In a TV studio on the banks of the Thames in London, a team of comedians are trying — and almost entirely failing — to get a laugh out of a gameshow audience.
It feels somewhat unsettling at first. Studio audiences aren’t usually the most comically discerning. But here, that’s the whole point. Each time an audience member so much as sniggers or sneezes, money is docked from a prize pot of £250,000 ($330,000), the slightest noise costing them up to £10,000 ($13,000) each time. Unfortunately for them, all 75 are on camera and mic’d up, with a team of stern-looking officials on the side monitoring fluctuating volume levels and ready to press a buzzer.
“Silence is Golden” — as it’s called — launches on UKTV on May 5. In something of a rarity, the format has already been sold to four other countries across Europe and Latin America before it’s even aired a single episode.
The show marks the first out of the gate for Yes Yes Media, the indie production company launched in 2023 that, without a second of televised content to its name, managed to attract an impressive — and eclectic — array of investors. Among them are Elisabeth Murdoch’s creative powerhouse Sister (which produced the likes of “Black Doves” and “Chernobyl”) and French unscripted TV giant Satisfaction. Then there’s former “Friends” star Courtney Cox, Snow Patrol musician Johnny McDaid and pop genius and frequent Ariana Grande collaborator Savan Kotecha (an Oscar nominee for “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga” song “Husavik”).
“Silence is Golden” is also the brainchild of Yes Yes founder Richard Bacon, who recently returned to London to spearhead his company after a 9-year spell in LA .
As the Brit — best known in the U.K. as a TV and radio host for the best part of two decades starting in the late 90s — enthusiastically explains from the Yes Yes offices in the well-heeled neighbourhood of Primrose Hill, the concept for the show came to him one morning.
“I woke up with this image in my head of [Brit comedian and TV host] Jimmy Carr standing in front a studio audience who weren’t allowed to make any noise — if they did they started losing money,” he says while eyeing up a bowl of croissants. “And I just thought: that’s a format. So then I spent three hours writing it.”
Bacon, as he freely admits, lives and breathes ideas. “They make me happy,” the 49-year-old says with a beaming smile, noting that his recently-diagnosed “strong strand” of ADHD allows him to enjoy “hyper-focusing” on each one. “I’ll be thinking about ideas and refining ideas at 9pm on Saturday night or on Christmas Day and I’ll be waking up at 4am and putting notes on my phone.”
It’s Bacon’s penchant for ideas — and not just those involving an awkwardly silent studio — that his investors (which were, for the most part, friends before they became business partners) have all bought into.
He’s a “uniquely gifted creative” with an “extraordinary ability to generate original, scalable ideas that resonate globally,” says Murdoch (who herself set up “Masterchef” producer Shine before launching Sister with Jane Featherstone). Satisfaction founder Arther Essebeg (who, like Bacon, started his career on local radio) simply notes that, “Richard really does think differently.”
Bacon’s ideas are at the beating heart of Yes Yes, which has itself blossomed from an idea into a bustling creative outfit where, he proudly asserts, there’s “quite a lot going on all of a sudden.”
Indeed, he’s speaking in front of a wall on which a neatly displayed grid of A4 sheets feature short blurbs for almost 30 concepts spanning talent, quiz, reality, dating and cooking shows, plus live events. Most are covered in colorful Post-It notes on which updates have been scribbled.
Some of the concepts are just a few words with a screen-grabbed image from a film — a loose idea that probably needs some major padding out, but others are fully-fledged projects that are moving forward at pace. Three go into pilot this summer, including a quiz show, a major talent show being developed for a U.S. network and an adventure reality series “on a Survivor-type scale, but with absurdity in it,” for a streamer. Bacon says another talent show and another reality show have just gone into funded development with streamers.
A sizeable number of the A4 sheets mention the names of very recognizable figures from the world of TV and music (most of whom, likes his investors, are, or have become Bacon’s friends). One show in late-stage development is set to mark the first small screen outing for a major Hollywood star, who will — hopefully — front an extremely high-concept game show straddling TV and video gaming.
Many of the ideas sound hilarious. “We can’t do anything that isn’t funny,” laughs Bacon. “It’s got to have a story in it, and a good story. But fundamentally, it can’t not be funny.”
Bacon in the studio for “Silence is Golden” with host Dermot O’Leary (Photo by Yes Yes Media)
For all Bacon’s passionate descriptions of each show, be it a “hybrid of Big Brother and the X-Factor,” a format simply called “The Easiest Quiz Show in the World” or another with the topline “One Woman, One Problem: Too Many Men,” plus some very impressive sizzle reels, little can — yet — be formally announced.
But what can be discussed is Yes Yes’s proprietary technology, the WOMI, still in test mode and several months away from its official launch.
A major foundation of Bacon’s vision for Yes Yes being a “formats company that straddles TV and tech,” the WOMI looks and feels like an iPhone in a rather bulky, military-grade case. But it could shake up and simplify unscripted programming by putting, as he explains, “a reality TV crew in your pocket”.
Essentially, when the WOMI phone is picked up, a TV-quality camera on the front instantly starts recording a close up of the user — in landscape — as they look at the screen while the one on the back simultaneously records whatever the phone is pointing at. Meanwhile, any on screen activity such as text messaging or video calls is captured. And then once the phone is put down, each of these individual recordings is turned into files and sent to the cloud so they can immediately be edited remotely.
“It’s not a consumer product, because that’s a crazy investment,” says Bacon. “What we’ve done is a B2B thing — it’s by producers for producers, it’s for television, it’s for brands, it prints content for YouTube and it’s going to be in quite a lot of our shows.”
It also came to Bacon during another brainwave, this time while hanging out with three-time Oscar nominee Stephen Daldry. “We were watching a Christopher Nolan film together, and he told me that the secret to all screen drama is the close up,” he says. “And it just got me thinking how all the biggest news you learn in your life is on your phone, so you’re actually putting yourself in close up for all the biggest news you’ll ever learn.” Bacon reached out to software engineer friends in LA, now part of Yes Yes, and challenged them to build something that could harness this.
To showcase the WOMI’s capabilities in terms of reality filmmaking, Yes Yes has produced an early test of a “self-shot” series in which a group of college students were given WOMI phones and asked to go about their days. The footage offers what Bacon describes as “authentic, raw content,” highlighting a scene from the promo in which we see one of the girls writing to a boy she’s been flirting with on her phone as her excited friends watch on, the animated ellipses showing that he was writing back and the gasps from the group reading the screen as he does so.
“I looked at their reactions and I thought, ok, with WOMI, anything is a drama,” Bacon says. “The way I think of it is the way that, like ‘Planet Earth’ captured bats flying at night, this is capturing teenagers in the wild.”
Yes Yes now plans to self-finance “The College Girls of Liverpool” as a 10-15 minute episode length series, which it’ll put straight onto YouTube with sponsorship, followed by a U.S. version “The College Girls of Miami.”
But this is just the start. There are many — many — other plans for the WOMI that include incorporating it not just into Yes Yes formats, but using it in pre-existing shows produced elsewhere and offering it to brands. WOMI was used in the company’s first step into live events, the Red Bull Culture Clash, a head-to-head music battle held in London’s giant Drumsheds that it broadcast live. Using the WOMI — which he says will soon be able to live-stream — people in the crowd or backstage can effectively become part of the crew.
The “crazy thing,” Bacon points out, is that he recently secured the patent for the technology, something he admits he wasn’t expecting. “We’ve got the absolute monopoly, through U.S. patent law, to build a device that records the screen and your reactions to the screen at the same time.”
But the WOMI — which Bacon suggest is “in some ways our biggest project, and also slightly the slowest” — isn’t just a fancy gizmo that gives a new close-up personal touch to unscripted TV. It’s something that could also help drive Yes Yes’s fortunes during an uncertain time for the entertainment sector.
“I don’t want to just rely on getting 10% of a production fee, because this is a declining market — and those fees get capped anyway,” claims Bacon. With the technology — if leased out to TV producers or offered to brands with a revenue share system — the company gets to open up whole new revenue streams, as it does through finding sponsoring for its self-made YouTube shows.
“It’s warning against the fact that the industry is in a bit of a funny place,” says Bacon. “So really we’re just trying to think differently.”
Even with little to show for it in terms of actual tangible content out there to see right now, it all genuinely sounds very impressive (presuming you can keep up with Bacon as he pinballs haphazardly — and charmingly — from one thought to the next). But for Brits of a certain age, becoming a hyper-creative tech-focussed innovator in the world of unscripted TV probably wasn’t what they were expecting from him.
Starting out on BBC radio at the age of 17 in the early 1990s, a 21-year-old Bacon landed a life-changing TV break as a host on iconic kids show “Blue Peter” in 1997. But this would end in infamy 18 months later, when he was sacked following a tabloid news report of him taking cocaine. “12-hour drugs romp shame of kids’ TV idol,” blasted the (now defunct) News of the World (funnily enough, run by Murdoch senior). Such was the seriousness of the matter, the BBC’s then children’s head was forced to go on air to awkwardly explain the firing to its young viewers.
Bacon’s cancellation didn’t last long, and just a few months later he was among the buzzy young faces fronting the groundbreaking and anarchic 90s morning show “The Big Breakfast” (a role he says first got him “into the mindset of ideas”). Many more TV and radio gigs would follow, before an extended run as the host of his own talk radio show with the BBC. But in 2014 he jacked it all in, moving to LA with his wife and two children.
Richard Bacon when he joined the U.K.’s Capital FM’s as a DJ role in 2005. (Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images)
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When a U.S. travelogue TV concept fell through (actually before Bacon had even left the U.K.) what followed was an almost year-long period of unemployment, broken when he landed a gig as presenter of the National Geographic Channel’s “Explorer.” The debut show: hiking through Yosemite with Barack Obama in the final days of his presidency. “And that was my first day’s work in America!” he says. There would be other jobs, most on U.S. daytime TV, and then, in the summer of 2018, Bacon experienced one of those seismic life-altering moments.
“I went into a coma — and I was expected to die,” he rather nonchalantly explains. A lung infection — first felt while on a flight back to London from LA — forced doctors to put Bacon into an induced coma, which he only woke up from nine days later.
“And that changed everything. When I came out of that I thought: I’m going to do what I intended to do, which is come up with formats,” he says. And so, prompted by this “near death thing,” that’s what he did, quitting a job and over the following year writing three formats that went to pilot and then to series. NBC signed him up on an overall deal, before he would set out to chart his own course in the unscripted world with Yes Yes Media.
Of course, it helped that by this stage the naturally gregarious and extremely likeable Bacon had, over a near three-decade career in both the U.K. and U.S., amassed a large circle of influential industry friends. Among them, Elisabeth Murdoch, who “bought into the vision” for Yes Yes through Sister when it was just an idea. “They’re very good at backing creatives,” he says.
Through a friendship with Snow Patrol’s McDaid, he had got to know his partner Cox — “just really such a nice person” — while also becoming close with Kotecha (“we literally speak every day”). All three also joined as investors. As did Essebeg’s Satisfaction.
“Sure, I do know all these people, but they’re all talented and they’re all interesting — it’s, selfishly, about having investors that I get on with, that I’m comfortable with socially, but also are strategically helpful to the company,” he says, adding that he’s been writing formats with both McDaid and Kotecha.
There’s also the Yes Yes creatives that Bacon has assembled around him. As he explains, with zero bravado, “all ideas start with me, all of them.” It’s not down to arrogance or any sense of megalomania, but rather Bacon’s ADHD. “It’s really hard to explain, but I’m just not that good with other people’s ideas, even if they’re great,” he says. “For me to really care about it one way or another the idea has to start with me, otherwise I don’t really know what to do with it.”
While an unorthodox creative process for any production company, what Bacon does have is an “elite team that bring these ideas into life.” Among them are his two big league hires, brought on board in late 2023. Head of entertainment Mark Sidaway, commonly referred to as “Sid,” is a five-time BAFTA-winning exec producer and served as showrunner on “The X Factor” for 10 seasons. Sidaway is leading Yes Yes’ “big push” into live events. Then there’s director of production Lydia Arding, poached from Hilary and Chelsea Clinton’s label Hidden Light. Arding was previously head of factual production at producer-agency giant “Avalon.”
It’s this team’s job, alongside receiving random emails late on a Saturday night with each lightbulb moment, to hone down whatever ideas Bacon comes up with into a manageable selection of actual workable formats. Because with ADHD, he warns, it’s “very easy to have loads of ideas and not finish them.”
Bacon points to a room at the other end of the office where they gather to improve concepts and “build the deck and write and refine, write and refine,” over and over again until they’re happy. “At one point there were 4-fucking-9 in there, but now there are 12 that we’re developing,” he says. “12 is still a lot when you say it out loud, but it’s not 49!”
With its patented proprietary tech, A-list investors, a format that is now hitting screens and has already been sold globally and many more coming down the pipeline, Yes Yes Media looks and feels like a high-concept startup that hit the ground running and has only accelerated since. And it absolutely is that.
But there’s also a delightfully frenzied and unpredictable energy to company, as if it could suddenly, out of nowhere — and entirely casually — find the next major globe-spanning format in entertainment. It may already have it — it could be somewhere on the wall, perhaps just three words printed on an A4 sheet and awaiting refinement.
But whatever this next major globe-spanning format in entertainment is, it’s highly likely to have first come to Yes Yes’ creatively-charged mad genius founder as an idea at 4am in the morning and hastily written into his phone.
As Bacon excitedly explains, “I want to put chaos in everything, really.”
