Organization:
BBC
Job:
Sport+ Documentary Development Lead
Location:
Salford, England, United Kingdom
Published:
08-05-2025
Deadline/Expiry date:
22-05-2025
Package Description
Job Reference: 23533
Band: D
Contract type: Permanent
Location: Office Base is Salford
We’re happy to discuss flexible working. Please indicate your choice under the flexible working question in the application. There is no obligation to raise this at the application stage but if you wish to do so, you are welcome to. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.
- Excellent career progression – the BBC offers great opportunities for employees to seek new challenges and work in different areas of the organisation.
- Unrivalled training and development opportunities – our in-house Academy hosts a wide range of internal and external courses and certification.
- Benefits - We offer a negotiable salary package, a flexible 35-hour working week for work-life balance and 25 days annual leave with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a defined pension scheme and discounted dental, health care, gym and much more.
If you need to discuss adjustments or access requirements for the interview process please contact the reasonable.adjustments@bbc.co.uk For any general queries, please contact: bbchr@bbc.co.uk.
Job Introduction
Working to the Sport+ Editor, the documentary development lead will help drive the ideation, research, and development of new and compelling evergreen documentary content.
This role requires a deep understanding of storytelling, strong research skills, and extensive experience in documentary production.
An understanding of audience engagement across different platforms is essential. A passion for producing documentaries and the ability to identify powerful narratives that resonate with audiences are key requirements for this role.
The successful candidate will identify new ideas that will attract target audiences and contribute to the story development in the pre-production phase.
Main Responsibilities
- Develop new and exciting documentary ideas. Research storylines and identify potential projects that can work cross-platform.
- Work closely with BBC Audiences team to test ideas. Stay updated on emerging trends in sports content and audience habits to help create fresh and innovative content.
- Help nurture key relationships with relevant agents and contributors.
- Assist in scripting and storyboarding content ideas for long-form formats.
- Oversee treatments, proposals and pitch decks for internal and external stakeholders.
- Plan and facilitate team creative sprints and ideas sessions.
- Oversee deep-dive research into topics, trends, and untold stories.
- Work closely with audio and written colleagues in Sport+ to develop ideas and refine concepts.
- Maintain clear communication with the Editor, Content Editor and Production Manager on all costings.
- Track, analyse and review performance data on all Sport+ documentary content.
- Drive reviews, capturing learnings, and strive to improve the quality and impact of our output.
Are you the right candidate?
- The successful candidate will have in-depth experience of long form video production. A strong journalistic and creative storytelling background is essential.
- Experience working with and understanding audience data.
- Extensive experience of long form documentary storytelling.
- Strong journalistic background, writing skills, with experience of crafting compelling narratives.
- Experience in scripting, storyboarding, and structuring narratives.
- A high-level of understanding video production workflows, from pre-production to post-production.
- Experience of managing budgets and multiple projects simultaneously, delivering on time and on budget.
- Strong network of contacts in sports media, journalism and production.
- Familiarity with storytelling and long-form narrative formats.
- Experience in managing research and production teams.
About The BBC
The BBC is committed to redeploying employees seeking suitable alternative employment within the BBC for different reasons and they will be given priority consideration ahead of other applicants. Priority consideration means for those employees seeking redeployment their application will be considered alongside anyone else at risk of redundancy, prior to any individuals being considered who are not at risk.
We don’t focus simply on what we do – we also care how we do it. Our values and the way we behave are important to us. Please make sure you’ve read about our values and behaviours here.
Diversity matters at the BBC. We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual's unique contribution, enabling all of our employees to thrive and achieve their full potential.
We want to attract the broadest range of talented people to be part of the BBC – whether that’s to contribute to our programming or our wide range of non-production roles. The more diverse our workforce, the better able we are to respond to and reflect our audiences in all their diversity.
We are committed to equality of opportunity and welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief. We will consider flexible working requests for all roles, unless operational requirements prevent otherwise.
To find out more about Diversity and Inclusion at the BBC, please click here.
