With Edith Warton’s final unfinished novel as it’s source material, The Buccaneers follows a group of new money American girls sent by their guardians to debut in London society. The culture clash is evident in all the ways you’d expect, the Americans are considered inelegant, until some of the Brits realise a stiff upper lip isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
In 2024, Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett) is a journalist at the height of her career – even receiving a coveted Royal Television Society Journalism award – before the novelisation of her past arrives and her achievements crumble around her.
The mysterious novel’s author is ‘unknown,’ but knows Ravenscroft’s most valuable secrets. A series of 2001 flashbacks, with Leila George (Mortal Engines) playing the young Ravenscroft, reveal a long-past relationship with a tragic end for her lover Jonathan (Louis Partridge, Enola Holmes).
Beside the Mighty Boosh star and Bake Off presenter, Bonneville (Downton Abbey) will play Turpin’s arch-nemesis, the self-appointed “thief-taker”, otherwise known as Jonathan Wilde.
When Turpin is appointed the unwilling leader of a group of bandits, he is sent on a bizarre journey of strange adventures. Turpin’s highway robbery success is mainly due to his good hair and charisma, but there is only so far this can get him when riding the rollercoaster of a life of crime and being chased by a “thief-taker.”
From the mind of Vera creator Paul Rutman comes Criminal Record, a stern detective drama focusing on the effects of institutional errors, centring around an old ‘solved’ murder case.
I’m writing and I love it. It started in lockdown. I was missing production, and someone suggested I write something to create a world I could control. I only wish I’d discovered it sooner. But maybe it’s only now that I feel there’s a lot of things that I want to say.
I’m working on a screenplay that is essentially my own coming-of-age story. One of the best moments in my career was when the BFI said it would fund development of the script. Now I must deliver it.
Watch all the highlights from the RTS Craft & Design Awards 2023, presented by Eddie Kadi and sponsored by Apple TV+.
The awards took place on Monday 4 December at the London Hilton on Park Lane.
Two statistics released in recent months have made people sit up and pay attention to the burgeoning progress made by the streaming service Apple TV+. In May, the Jason Sudeikis-fronted football comedy drama, Ted Lasso, became the first Apple show to feature in Barb’s SVoD average UK monthly audience top 20.
It came in at number 18, with around 963,000 viewers – well below the most-watched (Netflix’s Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, seen by around 3 million) but a milestone nonetheless.
Having started his career in stand-up comedy before moving into screenwriting, his television career levelled up when he started working with legendary Scottish satirist Armando Iannucci in the mid-noughties. This collaboration led to a spot in the writers' room on Iannucci's seminal political comedy The Thick of It, where Smith also ended up on screen as Phil, the geeky and pompous special adviser.
