David Wilson-Nunn – Creative Director at BBC Studios – on breathing new life into retro IP with BBC Playback

David, it’s great to connect! Before we dive into the exciting new BBC Playback project, how did you find your way into this industry?
I trained as a graphic designer and my first two jobs were in graphic design. Then redundancy came along and I thought I best get to London – I was living in Suffolk – so I had to find a friend with a London address so I could get interviews! That’s when I stumbled upon the licensing industry.

An agency had a job going at Universal Studios – he said: “It’s more of an art direction job on their movies… Is that something you’d be interested in?” It was like… Get me the interview straight away please! Bizarrely, I was collecting Jurassic Park memorabilia at the time… All the stuff Blockbuster Video would have – the toys, the tape on they’d have on their shelves ready for the incoming VHS, that sort of thing.

A superfan – I imagine the interview went well!
It did! They were working on Jurassic Park III at the time, I was offering the job – and then I was in licensing! So I loved design, I loved film, TV and pop culture – and the stars aligned. That was in late 1999.

Amazing. And Jurassic Park fan to Jurassic Park fan… Jurassic Park III – very underrated!
I like the cut of your jib Billy. It is very underrated! There’s the Spinosaurus and some very good performances in there.

“We feel these sorts of designs can be really powerful – especially in apparel.”

Absolutely! But before we lose the readers, we should get back on track! You’re Creative Director at BBC Studios. What does the role entail?
My main focus these days is on supporting my product development team – which is a global team. Bluey is so big, as one example, that we need to be as efficient as possible. It’s about being creative when writing briefs for new assets to be developed. I work across the whole portfolio, and that includes everything from Doctor Who and Top Gear to new initiatives like BBC Playback.

I’m trying to let my team get on with the general product development side of things, while I investigate where new opportunities might come from within the business… That might be from new IP and new shows, or taking existing titles and trying to build up some creative vision, ambition and assets for that. BBC Playback came from that approach – I’d been wanting to do it for years!

Yes, talk me through this! How has BBC Playback come about?
Well, I’ve been here 16 years this year, and I could never understand why we didn’t have an ‘archive licence’. We have so many great brands that resonate with people – and plenty that don’t resonate, but that people know as being a cool BBC brand from the archives. I could never get support for it because it’s quite a layered process, getting approvals for the different elements of it… I mean, some of these brands are from the Seventies and Eighties – there were no merchandise agreements in place. You have to unpick all that, which is quite difficult.

I can imagine. So how did this get off the ground?
I have a great supporting sales team who shared the vision and wanted to investigate it. That helped BBC Playback come to be – and it’s also the approach we’ve taken on a few other brands that have anniversaries coming up.

Amazing. So what brands are a part of BBC Playback?
At the moment, BBC Playback includes Ceefax, Tomorrow’s World, classic BBC Two idents… There’s also Radio 1 and Live & Kicking. I threw that one in there for the audience that I think we’ll try to hit with BBC Playback. That’s a brand I feel with resonate with an audience in their late thirties/early forties who grew up on that show. It’s a call back to their youth.

We also have Closedown, which is the BBC clock that would appear after the last broadcast, just before going to black screen – in the days before 24-hour TV.

There’s also Saturday Superstore, which is older than me but resonates well with a certain demographic… And finally, we have the classic BBC Test Card.

The broad idea is that it’s something we can add to as we go forward. We’ll be adding Top of the Pops in there too. We’ve done licensing before for Top of the Pops, but it feels right to put it in Playback. Who knows, this time next year we may have 10 more brands in there.

Fantastic. It’s funny, when you’re reeling those brands off, there’s several that I don’t necessarily have an emotional tie to – but I’d absolutely buy into from a design point of view… I’m all over a Ceefax hoodie! If something is designed or applied in a smart, stylish way, it can sometimes transcend your own knowledge of a brand.
That’s the exact intention. One of the main aims for this is not just to target people that remember these brands… We want to engage people like you who maybe weren’t born then, but who recognise it’s doing something clever, or that it’s referencing something significant in the BBC’s history. UNIQLO do this really well with their licensed designs – they don’t just go for the obvious. They’ll twist something or focus on one specific detail…

That’s the fun of this kind of thing. Look at Tomorrow’s World. The example we’ve focused on in the guide is moment featuring the first mobile phone. An everyday object that everyone can connect with. We feel these sorts of designs can be really powerful – especially in apparel.

It sounds brilliant – and the sort of style guide that may double as a coffee table book in terms of having real appeal to anyone interested in design.
It’s funny you say that. I want to inspire designers at licensees with our guides. I don’t want to just give them a download to apply to product… I’d rather give them something physical to have on their desk that can flick through and be inspired by.

A few years ago, we did a style guide called Doctor Who Universe. It was illustrated by Mike Collins – quite a famous Doctor Who illustrator – and amazing15 were the creative agency that we used. We produced a kind of Marvel take on Doctor Who. We were between Doctors but we needed to create something evergreen… So we created this comic book-inspired Doctor Who Universe guide, that we produced as a graphic novel.

Wow! I bet that’s become something of a collector’s item!
I kid you not, the amount of people I’ve shown it to who say: “That’s a cool product – where can I buy that from?” But it’s not a real graphic novel, it’s a guide.

Fantastic. Let’s dive into the development of BBC Playback. You worked with the wonderful team at Skew on this. What kicked things off?
I wrote a brief and chose the brands. I looked at what brands are out there that I liked the look of, and what brands out there were being pirated… You can get a lot of useful information from pirated merchandise – good and bad. I collated all that and met with Skew – who are fantastic.

“Ceefax is a database – we have reams of references. There’s so much you could do with that brand.”

What Skew do really well is take all that information, ask the right questions and then they go away and come back with a series of options. They did all that, as well as coming back to us with an overview of what’s happening in the apparel market for this type of thing, right now. That meant a graphic language had started to be pulled together.

BBC Closedown is a nice example of this. Instead of just taking the clock with the globe in the middle, we broke it down into component parts… A bit like a Nineties t-shirt design. They did that for all of the brands, so we had two or three different looks for each brand. It meant we could pick and choose what worked best for each one.

And it all happened quite quickly. The project from start to finish took around two months. We had three or four meetings during that time – and Skew nailed it. Totally nailed it.

Well done Skew. Do you feel any of the brands within BBC Playback have the potential to do so well as to become their own kind of pillar brand?
Absolutely. I think Ceefax could. Ceefax is a database – we have reams and reams and reams of references. You could do print-on-demand that’s personalised… You could put your football team at the top of division one and have that graphic on a t-shirt… You could find a graphic that relates to your birthday… There’s so many things you could do with that brand.

BBC Playback gives us a great opportunity to test this kind of stuff – interesting, creative designs that aren’t Bluey or Doctor Who… And there’s real value in that. If one of them comes off, we’ll be very happy.

You mentioned earlier that this came about in part with the support of your commercial team. How important is it that creative and commercial teams move in lockstep?
It’s important, and I think we’re unusual at BBC Studios in that it’s a proper collaboration. Me and my creative team are on the same level as the commercial team – there’s mutual respect there. If you listen to each other, you achieve much more than if one has dominance over the other. And I don’t just mean if commercial has dominance over creatives – the same is true if creatives throw their crayons out of the pram. You have to listen to each other. And if you share the vision, you can share the success.

What product categories do you see BBC Playback lending itself to?
Print categories really. Apparel… Gifting and stationery could be nice. Accessories… You can see a bucket hat with a BBC Two logo on being worn by someone at Glastonbury. I’m hoping we see that next year! It’s predominantly an apparel guide, but like most apparel guides it can applicable to lots of sectors.

You mentioned about how your love of Jurassic Park played a role in how you entered licensing. Does being a fan of the brands you’re working with have an impact in how you do your job today?
It’s a really interesting question – and my answer is yes and no! I’m really into my cars, so working on something like Top Gear is amazing. It’s interesting every time I work on it. That said, back when I was doing product approvals, it was dangerous being a fan, because you try and skew the brand to how you see it as a fan. I think you need a certain level of distance doing that type of job. So it’s important to be a fan, but in this industry you need to understand where the fan stops and the commercial starts.

BBC Playback features a whole host of brands that have perhaps been underrated thus far in terms of their licensing clout… Are there any launches you’ve worked on during your career that you feel were maybe underrated? We’ll shine a spotlight on it here!
There’s been a few! I’d say Doctor Who Universe. It was special because it came at a time where there was no content on – and a time where my boss challenged me to think about how to make Doctor Who an evergreen. It launched at BLE, looked amazing and did well – so it’s not underrated in that respect – but there wasn’t really a big announcement about it at the time…

I’m proud of it because we produced a lot of artwork in a short amount of time that was very commercial and very usable for licensees that were craving newness at the time. I’m really proud of that.

Great pick. I have one last question! You mentioned earlier that you’ve been at BBC Studios for 16 years. What about the company has kept you happily there for so long?
This will sound a little strange or negative, but I like that things are difficult sometimes. I’m working at a company that’s one of the only ones left of its kind in the UK – or the world… You have more than 100 years of heritage, and there’s a way of doing things, but there’s also a real need to be commercial. You’ve got a public service approach, and the studio’s commercial ambitions… It’s an interesting, exciting balancing act. That keeps things interesting.

Fantastic. Huge thanks David. And worth mentioning that the BBC Playback collection will launch as a merchandising opportunity at this year’s Brand Licensing Europe – in a few weeks!