BBC Three is transforming the BBC’s offer for young people

Published: 15 February 2016

This is just the start for BBC Three and us reinventing the BBC's offer for young people.
— Damian Kavanagh, Digital Controller, BBC Three

The reinvented BBC Three will offer TV shows to stream and download through new home The Best Of and BBC Three on iPlayer, and start publishing a range of daily content through its new, mobile-first platform, The Daily Drop.

YouTube link here.

The home of Gavin & Stacey, Being Human and Our War will continue making original British comedies like People Just Do Nothing, Cuckoo and Murder In Successville, contemporary British drama like Thirteen, Clique and Doctor Who spin-off Class, thought-provoking British documentaries like Life And Death Row and Suicide And Me, and distinctive current affairs programming like Black Power and Is This Rape? Sex On Trial - all made exclusively for BBC Three’s 16-34 target audience and with the best new comedians, directors, actors, writers and filmmakers.

All long-form programmes will be available to stream and download through BBC Three’s new home The Best Of and BBC Three on iPlayer on over 10,000 devices, including connected TVs, mobile and tablet apps, browsers, set top boxes, games consoles, media streamers and BBC Red Button+ before airing on BBC One or BBC Two at a later date.

The Best Of and BBC Three on iPlayer will feature box sets of some of BBC Three’s most loved shows including Little Britain, Him & Her and Gavin & Stacey, and some of BBC Three’s award-winning shows including Murdered By My Boyfriend and Our World War.

The second part of BBC Three’s new offering is a daily stream of content including short films, animation, blogs and news and sport updates delivered through new platform The Daily Drop and BBC Three’s YouTube Channel and social media accounts including Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat.

YouTube link here.

Updated throughout the day, The Daily Drop will curate original content produced by the BBC Three team, original content from partners across the BBC including BBC Sport, BBC Trending, Radio 1 and Newsbeat, as well highlighting BBC content that appeals to BBC Three’s 16-34 target audience. The Daily Drop will link to the best third party content that appeals to young people from sites in the UK and internationally.

Switchover night sees episode one of the new series of Cuckoo, the first film from the new series of BAFTA-winning Life And Death Row made available through The Best Of and via BBC Three on iPlayer with Live From The BBC featuring some of Britain’s best new comedians including Nish Kumar, Sophie Hagen and James Acaster available from Wednesday 17 February.

Made available this week through The Daily Drop and BBC Three’s YouTube Channel are new documentaries.

The Man Who Witnessed 219 Executions is a 3x5 minute documentary about Larry Fitzgerald, whose job it was to witness executions carried out by the state of Texas and who, after retiring, is having to reconcile what he has been part of.

With men facing pressure to be strong and silent and with clichés like ‘boys don’t cry’ and ‘real men don’t show pain’ commonplace, men are four times more likely than women to commit suicide, and male suicide is billed as a silent epidemic. In Tough Being A Man, 13 men break that silence.

15 And On Steroids follows Bignattydaddy, the teenager whose life revolves around attaining the perfect male physique and who gained notoriety for his use of anabolic steroids. Bignattydaddy chronicled his physical progress on social media and garnered a lot of criticism and abuse for his open use of steroids, which can cause long term damage.

With gaming now bigger than Hollywood, Jezzeka Duma (AKA Ms 5000 Watts), Olajide Olatunji (AKA KSI) and Brianna Wu (AKA Spacekatgal) and Julia Hardy explore the abuse female gamers receive online, in The Dark Side Of Gaming.

Coming soon to The Daily Drop, YouTube and social media are a range of content themed around life online, sex and relationships, crime and comedy including new returning strand Things I Can't Unsee featuring members of the public disclosing some of their darkest moments; Meet The Devotees about the hidden world of disability fetishisation; The Slender Man, about an internet phenomenon that led to a real-life attempted murder; and The Ladventures Of Thomas Gray featuring the eponymous YouTuber and his comedic look at modern masculinity.

BBC Three will allow the majority of its short form content to be embedded by third parties on their sites so they can include it in its entirety. All BBC Three content in The Best Of and The Daily Drop will be tagged around themed topics, strands, talent names and programme titles to aid discovery and allow audiences to easily discover related content.

The Man Who Witnessed 219 Executions and The Dark Side Of Gaming are available now through BBC Three’s new online platform The Daily Drop and BBC Three’s YouTube channel.

BBC Three’s commitment to original British comedy continues with two new series of People Just Do Nothing featuring Kurupt FM, a new series of Uncle featuring Nick Helm and Elliot Speller-Gillot, a new series of Josh featuring Josh Widdicombe, Elis James, Beattie Edmondson and Jack Dee, the return of Murder In Successville featuring Tom Davis, Cariad Lloyd and new recruits Vicky Pattison, Mark Wright, Chris Kamara, Emma Bunton and George Shelley.

Brand new comedy coming soon includes Flat TV with Tom Rosenthal and Naz Osmanoglu, Witless with Kerry Howard, and Zoe Boyle and Sunny D with Dane Baptise - which started as a BBC Three comedy feed - and Stupid Man, Smart Phone, where Russell Kane is joined by a different star each week and dropped somewhere in the world with only their mobile phone for help.

A new series of BBC Three’s Comedy Feeds and a number of brand new comedy series will be announced soon.

There will be as much contemporary British drama with brand new on- and off-screen talent as ever before. Thirteen, written by new writer Marnie Dickens and led by Jodie Comer alongside Aneurin Barnard features Ivy Moxham after she escapes the cellar that's been her prison for the last 13 years. Today is the day she'll return to her home, to her family, to her life. Available later this month from BBC Three.

Murdered By My Father is the story of the ‘honour’ killing of a 16-year-old girl, a riveting exploration of how family love and duty turned to violence, and murder, in a suburban British home. Written by exciting young screenwriter Vinay Patel, the drama is from the team behind Murdered By My Boyfriend. Coming to BBC Three in March.

Class, a new Doctor Who spin-off from the acclaimed young adult author Patrick Ness is set in contemporary London. Incredible dangers are breaking through the walls of time and space, and with darkness coming, London is unprotected. Coming to BBC Three this autumn.

Clique is created and written by Skins writer Jess Brittain. Childhood soulmates Georgia and Holly are only a few weeks into the so-called best years of their lives at Edinburgh Uni. What they discover is a world of lavish parties, populated by Edinburgh's elite. But it’s a world underpinned by sordid compromise, and a corrupt core. Can Holly reclaim her soulmate? And at what cost to herself?

A series of short films from Idris Elba’s Green Door Pictures will see BBC Three offer a range of new writers and new on-screen talent the chance to work alongside some of the UK’s biggest established on-screen talent.

There will be even more distinctive British current affairs and documentaries from BBC Three.

After presenting powerful documentaries on suicide and youth homelessness, Stephen Manderson, AKA Professor Green returns with a documentary about the rise in young people owning dangerous attack dogs.

Stacey Dooley: Sex In The Strangest Places sees the acclaimed documentary maker travel to Turkey, Russia and Brazil to uncover shocking stories about attitudes towards sex and prostitution. Stacey presents tough questions to brothel owners and government officials, and talks to prostitutes and people affected by sex crimes to uncover a dark and surprising side to these three countries. Coming to BBC Three in March.

Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared sees reporters Alys Harte and Bronagh Munro launch a forensic investigation into the real-life disappearance of a teenage boy who vanished after a night out with friends 20 years ago. Rumours in the community claim he was murdered, but no trace of a body has been found and, despite several arrests, no one has been charged. The format is yet to be decided but will be whatever form works best to tell the story and allows audiences to follow the twists and turns of this investigation and find out what might have happened to the boy who disappeared. Coming to BBC this spring.

Last year Dan Murdoch’s KKK: The Fight For White Supremacy looked at the rise of white supremacists in the USA. In Black Power, Dan Murdoch returns to the USA to take a closer look at the Black Liberation Movement, and re-visits some of the people he came across, following them closely to explore their motivations and ambitions, and the impact of the movement in the USA today.

Where to find new BBC Three

All BBC Three originals will be available via bbc.co.uk/bbcthree and through BBC iPlayer on connected TVs, set top boxes including Sky, Virgin Tivo and YouView, games consoles including Sony Playstation and Microsoft XBox, web browsers like Safari and Internet Explorer, native iOS, Windows, Android apps and BBC Red Button+.

All BBC Three originals will be repeated on BBC One or BBC Two at a later date.

BBC Three content will also be available on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr and Snapchat.

All new-form content, including short films, news and sport, image galleries and social media, will be available through bbc.co.uk/bbcthree and our new daily platform bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/daily-drop.