The latest RTS Futures Careers Fair took an absorbing behind-the-scenes look at the Disney+ adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s riotous bonkbuster Rivals. Writer and executive producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins opened the lid on the hit series for a packed room of young talent among the 1,800-plus people who registered for the fair. Making TV can rarely have felt such fun.

“I’ve wanted to put Jilly Cooper on the television for years and everyone laughed at me,” he recalled. Setting up his own production company, Happy Prince, in 2019, gave him the opportunity. He wrote a pilot script and soon found himself in a bidding war.

Treadwell-Collins told the audience: “You wouldn’t think Jilly Cooper and Disney would go together, but they’ve been the most amazing home for us. They allowed us to be naughty and poke [fun] at Britishness and class.”

Attitudes to sex have changed since Rivals was published in 1988, as the experience in the writers room showed. “We talked about the themes of the book,” said Treadwell-Collins. “There was this moment where a female writer in her early 20s and a writer in her 50s talked about sex. The younger writer said: ‘You can’t say you want to be thrown up against a wall and shagged.’ The older writer went: ‘I do and I did.’ That was really useful.”

Cooper gave her backing to the show – and notes on the script. Two episodes were written by another of the series’ executive producers, Laura Wade, also present on the Rivals panel.

Catriona Chandler played the high-spirited teenager Caitlin O’Hara in a pitch-perfect posh accent, far from her native Scouse. Caitlin, she said, “represents the youth of the 80s” and is “obsessed with the idea of sex. Jilly is unapologetic about younger people being obsessed by sex… Caitlin goes on and on about orgasms.”

Rivals boasted a superlative ensemble cast, notably David Tennant, Alex Hassell, Katherine Parkinson, Danny Dyer, Nafessa Williams, Aidan Turner and Victoria Smurfit. Lead director, Elliot Hegarty, said: “It’s a cliché, but if you cast it right, that’s 90% of your job as a director done. And it’s a cliché because it’s true.”

Treadwell-Collins added: “We had a ‘No wanker policy’. I’ve always said: ‘You can be a nice person, work hard and make great telly.’ One reason the show has been such a hit is that you can feel the joy and the love through the screen. It’s important in this industry not to reward bad behaviour, and we didn’t.”

A session on BBC soap EastEnders, which celebrated its 40th birthday last month, offered a fascinating insight into the highly-tuned machine that produces more than 100 hours of TV a year. The panel from BBC Studios Scripted explained why the soap – which employs 130 staff and each year processes more than 30,000 days of freelance bookings – is the ultimate training ground for new talent.

Training Executive Kris Green said: “Soap provides end-to-end training opportunities, from story to script, production to post-production. They’re the unsung universities of our industry. The high volume of work and fast-paced environment sets the foundations for a solid career. If you can do soap, you can do anything.”

The remaining two sessions were put on by the careers fair sponsors: “Kickstart your unscripted TV career” with National Film and Television School Head of Television Entertainment Simon Broadley; and “The future of sports 

TV: innovation and sustainability in broadcast production” with IMG Studios. Broadley said: “However competitive [the industry] is, somebody’s got to do this stuff. So if you’re passionate and motivated, just go for it. You’ll find a way – talent will out.”

He was joined on the stage by NFTS alumnus and RTS Student Television Awards winner James Lacy, who graduated in 2023 and has just completed a five-month stint as a researcher on Strictly Come Dancing.

The sustainability session explored IMG Studios’ approach to reducing the carbon footprint of live sport productions, including the use of remote production and green hydrogen.

The careers fair also featured an all-day CV clinic and career advice area where attendees could get their CVs tweaked by industry professionals and receive more general advice. Some 40 leading broadcasters, indies and TV organisations exhibited, many attracting long queues of young people keen to get the inside track on a career in the industry.

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Unrivalled advice

Dominic Treadwell-Collins, who executive-produced EastEnders and the RTS award-winning A Very English Scandal about the fall of politician Jeremy Thorpe, advised the careers fair audience: ‘Keep asking questions. At first in this industry, I tried to bluff about knowing things, but you don’t learn that way. Be honest.

‘I didn’t know for years what I was going to do… I thought I wanted to be an actor. I remember coming out of a school play and saying: “Mum, was I good?” She went: “No, that boy there was good.” And it turned out to be Ben Cumberbatch! It took me a while to work out what I was best at and I learned that from lots of different people. So … ask questions.’

Laura Wade started writing plays when she was four –  ‘which my parents will tell you about in therapy, [discussing] the trauma of having to watch my early work.

‘I studied drama at Bristol University and carried on writing and sending off scripts; working in offices during the day and writing at the weekend and in the evenings. [I was] cranking out plays, trying to work out my voice.

‘I went on the Royal Court Young Writers’ Programme, which was amazing and probably more useful than my degree, and I [built] a theatre career. When you start having some success as a playwright, TV people come knocking.’

She adapted her play Posh for film as The Riot Club, and enjoyed working with Treadwell-Collins on a project that, as so often in TV, failed to come to fruition. ‘When Rivals came up, it was a no-brainer.’  Wade advised: ‘Write. People spend a lot of time talking about writing or having a great idea and then talking themselves out of it – just start writing and get it down.’ 

 

Elliot Hegarty did a politics degree but spent much of his time at university obsessing about film and starting a film-making society. He said: ‘I started making short films, then worked in camera departments and went to film school. I made a low-budget movie set in a pub [County Kilburn] – I ripped off a film called Clerks. It did all right and set me off, and I got work in [TV] comedy.’ Recently he directed Ted Lasso and Cheaters.

He advised: ‘Work harder than the person next to you. Absorb everything, write loads. Now that you can [shoot] on your phone and edit on your laptop, you’ve got no excuses.’