Blog posts by year and monthSeptember 2010
Posts (15)
The Cut: I'm the wardrobe stylist on the drama
The Cut is a drama for young people about a group of friends (and some enemies) living in London. I'm the wardrobe stylist so my main job is interpreting each of the character's personalities and reflecting this through their individual styles. I think about the look and the brands that the...
Inspector George Gently: Returning home to Durham
I think everyone is, and always will be, in love with Inspector George Gently and the 1960s. Martin Shaw's natural charisma breathes life into this character - he is warm, conscientious, engaging. Couple that with Peter Flannery's great skill as a writer and the magic that is Inspector George Ge...
Michael Wood's Story Of England
We are outside Mary's Deli in the village of Kibworth in Leicestershire, and I am scribbling this as the camera crew gulp a quick coffee, after an early start. After epic journeys in the Story Of India, not to mention tracking Alexander through Afghanistan, and Pizarro Over The Andes, this f...
Don't Tell The Bride: Planning my fiancee's wedding
My partner Kaleigh and I applied to be on a BBC Three show called Don't Tell The Bride. The concept sounded simple - we get £12,000 to get married, with one small snag. As the groom, I have to plan everything. How hard can it be? I've been with Kaleigh for six years, so I'd like to think I kn...
Lost Land Of The Tiger: Filming in Bhutan
When I mention Bhutan it solicits one of two responses. There is the "Oh, wow!" and then there is the "Oh, where?" The mention of filming tigers, however, solicits a combination of the two - "Oh wow, where?" Searching for tigers in a remote Himalayan kingdom is as awesome as it sounds. ...
Excluded: How we made the BBC School Season drama
I'm the director of Excluded, a one-off drama and part of BBC Two's School Season. It's set in the fictional The Lamont School, a struggling comprehensive in north London. Spanning the first few weeks of a new school year, the drama charts the intersecting stories of Amanda, an ambitious hea...
Playing my own dad in The Road To Coronation Street
I'm about to appear in a BBC Four drama about how Coronation Street started called The Road to Coronation Street, where I play my father, Bill Roache (who plays Ken Barlow in the soap) as a young man. I am about the same age as him when it started. To get into the role I had some great chats...
Spitfire Women: Margaret Frost on her role in the Battle of Britain
Spitfire Women is a documentary that tells the story of the female pilots who transported aeroplanes for the RAF as part of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA). Eighty-nine-year-old Margaret Frost was one of the one hundred and sixty-eight women in the ATA and features in the programme. She spo...
The Young Ones: Can re-living your youth make you young again?
What if you really could turn back the clock? What if you could simply think yourself younger? Those two questions form the heart of The Young Ones, a new series for BBC One. It's a re-staging of a Harvard experiment which tested whether re-living your youth could make you young again. Our e...
First Light: Dramatising the real Battle of Britain
In a way this was a dream come true - getting the chance to dramatise for BBC Two Geoffrey Wellum's stunning First Light on the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. The book is his memoir of what it was like to be an 18-year-old Spitfire pilot thrust into the gut-wrenching, ear-deafen...
