Blog posts by year and monthJanuary 2011
Posts (10)
Outside The Court: Filming the stories behind the court cases
Film-maker Marc Isaacs spent three months on the steps outside Highbury and Islington Magistrates' Court in London, talking to the people who were coming in and out. The result is Outside The Court, a documentary that is part of BBC Four's Justice season. Marc told the BBC TV blog about how h...
How we documented Laura Hall's battle with booze
I'm the executive producer of Laura Hall: My Battle With Booze. We read about Laura, like so many people, when she hit the headlines earlier this year. Newspapers named her the "poster girl for binge Britain", while a judge even called her "despicable and rotten". She'd become an overnight...
Making the new BBC One HD trailer
How do you tell the story of BBC One HD in a short trail, which makes sense whether you are watching in Standard Definition (SD) or High Definition (HD), at the beginning of 2011? The BBC likes to throw out challenges, and the wheel stopped on this one for me and the marketing team I work wi...
Hattie Jacques: How we filmed her bittersweet tale
The idea for a Hattie Jacques film was first hatched with Cheryl Taylor in BBC Comedy, following the excellent BBC Four dramas on Frankie Howerd, Tony Hancock and others. We all felt it was time to look at a woman in comedy and it would be interesting to portray a comic whose life was more ...
Land Girls: My Tiger Moth adventure
When I read the opening of episode one of the new series of Land Girls, I was chuffed to bits with all its action, suspense and romance. The land girls are together working in the fields, a Tiger Moth flies in close over their heads and lands nearby, the pilot turns out to be John, the husban...
The all new BBC blogs homepage
I knew the BBC had a very decent range of blogs coming from news, radio, TV and more - but it surprised me to know there's actually almost 300 of them from - from Zane Lowe to Formula 1 to The Archers. The BBC blogs homepage has just been relaunched so that it showcases all the blogs all th...
Lark Rise: I design the costumes and corsets
For a costume designer, Lark Rise To Candleford is an interesting project to work on. The research beforehand means I get to spend hours looking at photographs and paintings of the period. It's a part of the job I particularly enjoy. For this fourth series of Lark Rise To Candleford I spent f...
Aurelio Zen: Michael Dibdin's Italian detective on TV
Years ago my Dad gave me a Michael Dibdin book and told me to read it. What I most enjoyed about it was the loving detail and description of life in Italy - it's almost as if Italy is a huge character in the novels. I tucked it away in my memory. The success of the first series of Wallander,...
The Laconia: Sinking an ocean-liner onscreen
I was working as a production designer on a show in Lithuania when Nico Hoffman, the producer of The Sinking Of The Laconia, came to visit. He told me about the idea for a new TV drama: the true story of the WWII English ocean-liner, RMS Laconia being bombed by a German submarine 600 miles o...
Eric & Ernie: A minute with Jim Moir
Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) and Victoria Wood star as Eric Morecambe's parents in the one off drama, Eric & Ernie. Victoria Wood is also the executive producer of the programme. It was her idea to focus the story on the pair's boyhood friendship when they were child performers in variety shows...