My name's Nicky Birch and I'm a Lead Producer
at BBC Research & Development.
So 5 Days 5 Dates is a dating experience, right.
So you have a friend called Noelle, and you play you.
You're her flatmate, right, so you're listening in to the dates and seeing how the dates go.
"So, Noelle, tell me a bit more about yourself...."
"No, I was just joking, you know about the cracking your skull open."
"Hahahaha, I'm laughing, on the inside."
But the great thing is, not only do you listen in to the
dates like a normal radio drama, you can actually talk to Noelle.
You can text her and she texts you back, and also some point
you get to leave a voice message that gets played out in the date.
And lastly, you have a phone conversation with her,
which your response affects the path that the drama takes,
ie does she like the date, should she carry on or she just dump him.
So the five Days five Dates project came about off the back of some
voice-activated dramas we did for smart speakers on Amazon Alexa.
These were often quite long and we wanted to do something more
short form and episodic and also aimed at younger audiences.
I'm no Nosa Eke and I'm a co- writer on 5 Days 5 Dates.
Interactive experiences give audiences,
you know, being an active participant in a story.
We all digital natives, so we're sort of expecting that,
that's the stuff that we can that we should be able to do.
The process of making this was really interesting.
So we started with a hack week, which we did around looking specifically
at multimodal - so working across two devices and we came up with a
number of different ideas and what we did after that was we thought, OK,
let's bring in some target audience, people to collaborate with us.
So we, we got the National Film and Television School.
There's a fantastic Masters in digital production.
We got them involved and they helped us shape some of the ideas
and then we worked with two writers Nosa Eke and David Verela
to script out one of the episodes.
Orator is our name for the tools and tech we developed for the
Inspection Chamber, an interactive story made for Amazon Alexa, in 2017.
By extending it for this project we've been able to add useful
future facing capabilities to Orator and extend our own
interactive storytelling tool kit. It became clear that the cross device
storytelling wanted to try, wasn't gonna be possible on, smart speakers.
Luckily, in R&D we already had a prototyping platform for trying out
ideas for interactive radio and audio - Neue radio, so we were able to
extend this by adding voice commands and cross device communication to
give us the prototyping tool kit we needed to create the experience.
They knew what to do, it was instinctive to them to
sort of write in what they thought about how the date was going.
There was definitely a sort of sense of clever, people were
quite impressed that their voice, appeared in it.
Some people found that a bit weird.
The BBC has a problem with retaining younger audiences.
I think what the BBC could be doing to engage with young audiences is
exactly what R&D are doing. Young people are actually really loyal.
So when you are actively catering for them and engaging with them.
They'll stick with you for life.
You know this is one one attempt at trying to work things out.
That's what we do ar R&D, right. We try and work things out.
We explore ideas. We prototype fast and hopefully if it inspires other
areas of the BBC or even other areas of people working media,
then y'know, that's a great thing.