Chris Gosling chats with Nick Lomas, Director General of the Caravan Club

All of his programmes have been exclusively aimed at specialist niche audiences, and produced to a level and budget which has matched the potential audience. His most popular fortnightly continuous production series The Caravan Channel started showing in 2006, and Gosling passed it on to new producers after 106 editions in 2010. The programme is still in production, and is unsurprisingly still crammed with specialist advertisers and sponsors

Gosling’s UK Boating programme reached 30 editions, and has also been passed on to a new production company.

But Gosling thinks he has one more major project to launch – Retired Life TV.

“The simple fact is that no-one seems to have addressed the very specific needs of retired people, in TV terms,” he says. “For most broadcasters, the retired population is an extremely difficult audience to target – essentially because they are so diverse, just like the rest of the population. You can’t just say this is for retired people, for instance, because what might appeal to a retired bus driver might not suit a retired doctor, whose choice might not interest a retired office worker, and so on.”

So Gosling is working at putting together half-hour and one-hour formats which will provide a very wide range of interest, but slant their coverage towards an older viewpoint. He comments, “Older peoples interests are exactly the same as everyone elses – but with a specific angle that make them uniquely different, and that is what I want to capture.”

Next post: Sample programme – part one of the first of our new half-hour shows . . Retired Life, early in January 2012.