Timewasters follows a London jazz quartet who reluctantly time travel to the 1920s, encountering a host of bizarre situations and characters.
Among the band is Nick (Daniel Lawrence Taylor), Jason (Kadiff Kirwan), Lauren (Adelayo Adedayo) and Horace (Samson Kayo).
As leader of one of the world’s largest media and entertainment companies, Burke will share his views on global media trends, how NBCUniversal is capitalising on shifts in consumer, technological and market dynamics, and his expectations for the future.
This year's RTS London Student Awards Ceremony will be hosted by Ore Oduba, the rising star of sports broadcasting and a regular face on the UK’s leading morning news programme, BBC Breakfast,
Tickets are available for the nominees and their university staff, with 20 available on ballot for members to attend and network with the next generation of TV creatives.
Middlesex University students took home the Factual Short-form and Entertainment and Comedy Drama awards. Factual winner The Turning Point by Sanaa Hamdoun told the story of a young Lebanese woman’s determination to break into the film industry, and was “well told and crisply edited”, said the judges.
Alina Ilin and Benjamin Bogdan-Hodgson’s rom-com The Other Half, set in a “gorgeous chocolate box European village” was “very witty”.
RTS London heard how the visual effects were created for The Crown over six series of the landmark Netflix drama – everything from recreating Buckingham Palace to real-life incidents such as the death of Princess Diana in Paris, the Aberfan disaster and the fire at Windsor Castle.
“[As] a historical drama, there are things that we have to… recreate, so we needed visual effects to be able to bring those stories to life,” explained Reece Ewing, VFX (visual effects) producer and post-production supervisor, who joined the drama in series three.
The day before filling a panellist’s chair at the RTS National Event “2024 TV predictions”, in late January, media universe cartographer and analyst Evan Shapiro appeared solo at a sold-out RTS London session.
“Content remains king – that’s not going to change,” he told a rapt Everyman King’s Cross audience. However, he added, there is a misperception “that most television watched on Earth is streaming – it’s just not true”.
The Christmas before last, you might have expected the most streamed programme in the UK to be The Holiday or Elf. In fact, it was My Lover My Killer, the Netflix series exploring the cases of murder victims who meet tragic ends after relationships turn deadly. It’s not typical festive fare, but testament to the mushrooming market for true crime, via TV – both factual and drama – as well as podcasts and, increasingly, TikTok.
Over the past decade Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Year has emerged as one of the channel’s flagship shows – and one in which skill triumphs over exhibitionism. As Sky Arts’ supremo, Phil Edgar-Jones, said: “The show is not all about loud, mad characters but people doing something well.”
He was speaking at an RTS London event, “Portrait Artist of the Year at 10”, where he was joined by members of the production team at independent producer Storyvault Films, and which was chaired by the company’s founder Stuart Prebble, also an executive producer on the show.
Frustrated that he couldn’t get a break in TV, comedian Munya Chawawa took to impersonating celebrity offspring. “I was so desperate… I told a TV agent that I was Idris Elba’s son, which obviously you can’t verify until you see the person. I’d turn up and they’d say to me: ‘Look. If you had 30,000 followers, maybe we’d talk to you. We like your showreel but you’ve got no profile.’”
Chawawa felt his comedy suited TikTok’s “quick bursts of entertainment…. Most videos have one punchline at the end, so my rule was that I was going to have 11 punchlines in 60 seconds.”
It served as a jumping-off point for a look at examples of work by Steven Soderbergh and Ridley Scott shot on smartphones to demonstrate how far these devices can go in the hands of expert cinematographers.
Mulcahy revealed how to get the most out of these powerful ‘entertainment devices’. Tips on framing, sound and storytelling kept the audience enthralled. A full house used the Q&A to ask about squeezing out the most from their iPhones and the best editing software to use. The event was produced by David Thomas and held at the University of Westminster in mid-May.
