Blog posts by year and monthNovember 2011
Posts (11)
Love On The Transplant List: Filming with Kirstie
Love On The Transplant List is really a love story about two extraordinary young people but it just so happens that one of them, 21-year-old Kirstie, has Cystic Fibrosis. At Special Edition Films, we got in touch with Kirstie after seeing her blog 2ndchance@life to approach her about making...
Frontline Medicine: Camp Bastion's battlefield hospital
I watched a young soldier lying in the mud under a sweltering Afghan sky as his friend, with fumbling hands, desperately tried to get a tourniquet round his naked leg. The screaming was incessant until finally the tourniquet was in place and fiercely tightened. What I was watching was a t...
Baker Boys: We're the writers and real-life partners
Hello - I'm Helen Raynor. I've worked on established dramas like Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Primeval, but Baker Boys is my first original drama series. We've filmed this blog post to share a bit about the creative process with you. I created and wrote it with Gary Owen, who you will spot nod...
Children In Need: I manage a call centre
It was 11 years ago now that I started volunteering to manage a donation centre for BBC Children in Need. On the night of the first appeal I worked on, we had volunteers lined up to answer 125 phone lines, thinking that would be feasible. It wasn't until we saw the list of all the UK's d...
Rev. - Directing the second series
As the director of Rev. it's hugely exciting to see the second series go on air even though I am still very busy finishing the last couple of episodes. Rev. Adam Smallbone (Tom Hollander) jumps over a pew I watched episode one of series two on two TVs at home to get a sense of how al...
Double Agent: The Eddie Chapman Story
Eddie Chapman was a crook, a womaniser, an opportunist and a manipulator. But he was also an unlikely sort of World War II hero. He was motivated by a strange combination of self-interest, hunger for adventure, greed, bravery and patriotism. He was freed from prison and trained as a spy b...
Antiques Roadshow: Telling the forgotten stories of war
TV producers are often asked "Where do you get the best ideas for programmes?" I can honestly say that some of the best I have stumbled upon are at a bar whilst enjoying a pint. Actually I'm not a big drinker, but being the series editor on Antiques Roadshow inevitably means many nights ...
Life's Too Short: Me, Johnny Depp and Ricky Gervais
Of all my career achievements, I am most proud of Life's Too Short. I say this because I have a much closer connection with the series than any project I have worked on before. It was an idea that came from a conversation with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant whom I'd first worked wi...
Britain In A Day: Creating a time capsule for future generations
Some of you may remember Video Nation in the 1990s - a really ground-breaking project where the BBC trained a group of people to use what were then cutting edge camcorders to record their lives on video for a BBC Two series. The result was fascinating, intimate and raw, sometimes funny and ...
Symphony: The fireworks of Johann Stamitz
Directing the first two episodes of the new Symphony series for BBC Four was a real voyage of discovery for me. Although I've been making classical music documentaries for about 15 years now, I always find new music and new stories that I've not encountered before. The big revelation of ...
