Stream Queen
Client
Virgin Media
Industry
Telco
Category
Documentary, campaign, social
This one started unusually. Virgin Media had booked the talent before anyone had an idea. They wanted to go bigger on Pride in 2021, so they signed RuPaul’s Drag Race UK icon Cheryl Hole, whom they had worked with during lockdown, and then came to us with the talent in place and a blank page for the concept.
The safe answer was obvious, and we wrote it first: interview Cheryl about her favourite LGBTQ+ shows and films, tie it back to Virgin Media’s Pride TV collection, job done. But brands have a credibility problem around Pride. Show up in June with a rainbow logo, disappear for the other eleven months and the audience sees straight through it. A safe celebrity Q&A would have read as exactly that. With the goodwill we had banked on The Telly That Kept Us Talking, we argued for something braver and used that capital to expand a small interview brief into a proper documentary film.
The idea was Stream Queen, a short documentary that took Cheryl to Brighton to talk to members of the public about the LGBTQ+ shows and films that mattered to them. The shift was deliberate. Rather than the brand talking about the community, the brand stepped back and let Cheryl and real people do the talking. That is the difference between showing up and barging in. It let Virgin Media demonstrate its credentials in the space while genuinely listening, which is the only version of this that earns any trust.
Cheryl’s own voice anchored it. She was passionate about television and about representation, and it was the first thing she had fronted beyond Drag Race UK, which gave the film a host who was invested rather than booked. We filmed it in a single day in Brighton on a small budget with a skeleton crew, and still came away with something that felt like proper filmmaking, not a brand video.
Underneath the warmth and the humour, the film does the thing The Telly That Kept Us Talking had proved Virgin Media could do: use television as the common thread between people. It celebrates the diversity of identity through the public’s own stories, what representation on screen meant to them growing up and what it means now, while touching on the harder moments in shows like It’s A Sin, Queer as Folk, Sugar Rush and Feel Good. Through the eyes of the people watching, you learn not just why those shows were good, but why they mattered beyond the screen.
What it shows: turning a blank brief into a brave one – pushing a client past a safe idea, handling sensitive subject matter with the authenticity it demands and producing a documentary-grade film out of a single day, a small budget and a skeleton crew.