Fresh Cops

23 September 2022

David Waterman, Series Producer for Full Fat TV, shares his experience of bringing Fresh Cops to our screens

Fresh Cops came out of the West Midlands Voices initiative, led by BBC3 and BBC England in partnership with Create Central. Back in May 2021, local indies were offered the opportunity to submit documentary ideas that reflect the life experiences of 13-24 year olds.

“When Full Fat approached me with the challenge of making a police obs doc series for BBC Three from the point of view of some of the country’s youngest police officers, I couldn’t resist. Our aim was to get under the skin of these officers, to see the job from their point of view and understand how they cope with such a big responsibility at such a young age. We wanted to offer up an exciting, entertaining and touching portrayal of their ventures into the new and unknown – crucially, for BBC Three, it had to be their story, from their perspective, not from ours.

The series had to feel fresh and distinct from other ‘blue light shows’, have its own look and move at a pace that would live happily on the channel.

It also had to honour the rich cultural context of Leicestershire and celebrate the unique slice of England that these young officers are a part of.

But we only had a month to film with the officers and we couldn’t film anything outside of their working world.

Before I arrived, the exec Catherine Welton had been meticulous about finding PDs who had blue light experience (we had a duty of care to them, given they would be filming on frontline response for a month) but would also deliver a style and tone that would fit the BBC Three brief.

Police Sergeant Adam Ahmed

Although our filming schedule wasn’t that long we did have an invaluable period of casting. This meant we could handpick contributors that (we hoped) would deliver what we needed, while also being representative of a new young breed of police officer. It also meant we could get to know our contributors and their back stories which allowed us to map their likely arcs across the series - crucial for that BBC Three reality feel.

We also had time to build good relationships with Leicestershire Police more generally and especially the PR team. We chose to base ourselves inside Leicestershire police HQ, essentially embedding ourselves and that made it far easier to deal with everything from production issues to editorial casting concerns, be they re-shuffles or monitoring fatigue.

Pulling together the filming protocol on this series was a challenge and it’s amazing how far ‘blue light’ shows have come in this area. As a PD I remember turning up on police series of the past, being handed a camera and put in a panda car and just told to follow the action. We also did a stress test of the protocol before filming, which threw up some interesting questions and helped us to make it even more watertight. If this series has taught me anything, it’s how invaluable a protocol is for grounding a series and giving everyone confidence.

Series Producer David Waterman

We shot our first batch of master interviews before we shot any actuality so we had a healthy bank of character information and relationship building was established early. It was also an important exercise in implicitly laying out our stall in term of what we were interested in and what being with us for a month would be like – we were interested in the professional and the personal but only when the latter overlapped with the former, we were playfully inquisitive but hopefully always respectful.

The PDs (who were brilliant) were partnered up with the officers, and, in the main these partnerships worked very well. Relationships were made, trust was engendered and we patiently waited, hoped and helped from the sidelines. They were a light-footed reportage infantry, assisted with more junior recruits (equally as brilliant), armed with go-pros and a single 50mm prime attached to a light and nimble FX6 (Thanks Tom Power PD sharing your experiences on this singe lens choice).

One of the departures we made from traditional police obs doc was to shoot lightly produced scenes with our officers as they decompressed, either over a cuppa in the canteen or in the police gym. We weren’t sure to begin with how these scenes would work, but actually they really added a layer of character, colour and insight.

We tried to be proactive about spending money in the short term to save money in the long term. For example, it quickly became clear that music clearance was going to be a challenge and we didn’t want to waste precious offline / editor’s time to keep replacing tracks so took the decision to hire a music supervisor to put together a series playlist. I think we’d do it again.

DOP Ollie Bostock & PC Jake Bull

Making a first series which is trying to break the mould of a very well-established genre was never going to be easy but we were so well supported by our commissioners, Nasfim Haque and Diana Hare, who were brave about compliance and very clear about what the BBC Three audience expected.”

Fresh Cops is now available to watch on BBC iPlayer: WATCH FRESH COPS

Fresh Cops is the third of three commissions to come out of the BBC Three and BBC England partnership with Create Central which focused on developing and championing West Midlands based talent and creativity.