Taking any script and bringing the story to life on screen is no easy feat, and when the story is based on the most famous family in the world, the task carries an elevated sense of responsibility.
“We’re not just recreating history,” said The Crown's production designer Martin Childs.
“It’s our own version of the world – it’s not a documentary. We try and find the mood and tone of our version of it,” added costume designer Jane Petrie.
Part royal soap, part British political lesson, The Crown is all first-rate drama. To mark the release of its second season on Netflix, a packed RTS pre-Christmas event at the House of Commons heard creator and writer Peter Morgan, executive producer Suzanne Mackie and director Philippa Lowthorpe discuss how they made the award-winning series.
Season 2 of The Crown, produced by UK indie Left Bank Pictures, begins with the Suez crisis in 1956 and ends with the Profumo affair in 1963.
The debate over women working in television has come a long way since 1986 when Coronation Street was an all-male cabal. In those days, all the female characters were written by men. Yet, as recently as 2015, when Red Productions unveiled the latest run of ITV’s trail-blazing cop show Scott and Bailey, the response of male journalists could be relentlessly sexist, revealed actor Lesley Sharp.
The eight-part series, written by The Night Manager’s David Farr, will portray the epic story of a battle between mortals and gods – and the turbulent romance which sparks the Trojan War.
Told from the perspective of the Trojan family at the heart of the siege, Troy: Fall of a City follows the love affair between Queen Helen and Prince Paris. The romance and subsequent elopement triggers a war between the Trojans and the Greeks as Helen’s jilted husband King Menelaus seeks to get his wife back.
It’s become an old saying now, but if you can make a living doing what you love, then you’ll never have to work a day in your life. That has certainly been what it’s felt like for me. The hardest thing to deal with is what happens when you're not able to work, and you either have to take another job or just be frustrated and wait. There’s all sorts of disappointments waiting for you, and I think the measure of professionalism in our career is how you handle disappointments, not how you handle success.
Ardal O’Hanlon will be back in 2019 as happy-go-lucky detective DI Mooney in the programme, currently airing its seventh series on BBC One.
O’Hanlon joined the show in 2017, replacing Kris Marshall who had played DI Humphrey Goodman for three series.
Set on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint-Marie, DI Mooney heads up a team of detectives solving murder mysteries among the idyllic beaches and lush forests of the Caribbean.
The powerful new series is set against the run-up to the 2016 US Presidential election, focusing on the relationship between China and the US and several issues that affect society today.
An American photojournalist tries to discover the truth behind the iconic image that launched his career nearly 30 years previously.
The famous image is of a man facing down a tank in China’s Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Years later, the journalist seeks out the Chinese man in the photo following accusations of fake news.
That was the conclusion of an engaging RTS debate, Is Older the New Younger?, which heard from an all-female panel chaired by Channel 4 News’s Social Affairs Editor, Jackie Long.
Screenwriter Key Mellor said that with people like Charlotte Moore at the BBC (director of content) and Polly Hill at ITV (head of drama) occupying powerful jobs TV was less dominated by men that it once was.
