We had a great casting director called Jessica Straker…she helped put out calls. Nick: We’d done the pilot and wanted to follow a similar process because obviously, we’re about opportunity. What was the casting process like? How did you choose who was going to embody these characters? With people involved whether it’s some of the main cast, or whether it’s some of the young team that were involved in some of the day roles and supporting artists roles, they’ve been in PRUs growing up as well, both the writers have as well so a lot of it is from lived experience. We touch on a lot of different topics which is the kind of work that we like to do. Doing a comedy like this, doing a show like this, kind of comedy-drama, it’s definitely comedy at the heart of it but there are some serious moments in there. Like Nick said there’s a lot of social impact stuff. Combining forces to create the story made sense. I really wanted to tell a story set in a PRU and I felt that comedy was a really good way, and I knew the writers had something similar they wanted to do. I always kind of wanted to do some work that involved young people and so a lot of environments I was going into were pupil referral units. Teddy: In terms of PRU, I was kicked out of school when I was 15, didn’t get to do my GCSEs and kinda went on a mad path as a teenager. PRU is like a natural progression of all the work we’ve done beforehand. But if you look back from 2010 till now, we’ve been making films with a social conscience, making films where young people’s voices could be heard, with positive social messages talking about the issues they face on a daily basis. The idea for PRU came from Teddy and the writers from them meeting up together and developing the idea. That’s changing now and we feel we’re at the forefront of that change.
#Pru on bbc iplayer tv
Nick: When I was coming up in the TV industry there was nothing like Fully Focused, there was nothing that made you feel like you belonged in the industry…you had to go there and fit in, you had to worry if you could you be yourself. The project that Nick spoke to me about was the perfect thing to work on together. Growing up I had my own stuff as a teenager so as soon as I was able to, I wanted to reach young people that have been through similar stories that I could hopefully relate to them. All the young people I was working with were people who were visiting estates or pupil referral units or youth offending or whatever it was. Teddy: I was working with young people as well at the time (2010) and had been wanting to set up an organization for a while, from everything I’d learnt working with other organizations. Teddy and I are actually old school friends but he was directing music videos and stuff and I’ve been working in various parts of TV so I got this project and it was a creative project with young people from Tottenham who are in gangs and we worked together so well that we just kind of clicked and said, you know what, this is actually what we believe in terms of letting young people realise their potential and get their voices heard, especially if they’re from communities where that’s not the norm in our industry. Nick: Teddy had been working already in the media industry doing some documentaries and I’ve been working in the TV industry already and we actually came together by chance on a project where Teddy directed it and I was the producer, and it was it was a project with the young people in Haringey. How did you guys set up at Fully Focused? Teddy Nygh, the co-founder of Fully Focused and Nick Bedu, the Exec Producer of PRU, co-founder and Head of Production at Fully Focused Productions, sat down with GRM to discuss how their BBC Three show came to be.
The show was created through Fully Focused, the leading youth-driven production company in the UK. Using comedy, the show sheds a light on what kids who’ve been excluded from schools and have been in PRUs go through.
#Pru on bbc iplayer series
The series stars Tom Moutchi and Hannah Walters as the teachers at the PRU as well as Michael ‘MBbants’ Boahen, Nkechi Simms, Pia Somersby and Jaye Esravas as the teens the show focuses on. PRU – which stands for pupil referral unit – is a comedy series ab on a group of 15-year-olds struggling to navigate their way through adolescence in a school for excluded kids. BBC Three is currently airing one of their newest shows PRU.