Renegade founders return company to indie status

Wall to Wall and Ricochet are to take over production of Renegade Pictures commissions including Our Yorkshire Farm as the label’s founders are set to leave parent company Warner Bros International TV Production.

Alan Hayling and Alex Cooke will leave WBITVP after a decade and plan to establish a refreshed independent Renegade, centred on long-form docs, fact-based scripted drama and projects beyond the broadcast space.

WBITVP will retain Renegade’s slate, which also includes Car SOS, Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild and Don’t Tell the Bride, and could also re-employ Renegade’s staff elsewhere in the business.

Former BBC head of docs and Channel 4 commissioner Hayling and film-makder and former Sheffield Doc Fest programmer Cooke set up Renegade 16 years ago.

They describe their upcoming plans as the next evolution of the brand.

Cooke told Broadcast that the new-look company will “continue to tell urgent stories, bringing awareness to vital themes”.

As well as its returning formats, the indie has made single docs such as 2020’s Lost at Sea and 2019’s The Death of Aimee Spencer, factual series with Ross Kemp, limited doc series such as C4’s The Tribe and The Queen’s Lost Family and events including C4’s Drugs Live: Cannabis on Trial and Brexit: What the Nation Really Thinks.

It recently contributed one of the first docs to C4’s new youth-skewing factual strand Untold: social housing investigation Help! My Home Is Disgusting.