Calling it 'the black Bridget Jones', Carty-Williams knew Queenie wasn't going to be a small book. “I [expected] it to be at the scale of Bridget Jones, that was my expectation and my statement of intent."
The novel tells the raw and unflinching story of 25-year-old British Jamaican Queenie, who is trying to get through a difficult year. Carty-Williams calls it a “modern messy story for black women.”
The role of Connell Waldron was his first acting credit outside of drama school and the buzz around his performance is still continuing over a year later.
“To still be in the conversation is really exciting and gratifying,” says Mescal, who was nominated for an RTS Award for his role in the hit series.
Mescal’s meteoric rise to stardom at the start of a global pandemic is far from the ‘conventional’ way to break into the industry.
“I saw Netflix, I saw Gillian Anderson and Asa Butterfield and I just thought, there’s no way I’m going to get it,” laughed Gatwa.
He was used to going for auditions that wanted big names, so joining Sex Education - where for most of the cast it was their big break - he thought it was great how new talent was being championed.
“It’s Emma Mackie’s first job,” said Gatwa, “one of the big plus sides of [streamers] like Netflix is there’s so much work being created now, there’s a whole bunch of actors who now have opportunities that weren’t around before.”
Kerkour has been working as an actor for almost 20 years and at six foot four he is used to playing the “killer” on screen, after roles in Strike Back and Nightflyers.
However, in Home he plays a loveable gentle refugee from Syria, who is looking to build a new life in the UK.
“As an Arab on screen I’d spent most of my life either killing people or being killed,” said Kerkour, “then I get this script about a refugee in the UK and he’s humanised.”
It was spring 2014. Actor David Gyasi had just landed his first lead role, playing special agent Marcus “Ash” Ashton in the action-packed BBC One drama series The Interceptor.
Not many people know what a dubbing mixer is.
David Drake wants to change that, having worked on shows like Fleabag, The Bay and The End of the F***ing World.
There are a few key roles in a sound team: the dialogue editor effects editor, foley artist, composer and dubbing mixer.
“A dubbing mixer is someone who takes all those elements, the dialogue, effects, music, then mixes, processes and treats them so you end up with a finished soundtrack,” Drake explains.
Veteran arts programme The South Bank Show has celebrated the best of TV drama from its earliest days. In the very first series it aired a film on Dennis Potter. Since then, Andrew Davies, Paul Abbott, Jimmy McGovern and Sally Wainwright have all featured.
Deborah Turness greets me in the top-floor café of NBCUniversal’s UK HQ, which looks out over London’s rooftops. This is appropriate as NBC News took a 25% stake in Euronews in February in order to “change the landscape of international news”, as Turness’s boss, Andrew Lack, put it.
He said that, for years, NBC News had “wanted to establish a global reach”, and Turness was moving from being President of NBC News to do just that – to become the first President of NBC News International and oversee content for the new Euronews NBC.
The project puts the broadcaster live at 250 declarations across the country, from Witney to the Western Isles, and from Hastings to Hartlepool.
Sky 250 builds on Sky’s world record-breaking coverage of the 2015 election, which put them at 150 declarations. That project took over a year to organise, this time they had just seven weeks to do it all again – but bigger.
Overseeing the organisation of the Sky 250 project is Valerie Hamill, who has been tasked with recruiting over 300 personnel, organising the tech and liaising with 150 count locations.
“I remember on the day of the [Trump] election thinking there is not a news organisation, or periodical that won’t be covering this on the front page.”
The RTS Network Presenter of the Year nominee has spent the year hot-footing it across America in pursuit of the new president.
“I didn’t call it for Trump,” she confesses. “I started in Texas following Ted Cruz. I went down to Florida, I followed Marco Rubio. I knew each of the candidates before we got to Trump.”
