How we write about programmes

Yoreflix is a streaming service for period drama and history. Alongside the programmes we carry, we publish writing about them: a page for each title in our sample catalogue, and a long-form feature for each interview in the Yoreflix Stories series.

This page explains who writes that material and how, so you can judge it.

Who writes it

Our programme pages and interview features are the work of the Yoreflix editorial team, who are responsible for what appears on them. How they are made — including where we use AI tools — is set out below. Where an individual is the author of a piece, as with the essays in The History Society archive, they are named on it.

Yoreflix is the brainchild of Imogen Cooper, a history student turned executive producer. Imogen curates the catalogue and hosts the Yoreflix Stories podcast, and the editorial standards below are hers.

How we write about a programme

We work from the programme itself. Every title page is written from the film or series — its own dialogue and what happens in it — and not from the material supplied alongside it.

We write our own account of every programme, and we also use what the makers supply. A programme's makers and distributors provide a synopsis with the licence. It is written by people who know the work, it is carefully considered, and it is given to us for this purpose — so where it serves the reader we use it. It never stands in for our own writing: on any page that carries a supplied synopsis, the greater part of the page is still ours, written from the programme itself. The same text will appear on other services carrying the title, which is what a supplied synopsis is for.

We do not reproduce the script. Quotation is kept short and used only where the exact words matter. The dialogue is the work of the people who wrote it.

We check what we assert. Dates, running times, credits and identifiers are checked against the programme and against public records. Where the two disagree we say what we know and omit what we cannot establish, rather than repeating a figure because it is already in our own catalogue — we have found our own catalogue to be wrong more than once, and corrected it.

We would rather say less. A fact we cannot stand behind is left out. There are no placeholder credits and no invented detail on these pages.

How these pages are made, and where we use AI

We are open about this because you should be able to judge the writing knowing how it was made.

Which pages. What follows applies to the programme pages and to the Yoreflix Stories interview features. It does not apply to The History Society essays, which are written by the named historians and writers credited on them, or to the rest of this site.

We use AI tools to draft this material, and a person edits and publishes it. We carry a catalogue of period drama that deserves to be written about individually. Producing original writing about every title — rather than reposting the synopsis supplied with each licence, which is the same text you will find on every other service carrying it — is not something a team our size could do by hand. The tools are what make it possible; they are not what makes it true.

What a programme page is drafted from. Two things: the programme's own subtitle track, sampled across the whole running time so the piece reflects the entire film rather than its opening, and general historical context for the period it is set in. That is the point of working this way — the writing describes what actually happens in the programme and the history around it.

What it is not drafted from. Not other people's writing about these films, and not the supplied synopsis — our account of a programme is written from the programme, which is the whole point of working this way. Where a page also carries the makers' own synopsis, that is a separate thing sitting alongside our writing rather than a source for it. The subtitle track is a source to read, not text to reproduce; the quotation rule above applies to it in full.

How an interview feature is made. The recording is machine-transcribed, then edited into a readable feature. Automatic transcription is reliable on ordinary speech and consistently wrong on exactly what carries the meaning — names, titles and places. In one interview the guest's own film came through under six different spellings across twenty mentions, none of them correct. So every feature is checked against the recording before it is published, each correction is recorded, and anything that cannot be confirmed from the audio is left out rather than guessed at.

What we do not do with them. We do not generate pages to fill space for a search engine, and we do not publish machine output unedited. If there is nothing worth saying about a title, its page stays short.

Who is responsible. Everything published under this byline is the responsibility of the Yoreflix editorial team, however it was drafted. Where we have found an error — a wrong year, a credit that belonged to another film — we have corrected it.

How we edit an interview

Yoreflix Stories features are edited from the recording. They are not raw transcripts.

Every quotation is what was said. Repetition, retakes and production chatter are removed and headings are added, but nothing is put into a speaker's mouth.

Corrections are marked. Where a speaker misremembers a name or a number on tape and the record is clear, the correction appears in square brackets inside the quotation. We do not silently rewrite people, and we do not print something we know to be wrong.

Uncertainty is kept. Where a speaker hedges — "1976, I think" — so does the page.

A name we cannot confirm is left out. Where a recording is ambiguous we omit the name rather than guess at it. This applies especially to people who are named in passing and to anyone who has died.

We ask before we publish. Where a contributor discusses something not yet announced, we confirm with them that it may appear in writing. A permanent page is not the same as a conversation.

Corrections

If something on these pages is wrong, we want to know and we will fix it. Write to us at support@yoreflix.com with the page and what is inaccurate.

The History Society

The essays in The History Society archive are separate from the writing described above. They are commissioned from named historians and writers, who are credited individually on each edition, with their affiliation where they have one.