CLOAK PRODUCTIONS - Quality television produced with skill, creativity and integrity

'The UCB Story'

This three part documentary was commissioned by UCB TV to be broadcast as part of the launch strategy for their new TV service on digital satellite. Prior to this, UCB had a twenty-year history of pioneering Christian broadcasting (to that point primarily radio) within the UK. However much of that broadcasting was to limited audiences. With the launch of their new TV service they were aware that this situation would change. It was therefore felt that there needed to be a programme produced which told this fascinating and engaging story in a way that would inform the new viewers of the TV service about their history, while at the same time delivering an entertaining and highly watchable historical documentary.

We had a total of four months, thirteen shoot days and ten weeks of editing to produce the series. One other major stumbling block was the lack of archive material. Because to that point UCB had been a radio broadcaster, they had very little visual material other than some photographs. We felt in order to tell the story and keep it interesting it was important to find creative ways of using the photos and so came up with various different treatments for them. We did manage to track down some very old SVHS archive material, which we graded in such a way as to disguise the poor quality and make it fit with the fabulous new material our cameraman Ian McCann delivered for us.

It was also felt that the best way of telling the story would be to condense it into various key sections – major turning points in their history. The problem was however how to link these sections together without access to large amounts of archive, or the budget for additional filming. We therefore came up with the solution of the radio sequence as a means of jumping around the story – it also evolved into providing the title sequence for the programmes and fitted perfectly with the programme’s subject matter.

There were two other important aspects we felt needed to be paramount in the telling of the story: firstly the huge sacrifices that many of the people involved had made, must be brought out; and secondly this was primarily a story not about a broadcasting entity, but about what God had been able to accomplish with a small band of loyal and committed people. We feel this was the UCB story we told.

The programmes feature interviews with many of UCB’s senior staff, both past and present, as well as contributions from Christian leaders and Christian media practitioners. We even interviewed a 98 year old, who phones the UCB Prayerline on almost a daily basis for someone to talk to.

Here are some of the people we interviewed as part of the programme:

Joel Edwards – General Director of Evangelical Alliance
Bishop John Francis – Founder of Ruach Ministries
David Heron – Chairman of Premier Radio (London)
Olave Snelling – Chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Council
Colin Urquhart – Senior Pastor of Kingdom Faith Ministries
Andy Hawthorne – Founder of The Message Trust
Roy Crowne – UK Director of Youth For Christ
Rosemary Conley – Diet and Fitness Guru
Gerald Coates – Christian Communicator
Noel Richards – Songwriter
Dave Bilbrough – Songwriter
Chris Cole – Founder of Cross Rhythms
Gareth Littler – Director of the Centre for Justice and Liberty and former Managing Director of UCB
Ian Mackie – Chief Executive of UCB
Hal Short – President of UCB International
Bob Gass – Author of Word for Today

And many more.

The programmes were on UCB TV (channel 677 on Sky Digital), and the feedback both UCB and Cloak Productions have received has been very positive.

Ian Mackie, Chief Executive, UCB had this to say:

“In October 2003 the board of United Christian Broadcasters decided to chronicle our organisations history in the form of a documentary. The decision coincided with launching our own television channel (UCB TV) on satellite and it was decided to capture our history as a television documentary for broadcasting as well as a promotional tool to UCB’s growing supporter base.

We began looking for a company who could work with us to capture our history and importantly work within our budget. A contributing and important factor for us was that we could trust the integrity of the company to portray the faith aspects of our charity.

UCB finally ended up choosing Cloak Productions as our contracted production company and commissioned them to make a series of three one hour programmes capturing succinctly the twenty year history of UCB.

Graeme Spencer and his team worked with us to formulate the scripts and the styling of the programmes and also kept us informed of how the costs were developing and the budget was allocated. The project took nearly six months to complete but we were absolutely delighted with the end result and believe the programmes are some of the best produced Christian documentaries we have seen or been able to broadcast on our TV channel.

We were impressed with Cloak's creativity, integrity and their administrative abilities, all in all the experience was a very positive one and we hope we will be working with Cloak again in the future. UCB are pleased to recommend Cloak Productions to any charity, organisation, company or broadcaster looking to commission a production company to produce television material either for broadcast, or for video release.”