'It’s easy to just take the piss out of showbusiness. In many ways, it’s laughable: we’re not saving lives, it’s a distraction, we’re like shadow puppets on a cave wall,” says Jack Davenport (This Life, Coupling), star of Ten Percent. “But John Morton’s evocation of the world of showbusiness in the UK in the year 2022 shows tenderness. These are real people with real vulnerabilities.”
It's an exciting time as the BBC’s Head of Values Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville), formerly Olympic Head of Deliverance, is throwing open the revolving doors of the organisation in this six-part series.
The cameras will be following Fletcher and his team during and post-Charter as the attempt to decipher the BBC’s new mission statement of doing More Of Less, something Head of Output Anna Rampton (Sarah Parish) described succinctly as “putting what we do best front and centre and about identifying better ways of doing less of it more.”
W1A has enjoyed two successful series gently mocking its BBC paymaster and delighting audiences. But with government pressure on the corporation mounting, Writer/Director John Morton faces some tricky decisions as he prepares a third series.
“It will be harder to pretend that I don’t hope the BBC survives,” Morton told a packed RTS London Centre event, “W1A: the story behind the series”, at the end of January.
Writer/director John Morton explained to a packed London Centre event at the end of January that the show’s forerunner, London Olympics mockumentary Twenty Twelve, was initially poorly received by the BBC.
“Twenty Twelve had a bit of a bumpy start – it wasn’t always liked very much in the BBC,” revealed Morton. “When it went out and did okay the music changed from ‘We don’t think this is very good’ to ‘Can we have more of these wonderful characters?’.”
