Sky History Acquires ‘Castles SOS,’ AI-Powered Doc Exploring Royalty, Ruins & Restoration

EXCLUSIVE: Sky History has sent out a Castles SOS. The UK channel has acquired a new AI-powered doc telling the royalty, ruins and restoration stories behind British castles. Will Hanrahan’s indie FirstLookTV is making the series for the Hearst Networks EMEA channel. It will be fronted by British presenter Rick Edwards and is now in post.

Sphere Abacus will sell Castles SOS (WT) globally. It will unpack the work to restore castles, as well as the stories of the people that lived in them.

Hanrahan tells Deadline about the starting point for the show: “We asked what we could do to tap into the global thirst for royal stories that was new and different and also gave a sense of historical takeaway.” FirstLookTV decided the way in was looking at castles that are being restored, but also looking at the human stories the castles could yield. “Each time we went to any of these places, we said ‘What are the royal stories in here that nobody’s told before?’”

The restoration elements of Castles SOS highlight the work of the The National Lottery Heritage Fund and the series is produced with backing from the UK National Lottery.

The human stories in the three-parter, meanwhile, include a boy-king who nearly died at Fyvie Castle, the queen who cheered carriage races at Lowther, and the king who starved his enemies at Hay. This is where generative artificial intelligence comes into the picture.

Hanrahan said: “What better way of bringing the past to life than with big movie-style reconstruction? There’s going to be battle scenes in the new series and there’s going to be architectural recreations of the castles from the past.”

As debate rages about the use of AI in film and TV, FirstLookTV said any AI sequences in its series will be created ethically. “We shoot original material and then train our AI tools to only use that or material that’s been cleared for global use,” Hanrahan said. “We are feeding the data into AI and seeing what it can come up with, and it’s mind bogglingly good.”

Factual producers are increasingly harnessing generative AI’s capabilities for providing high-quality drama reconstruction. Daniel Korn, VP of Programming at Hearst Networks EMEA acquired Castles SOS for Sky History. He also recently bought Ed Gein: Original Psycho, another doc using AI to power its reconstruction elements.

Hanrahan makes a wider point about artificial intelligence in production: “AI can do such wonderful things. Why not train it to do it the right way?”

Get our Breaking News Alerts and Keep your inbox happy.