What’s the Tea? UNSW research, built for the feed

Universities are full of world-class expertise that never leaves the seminar room. The UNSW Centre for Ideas wanted its researchers in the feed, talking about the questions people actually argue about: social media bans, protest rights, the NDIS, abusive governments, without flattening the thinking.

The catch is speed. Commentary content only works while the topic is live, and traditional university production timelines kill it.

We built What’s the Tea as a repeatable system rather than a series of one-off shoots. One expert per episode, filmed on Kensington campus in a short interview format designed to cut down clean, delivered inside a week when the topic demands it.

A bulk agreement covers the whole series, so a new episode starts with a phone call, not paperwork. Short-notice shoots are routine: the fastest have gone from booking to filming within the same week.

Six recent episodes have drawn around 159,000 views between them, led by Christy Newman on Pride Under Pressure at 33,000 and Rosalind Dixon on Election Battle Lines at 31,600. Numbers are platform counts at the time of writing.

The series was renewed for 2026 on a standing contract, and the format now stretches across the Centre’s calendar, episode after episode, without the production ever becoming the bottleneck.