Initial Planning of our Documentary

After considering all of our suitable options, we finally decided on basing our documentary on the topic of takeaways. We chose this topic as we feel it is something that most people experience in everyday life and as we felt that it would be easy to collect information on this topic and that we would also be able to easily find many people to interview due to the large number of takeaway shops in the area.

After some discussion, we decided that takeaways would be a suitable and practical thing to base our documentary on.

Before we chose how we were scheduling our documentary, we learned some key terms related to the scheduling of documentaries. 

Inheritance - Putting a show such as a documentary on after a popular show such as Coronation Street - in doing so, people may feel obliged to leave the channel on and the documentary can 'inherit' the audience of the more popular show.

Pre Echo - Works in the opposite way to inheritance; a documentary could be put on before a popular show such as Coronation Street. The audience waiting to watch Coronation Street may turn the channel on early so to not miss the start of Coronation Street, and in doing so may end up watching part of or the entire documentary.

Hammocking - A sort of combination of inheritance and pre echo, where a documentary can be sandwiched in between two popular programmes on a channel and may gain extra viewers via both or either of inheritance and pre echo, and also viewers who leave the channel on after the first show as they wish to watch the second popular programme.

We also were familiarised with the types of documentary featured on different British television channels.  

BBC1 - Family aimed documentaries 

BBC2 - Educational documentaries (more explicit and less suitable for children than documentaries on BBC1)

ITV1 - Friendlier, less serious family aimed documentaries than the ones on BBC1.

Channel 4 - Documentaries aimed at students and younger people.

Channel 5 - Family aimed documentaries.

We then had to select the information for the scheduling of our takeaways documentary. We decided that our documentary would be called Tastes Like Teen Spirit and that our target audience would primarily be teenagers and students. The title of our documentary is a take on the world-famous song 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' by Nirvana, and we felt that this would be a good title as it will appeal to our target audience of teenagers and students - who will most likely be aware of the song - and most people would understand the play on words used in the title which could attract them towards watching it. We decided that our documentary would be shown on Channel 4 on a Thursday at 20:00. This would sandwich our documentary in between the seven o'clock Channel 4 news and Educating Essex, a documentary. We decided that this scheduling would be effective as our documentary's target audience is students and teenagers, much like Channel 4's target audience for their documentaries. We decided that 20:00 would be a good time for our documentary to be broadcast as it is a time when we believe that a large number of young people would be watching television, and it is just after the Channel 4 news which could attract viewers, including possibly older viewers whom we could receive views from via inheritance. We felt that Thursday would be a good day as much of our target audience would probably be at home in relation to on a Friday or a weekend where they would most likely be out or socialising instead of watching television.