Blog posts by year and monthSeptember 2011
Posts (8)
BBC Two Mixed Race Season: Shirley
In February, I had a phone call to say Prospect Cymru was developing a factual drama about Dame Shirley Bassey for BBC Two, to be included in the channel's Mixed Race Season. Would I be interested in meeting the Executive Producer Charles Thompson to discuss? How could I refuse? It sound...
Eastenders: E20
I've been playing Tamwar Masood on EastEnders for four years. Together with Charlie G Hawkins, who recently left EastEnders after playing Darren Miller for eight years, I have written the second online episode of EastEnders: E20 series three. The latest additions to the Albert Square spi...
Last Night of the Proms: the best seat in the house?
OK, I admit it. I was a young, foolish, impressionable 16-year-old who spent a week sleeping rough on a street in South Kensington just so I could hang over the rail at the front of the arena on the Last Night of the Proms in 1982. Just don't tell anyone. But my abiding memory of that ...
25 years strong: the idea that defined Casualty
We met at Bristol University, in 1979, where we were both studying drama. We then went on to work together in the theatre, when Paul directed Jeremy's play In Times Like These for the Bristol Old Vic. Both of us had spent time in hospital - Jeremy after illness and Paul after an accident...
Reel History of Britain: Selecting the films
It's perhaps not surprising that I became a film curator. I come from a family who documented their lives through home movies over a period of almost 60 years. Every few years we hold a grand screening, projecting the films onto a sheet at the bottom of the garden. Melvyn Bragg insi...
Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency
A ballroom, pretty dresses, couples twirling round the floor to the swelling music of the Waltz. What could be more genteel? Well, as I discovered in my new series Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency, the waltz was the Regency equivalent of dirty dancing. When it firs...
Fostering Nature's Miracle Babies
I suppose it's not the average day at the office when you get to bring home two tiny little endangered monkeys in your bag. Not just tamarins but baby bats have shared my bedroom at various points over the last 20 odd years that I have been working at Durrell in Jersey. I must admit, I u...
The Killing on BBC Four
The Killing is back! Well, we're repeating all of the first series in its entirety, at least. The whole original and best version in one mad block of programmes so that fans and newcomers, people who missed the series first time around, and those hungry to watch it again, can submerge themsel...