BBC Studios today released the first episode of The Girls Are Talking, a weekly video podcast hosted by five women from music, radio, comedy and creator media, with 30 hour-long episodes planned and YouTube named as the launch platform.

In Short

The BBC's commercial arm has started a weekly video show where five women talk about money, dating, fame and identity, filmed so it can be watched on YouTube as well as heard as a podcast. It matters because large broadcasters are now building shows for YouTube first, and BBC Studios sells advertising and sponsorship around its digital channels. Each full episode will also be cut into short clips for Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, so most people may meet the show as a clip before they ever see a full hour.

What BBC Studios released

The Girls Are Talking went live today, a Tuesday, according to an announcement BBC Studios distributed this morning with the dateline "London, 20th October 2026." A second episode follows on Thursday, October 22, and new episodes then arrive every Thursday on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

The commitment is specific. BBC Studios describes the run as a "weekly 30 x 60-minute series," which amounts to roughly 30 hours of long-form video. According to BBC Studios, the series "launches on 20 October on YouTube and is distributed across podcast platforms, with cutdowns and clips across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts." The order of that sentence is telling: YouTube comes first, and audio platforms are described as distribution.

If all 30 episodes run weekly without a break, with episode two on October 22 and the remaining 28 on consecutive Thursdays, the final episode would land on May 6, 2027. That date is a PPC Land calculation from the published schedule, not a date BBC Studios has given, and any seasonal pause would push it later.

The show is a BBC Studios Audio Production. It was developed by Shukri Dirie and Hannah Wesson and is produced by Leanne Alie, according to BBC Studios.

Five hosts, five audiences

The line-up is the commercial core of the format. Each host brings an existing audience from a different corner of British media:

  • Keisha Buchanan, founding member of the Sugababes. BBC Studios credits the group with six UK No.1 singles and more than 12 million records sold.
  • Kamille (Camille Purcell), a Grammy and Ivor Novello Award-winning songwriter and producer and a former stockbroker. BBC Studios says her songs, written for artists including Dua Lipa, Stormzy, David Guetta and Little Mix, have more than 32 billion Spotify streams. In 2023 she became the youngest Black woman to win the Ivor Novello for Outstanding Song Collection.
  • Tara Thorpe, content creator, author and one half of Meet The Thorpes. With husband Adrian, she has built a following of more than 1.3 million across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube over 23 years together, according to BBC Studios. The couple's debut book was published in August 2026. The podcast is her first solo presenting role.
  • Issra Wiheba, national radio host on Capital XTRA at Global.
  • Sharifa Butterfly, a London-based stand-up comedian, writer and former professional hip hop dancer who started stand-up in 2022 and has been a Funny Women Comedy Awards finalist.

BBC Studios summarises the mix in one line: "A Sugababe, a hitmaker, a radio host, a stand-up and one half of one of the UK's best-loved creator couples don't always agree, and that's the point."

The hosts' existing commercial relationships are listed in the announcement too. The Thorpes have partnered with Vodafone, Skoda, the BBC, Amazon, Nissan and Sky TV, and Wiheba with Meta, Uber and L'Oreal, according to BBC Studios. Those details sit in a launch document for a reason. Hosts with a record of brand deals are a known quantity for buyers.

The first episode and the brief

The opening episode tackles a relationship question: when to stay and when to walk away. BBC Studios frames the five starting points directly. Kamille and Tara Thorpe are married, Buchanan draws on long-term relationships, and Wiheba and Butterfly are single.

The topics across the series are money, relationships, fame, faith and identity, which BBC Studios describes as "the conversations women are already having in the group chat."

Buchanan championed the idea, according to BBC Studios. "For years, I've wanted to be part of a talk show for women like us, women who grew up with daytime TV but never really saw ourselves on the sofa," she said. "This is the conversation we're all already having in the group chat. Now everyone gets to join in."

The reference to daytime television is worth noting. The format takes the panel-on-a-sofa structure of daytime talk shows and moves it to YouTube's long-form feed and phone screens rather than a broadcast slot.

Kamille pointed to her background in finance. "From trading floors to recording studios, I've been the only woman in the room more times than I can count," she said. Wiheba described herself as "Muslim, Libyan, loud and proud of all of it" and said she "never saw a woman like me hosting a show like this."

Tara Thorpe addressed the shift from couple content to a solo seat. "For years people have known me as one half of Meet the Thorpes," she said. "But this time it's just me, my opinions, and everything in between." Butterfly, who said she has AuDHD, promised "unfiltered thoughts, questionable logic and a lot of oversharing."

The representation numbers BBC Studios cites

BBC Studios positions the show as putting "women whose voices are still underrepresented in podcasting" at the centre. Two figures support that claim in the announcement's notes.

The first comes from the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. Women of colour accounted for 7% of hosts across the 100 most popular podcasts on Spotify in 2024, according to its 2025 study as cited by BBC Studios.

The second is a February 2026 survey by Acast and Attest of 600 weekly podcast listeners across the UK, France, Italy and Spain. In it, 63% said female hosts bring different perspectives they value.

Neither figure measures advertiser demand, and the second is a stated preference from a modest sample. Both are, however, the sort of data point that appears in sponsorship decks when a publisher sells a show to brands targeting women.

BBC Studios Digital Brands and the ad sales question

The announcement closes with a description of BBC Studios Digital Brands, the unit behind the show's distribution. According to BBC Studios, Digital Brands runs more than 150 channels, spans IP including Bluey, Doctor Who and Top Gear, and reaches more than 40 million people globally each week across 17 or more languages.

The same description states the commercial intent plainly. Digital Brands helps "brands connect with passionate fan communities through premium advertising, branded content and bespoke commercial partnerships," according to BBC Studios.

What the announcement does not contain is any detail on how The Girls Are Talking will be sold. There is no launch sponsor, no named ad partner, no mention of host reads, and no audience target. Whether YouTube inventory on the channel is monetised through YouTube's own revenue share, sold directly as integrated sponsorship, or both, is not stated. The audio feeds on Apple and Spotify could carry separate dynamically inserted ads, but BBC Studios has not said so.

BBC Studios has been building toward this format for some time. In March 2024, BBC Studios Social invited independent production companies worldwide to pitch short-form digital content for brands including Bluey, Top Gear and BBC Earth. In September 2025, BBC Studios supplied five free ad-supported channels to Titan OS for Philips and Sony televisions across eight European markets. In May 2026, the BBC joined YouTube and the National Film and Television School to start Create x Connect, a training programme for producers and creators, after a YouTube consultation of 9,465 UK creators found only 17% had access to the right training.

The Girls Are Talking is different from those efforts in one respect. It is original talent-led programming, built around personalities with their own followings, rather than an extension of an existing BBC franchise.

Why video podcasts matter to advertisers

The timing tracks a market that has moved quickly toward video. YouTube said in October 2025 that its podcasts reached more than 1 billion monthly active viewers, and PPC Land's coverage of YouTube's two podcast setup paths cited a 31% share of weekly podcast listeners for YouTube, ahead of Spotify at 27% and Apple Podcasts at 15%.

British data is especially relevant here. A Signal Hill Insights and FlightStory survey of 1,003 UK monthly podcast consumers, published in May 2026, found that smart TVs had overtaken computers as Britain's second podcast screen. In that survey, 84% had watched a video podcast, smart TVs accounted for just over 52% of podcast watch time, and 54% of video viewers watched between 19:00 and 23:00. An hour-long panel show fits that prime-time living room pattern.

The clip strategy in BBC Studios' plan also has data behind it. In June 2026, Sounds Profitable's Podcast Atlas found 73% of listeners would follow a creator from audio to video and 71% would follow from long-form to short-form clips. The same study reported that 84% of people who consume podcast clips say those clips sometimes turn them into regular listeners. Cutting each episode into short-form video for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts is, on those numbers, a discovery mechanism as much as a marketing one.

Money has followed the format. In September 2026, the Video Advertising Bureau circulated eMarketer projections that podcasts would take 48% of US digital audio ad spend by 2030, up from 42% in 2026, with 88% of weekly podcast consumers reaching shows through video platforms. iHeartMedia's chief executive Bob Pittman said in August 2026 that video "comes with a really nice CPM, premium pricing," as PPC Land reported when Netflix took two Martha Stewart shows in an iHeartMedia video podcast deal.

Acast's own results show the shift is still early. When Acast reported second-quarter 2026 results in July, revenue per listen rose 26% while listens rose only 2%, and chief executive Greg Glenday said video was "still a small percentage of our revenue." The gap between audience behaviour and ad revenue is the opening that broadcasters, audio networks and streaming platforms are all trying to fill.

Talent deals and the ownership of audiences

Other publishers have taken a different route: signing existing shows. SiriusXM in July 2026 took exclusive ad sales rights to The Bald and the Beautiful, a podcast with more than 770,000 YouTube subscribers. In February 2026, The Best One Yet signed a multi-year Acast deal and hired its first general manager to chase video.

BBC Studios is instead building a new brand from scratch, owned by its production arm, and borrowing reach from the hosts. That approach gives the company the IP and the YouTube channel, but it starts with no subscriber base of its own. The official YouTube handle, @GirlsAreTalkingOfficial, was linked in the announcement through its Shorts tab, an indication of where early discovery is expected to happen.

For agencies, the format matters because it sits between categories. It is a podcast in name, a YouTube talk show in practice, and a source of short clips on three social platforms. Measuring a campaign across those surfaces still requires stitching together YouTube, Spotify, Apple and social reporting that do not share a common audience metric. Who will sell the inventory, and on which metric, is the question BBC Studios has not yet answered.

The broader context is the UK creator economy. YouTube said in 2025 that its creative ecosystem contributed more than £2 billion to UK GDP in 2023. BBC Studios' own Digital Brands unit already operates more than 150 channels, and this show adds a new, talent-led brand to that portfolio rather than another franchise channel. The Girls Are Talking is BBC Studios' latest test of whether a commercially run panel show can find that audience on YouTube first.

Timeline

Summary

Who: BBC Studios, through a BBC Studios Audio Production, with hosts Keisha Buchanan, Kamille, Tara Thorpe, Issra Wiheba and Sharifa Butterfly. The show was developed by Shukri Dirie and Hannah Wesson and is produced by Leanne Alie.

What: The Girls Are Talking, a weekly video podcast of 30 episodes, each 60 minutes, covering money, relationships, fame, faith and identity, with cutdowns for Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts. BBC Studios has not disclosed sponsors, ad sales arrangements or audience targets.

When: The first episode went live today, October 20, 2026. The second episode follows on October 22, and new episodes arrive every Thursday after that.

Where: Launched on YouTube and distributed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other podcast platforms, with clips on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts. BBC Studios is based in London.

Why: BBC Studios says the show puts women who are underrepresented in podcasting at the centre, citing a 7% share of women of colour among top Spotify podcast hosts in 2024. For advertisers, it is another example of a broadcaster building talent-led programming for YouTube first, at a time when podcast audiences are shifting to video and television screens faster than ad revenue is following.