keen to have a role in expanding the BBC’s reach outside of its traditional London parameters.
“In some parts of the industry there is criticism about that – they call it ‘lift and shift’ – and question whether it is healthy and helpful. I feel very strongly it has been fundamental in allowing people to have jobs to go and work on so they can learn the craft.
“It has now got us to a really strong position where companies can come in – they might never have made a show for the BBC before – but there are enough people in Glasgow to go and work on those shows that we can commission them with confidence and make it work.”
Robot Wars is produced by Mentorn Scotland. Street was “blown away” by the response to its return even before the show aired. “It is a massive opportunity for Scotland and one of those shows where it feels right it is here,” she says.
Away from work, hobbies include yoga, cooking and walking her dog – a schnoodle called Columbo – who she says is “the second love of my life” after husband David.
While the couple are at “quite different ends of the spectrum” when it comes to their chosen genres – “David is very much a factual, documentary and current affairs man, while I’m very much a daytime and entertainment type of person” – there is a shared bond. “We end our day sitting on the sofa and watching the telly,” says Street. “It is quite a good common ground.”
Street views it as “a massive privilege” to be able to influence the content beamed into living rooms across the UK. She is constantly striving for fresh and dynamic ideas to meet her exacting standards. Put bluntly: watching dustbins being emptied simply isn’t going to cut it.
Daytime TV often gets a bad rap for being dull and formulaic, yet Street would wholeheartedly challenge that assertion. “The value for money our shows deliver to the licence fee is phenomenal ,” she says .“They are an easy target [to criticise], but when people actually sit down and watch them they realise they are a blooming good watch.
“I’m incredibly proud of it and I don’t think we blow that trumpet enough. I see the importance daytime telly and also the entertainment slate has brought to Glasgow. That makes me very proud.”