When Len met Jen

A no-holds-barred conversation between funny women Lena Dunham and Jennifer Saunders. From paps to the F-word, click on all the juicy bits you want to hear… This interview contains adult themes (no surprise there).

Inside Story

We dropped in on Anya Saunders from the Digital Storytelling team, who produced When Len met Jen

So tell us about when Len met Jen?

There was a great (and at times outrageous) conversation recorded for BBC2 between funny-women Lena Dunham and Jennifer Saunders.

This was on Newsnight wasn’t it?

Yes, but only a 10 minute cut of the interview was broadcast on that show. The actual conversation lasted much longer and was full of fascinating chat. So we re-cut an extended version of the conversation, put it into sections, and assembled it into Interlude's Treehouse web app which allows viewers to pick the parts that they'd most like to watch.

Sounds like a smart way to use additional material.

Yes, The Arts team who do lots of these kind of interviews, came to us with the idea of an interactive version and asked us to help them put it together.

The conversation was so funny and so interesting, we thought it would be great to experiment with how we might present it in a new way for an online audience. It ended up being an onscreen interview with a difference because viewers will get to pick which parts of the conversation they listen to, and in which order.

You enjoyed making this didn’t you?

The conversation is hilarious, fascinating and intimate. The interactivity allows you to watch small snippets or indulge in more depth, empowering the viewer and letting them decide what parts interest them most and in which order they want to watch. It’s exciting to give people the option to watch an interview in a completely different way.

What would you like the audience to get from this?

Hopefully they will engage with the content because they are being encouraged to get involved in making decisions about which sections of the interview to watch. Hopefully they’ll like being able to dip in and out of the content, will find it fun and will enjoy the novelty of watching a conversation in this way.