The tectonic plates of the international production world shifted forever on July 9, when the merger between indie giants Banijay Entertainment and All3Media closed. The result created an entity larger than the BBC with annual pro forma revenues of €7.4B ($8.5B) and a catalog including MasterChef, The Traitors, Peaky Blinders, Midsomer Murders and Big Brother.

Banijay boss Marco Bassetti was named CEO of the new-look company, which will be given its true unveiling at a swanky drinks bash on the eve of MIPCOM.

For market watchers, a standout element of the C-suite org chart was All3Media’s long-serving CEO, Jane Turton, who became Deputy CEO of the combined entity. After spending 11 years crafting All3 into a major revenue-generating business, one might assume she would have decided to exit the fray. Given she was widely mentioned as a leading candidate for Director General job at the BBC and retains a reputation among peers and former colleagues as a top strategic thinker, the options elsewhere would surely have been plentiful.

So, is Turton content now the dust has settled? “Of course, I wouldn’t have taken it otherwise,” she responds when she sits down with Deadline down in the lobby of an Edinburgh hotel. “Life is about making choices, and I’ve made a positive choice to stay.”

Turton becomes increasingly passionate as she provides context about her mission. She had spent a decade burnishing All3’s reputation as one of TV’s top players, and now wants to oversee its integration into the Banijay fold. She’s hoping to protect jobs where she can – though Deadline has revealed several exits in the distribution team, where duplication is heavy – and she likes the scale of a wealthy business backed by Jeff Zucker’s RedBird IMI and Stéphane Courbit’s Banijay Group that “isn’t just big for big’s sake.”

Turton is also a proponent of change and is up for the challenge. “It is exciting,” she says. “It’s a big adjustment and that’s fine. It won’t do me any harm.”

She’s also been inspired by Banijay’s ability to supercharge formats and produce them in-house, pointing to how Dutch murder mystery reality hit The Traitors might have rolled out internationally as an example. “If All3 had been in Banijay at the time, we’d have had that going out – bang! – across 25 territories in a week on Wednesday. But we were selling it piecemeal.”

Given how fresh this all is, the focus since July has been hitting the year-end target and integrating with management. Around €50 milliom ($57 million) in cost savings are planned. The long-serving All3 international sales chief Louise Pedersen exited in July, along with others such as All3 group COO Sara Geater. Last week, Deadline revealed Rachel Job was in line for an EVP of Content job Banijay Rights, and this was confirmed later in the week.

At MIPCOM, Banijay Rights will be in town with content from the former All3Media International catalog, with Cathy Payne leading the unit. “Cathy is working incredibly hard to get her team in place for MIPCOM,” says Turton. “She’s got a shiny new Banijay Rights team that hopefully can accommodate for people from both sides assembled in the roles in the right places.”

Buyers might find seeing The Traitors sitting next to Survivor branding on the Banijay stand as initially jarring, but they’ll need to adjust fast. Banijay Rights now has a catalog of more than 265,000 hours from a combined business that owns more than 170 production companies. For context, BBC Studios is around the 45,000-hour mark and ITV Studios comes in near 100,000 hours.

Federal future

Back on the production front, Banijay leadership teams have been set in the U.K., the U.S. and Germany. Collectively, the likes of Studio Lambert, Neal Street Productions, Endemol Shine North America, Filmpool, Initial and Two Brothers Pictures are all in the same house.

A key strategic question for the immediate future is how All3’s well-documented “federal” model, where producers remain siloed and independent of each other, can mesh with Banijay’s geographic approach. Turton says people “overstate” the difference and that both companies are led by the same underlying north star: Creative leadership. “Can they develop and pitch, sell and produce the best shows, yes or no?” she says. “That is the only criteria for success.”

EXCLUSIVE: Diana Unheard is the explosive three-part documentary that features the Princess in her own words. With never-before-heard audio, the tapes cover some of the ground explored by her brother, Earl Spencer, in his recent book, ‘Swan Song’, which sparked a war of words between him and the Palace.

The producers of the three-part doc, however, told Deadline their aim was to reframe the narrative around the Princess and give her a voice, almost three decades after her tragic death.

“The media always gave us this tragedy that Diana was sad and lonely and she was manipulated,” said Kerene Barefield, Creative Director, Love Monday TV, which produces Diana Unheard. In her first interview about the doc, she added: “These tapes don’t tell that story at all. They tell a story of an incredibly brave woman who had agency and knew what she wanted and how she was going to get to it.”

Years later, the tapes speak to modern-day royal matters. There is Diana speaking about Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew, who was stripped of his titles last year because of his association with Jeffrey Epstein. She talks about her sons and the line of succession. There is also Diana talking about her relationship with now Queen Camilla.

Recalling one excerpt, Barefield said: “There’s a story that they’re at an event, and she confronts Camilla because she’s been downstairs with Charles for a long period of time.”

In the tapes, Diana recounts her recollection of that meeting. “She (Camilla) said, ‘You’ve got everything that you’ve ever wanted, you’ve got all the men in the world fall in love with you, and you’ve got two beautiful children. What more do you want?’ So I said, ‘I want my husband.’”

Behind The Royal Scenes

Love Monday makes shows about the British royals including Her Majesty The Queen: Behind Closed Doors for ITV, William and Harry: Love and Betrayal for Channel 5 and talk show The Royal Beat for Prime Video in the U.S. It was when author Andrew Morton appeared on the latter that the prospect of accessing the Diana tapes became a possibility.

Morton’s ‘Diana: Her True Story’ used the recordings in the headline-making book, which rocked the British establishment. The interviews were actually between Diana and her friend James Colthurst and recorded in 1991.

The book was published in 1992, but Diana’s involvement was not revealed until after her death in 1997.

“We were talking about the tapes and I asked, where are they?,” Barefield recalled asking Morton when he was on The Royal Beat. “It changed his life doing that book with Diana … I think for a long period of time, he just wanted to close them away.”

Decades later, however, the guardians of the audio tapes were willing to work with Love Monday. Morton, ‘Diana: Her True Story’ publisher Michael O’Mara, and Colthurst gave the green light to use the audio and the trio all appear in Diana Unheard.

Segments of the tapes have been aired before, notably in Nat Geo’s 2017 doc Diana: In Her Own Words, but the producers of Diana Unheard had access to all of the tapes, about five hours in all, meaning the new series has never-before-heard audio of the Princess.

The documentary’s three parts are entitled: Got To Get Out; You’re On Your Own; and Time Is Precious.

The series unpacks the subterfuge and secrecy required to record the interviews and how Diana and Colthurst were on high alert while making the recordings, Barefield explained.

“They’re talking, and then they think someone’s outside the door, listening … another time they play classical music loudly, so that people can’t hear them.

“Something I don’t think people understand at all, is that how she took agency to get this book out, and her reasons for wanting it out. But also how, when it came out, no-one could know that she had anything to do with it.”

Diana’s Voice

In a world where the narrative around Diana’s story is often argued about and decided upon by men, the producers hope having a doc series from a female-led production company shows Diana in a different light.

“One of the things I loved when I first heard the tapes was just hearing her laughter,” Barefield said. “In the middle episode, we go back to her childhood. There’s all this stuff that you wouldn’t expect and I think it shows that she had that agency and that kind of drive from a very young age.

“And then the final episode brings it all back to the book again, and you start getting this countdown to when it is going to come out, and there is this time bomb that’s ready to explode.”

As well as Morton, Colthurst and O’Mara, Diana Unheard features her lover, Major James Hewitt. “His interview is incredibly moving, because you can see how he had this division of loyalty to the Sovereign – he was a military man, and he had pledged allegiance to his country – and yet he fell in love with Diana, and for five years had a relationship with her.”

There will be strong interest from international buyers for the series with news on where it will play around the world expected soon. Cineflix Rights is distributing the doc and it is a big launch at MIPCOM next week.

Barefield said: “This is what Diana would have done if she was still alive today. That’s how we framed it. It’s her documentary.”