BBC

From writer, actor and comedian Liam Williams, Ladhood explores the highs and lows of teenage life.

Williams explores the roots and realities of modern-day masculinity by looking at his own memories of a misspent adolescence.   

Series two will follow a teenage Williams (Oscar Kennedy), with his best mates Ralph (Samuel Bottomley), Addy (Aquib Khan) and Craggy (Shaun Thomas), tackle the fun and hardships of being a teenager in a Leeds suburb in the early noughties. 

A year ago, Normal People became the huge TV hit of the first lockdown, changing the lives of its young stars, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal, overnight.

The adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel was the BBC’s most-streamed series of last year, clocking up almost 63 million views on iPlayer in the eight months following its April launch.

In his eyes, the mostly right wing governments responsible for the closures - and their supporters - were making justifications that lacked any historical context, and he felt obliged to make a correction. “They were saying things like ‘we don’t want them, it’s their fault that their country’s like that, why should they come over here with their attitude?’,” he recalls.

“I wanted to show that we – America, Europe, Britain – are meddling. Our fingerprints are all over the origins of the crisis, and therefore we owe some responsibility to the refugees that are fleeing.”

The initiative will offer four participants the chance to produce and direct their first long form documentary for BBC Three, with the hope of finding and showcasing the next generation of documentary makers.

Many successful, award-winning documentaries have been created as a result of the initiative, including Manchester Bomb: Our Story, Abused by my Girlfriend, Why Dad Killed Mum: My Family’s Secret, and Defending Digga D.

“For me, it’s a real issue,” she explains, “because I spend so much time with guests before I interview them making them feel comfortable, going through their story, just letting them know I’ll be there to look after them.”

Such compassion comes as no surprise from a broadcaster who has long used her platform to both sensitively question victims of injustice and forensically interrogate those responsible.

Each hour of television produced leaves a ­carbon footprint of 9.2 tonnes, which is the equivalent of two households’ annual consumption. This startling figure is the average across all genres – quadruple it for drama.

That was the top line given by Roser Canela Mas of Albert, the pan-industry body set up to help make television production sustainable, at an RTS panel discussion, “Producing sustainable TV – myth or reality?”.

I think it’s fair to say that reporting for Newsround is a job like no other in journalism. I know John Craven and all those who’ve followed in his footsteps would agree. This week alone, I’ve gone from explaining the situation in Myanmar to revealing which celebrity was behind the sausage costume on ITV’s The Masked Singer. In case you were wondering, it was Joss Stone… all in a day’s work for a Newsround presenter.

There is already something of a buzz around Richard Sharp, the new BBC Chair, and about what he and Director-­General Tim Davie might achieve together as they navigate the corporation towards what we all hope is a post-Covid world.

Inevitably, not everyone at the BBC was pleased that another money man was chosen as successor to Sir David Clementi – himself a former deputy governor of the Bank of England. But many across the TV sector were relieved that a more controversial candidate was not appointed.