Documentary Unit - Contextual Analysis of Reggie Yates "Extreme Russia, Teen Model Factory"

Reggie Yates is one of the latest up and coming Documentary presenters. After originally making his name in radio he came across to TV and has presented a number of though provoking documentaries to date.

What is great about Reggie is that he is serious but at the same time someone very likeable so you can easily relate to what he is saying on screen.

I will be contextualising "Extreme Russia, Teen Model Factory" and comparing it to our show "Big Fat Lies"  The reason why I chose this show of Reggie's in particular it is about body image and how the media thinks young people should look.


The intro of the Reggies Yates show is like ours, it is an intense intro which shares some key facts about what the documentary is going to be about, it's a montage of music and main parts of the show which draws the viewer in, it's something Cailan did well in our show.

Something else that likens Reggie's show to ours is the "Presenter on a journey" style. It's as much about learning for the presenter as it is for the viewer which means you get the raw reactions and opinions from the presenter. Andrew did a great job at guiding our documentary along with his style which made him a very likeable character to be the face of our show.


Reggie talks to important people in the documentary and they are normally done like this, a very informal interview normally just grabbing someone for a minute and asking a few questions and with no planned questions. This differs from our show as we made sure all our interviews are sitdown interviews in which the person knew what the questions would be. In hindsight I would have liked to do more improv interviews as I feel like you get the most authentic responses. That is the problem with our interviews, they are very static and the characters themselves are not that interesting.

I feel like in our show we are following a taboo subject to talk about, the media like to control how people look and normally it is not questioned. We also followed some taboo subjects like pole fitness which is seen by some as bad but in reality it's no worse than any other form of exercise. It's something Reggie's does throughout this show, he's trying to find the truth behind possible child exploitations in the modelling industry which is a scary thought.

 Like our show Reggie talks to the people who are affected by the issue. In his show it's the parents who are affected and in our show Andrew our presenter is kind of that role as well. He knows that people judge him on appearance, it was an interesting subject we talked about off camera how certain pictures on his profile were getting him certain roles.

Jayne our nutritionist is also affected as she is having to deal with people who are possibly having problems with their weight, and they're asking about how they can lose that weight. Also our personal stylist Ryan, he will constantly be having people coming up to him about what they should wear etc. We had some great chats with our contributors which show that this myth of a quick fix can really affect people from many different professions.

Reggie talks to people who are in the industry and how they think it is going. They have to keep an open ended answer most of the time as they do not want to affect their chances of making it. This obviously leaves reggie speculative about what they say, if they don't feel they can open up about what happens it makes you feel there is something to hide.

The reggie yates series does follow a similar strand/format to what we have been going for. Without realising I have taken a lot of inspiration from his series as I am a massive fan with the way that he deals with controversial topics.

I like the idea of a presenter being the guinea pig in a way, and whilst he wasn't so much in this particular show he does take up that role a lot of the time and we used that role in our documentary.


Of course Reggie Yates is a very particular character and it's hard to replicate someone like him, but we were very lucky to have such a fun-loving guy in Andrew who really was a pleasure to work with. He carried the show with his fun personality and it helped improve some of the parts of the documentary in which we were struggling to make funny.