RTS London

Frustrated that he couldn’t get a break in TV, comedian Munya Chawawa took to impersonating celebrity offspring. “I was so desperate… I told a TV agent that I was Idris Elba’s son, which obviously you can’t verify until you see the person. I’d turn up and they’d say to me: ‘Look. If you had 30,000 followers, maybe we’d talk to you. We like your showreel but you’ve got no profile.’”

Chawawa felt his comedy suited TikTok’s “quick bursts of entertainment…. Most videos have one punchline at the end, so my rule was that I was going to have 11 punchlines in 60 seconds.”

It served as a jumping-off point for a look at examples of work by Steven Soderbergh and Ridley Scott shot on smartphones to demonstrate how far these devices can go in the hands of expert cinematographers.

Mulcahy revealed how to get the most out of these powerful ‘entertainment devices’. Tips on framing, sound and storytelling kept the audience enthralled. A full house used the Q&A to ask about squeezing out the most from their iPhones and the best editing software to use. The event was produced by David Thomas and held at the University of Westminster in mid-May.

An RTS London event last month heard that the BBC TV archive – the largest broadcast archive in the world – contains more than half a million unique programmes and that 85% have been digitised.

Claire Coss, head of product, library and curatorial services, BBC Archives Technology & Services, is based at the BBC Archive Centre in Perivale, west London. She explained that for many years BBC archive teams have helped content-makers “to reuse and reimagine the content we hold”.

Earlier this year, a joint bid from two Northern Ireland indies – Tern TV Belfast and Green Inc – won the tender to produce 24 episodes a year of Sunday Morning Live, BBC One’s ethical and religious current affairs show. 

The show is broadcast live from a London studio, using producers and directors in Glasgow, Manchester and Sheffield, but is produced and edited in Holywood, Northern Ireland. It sounds complicated but it works, as a recent joint RTS London/Yorkshire event discovered. 

Lucy Tallon, head of mental health and wellbeing at The Film and TV Charity, which organised the October event with RTS London, said one in seven people in the UK have some form of nuerodiversity. These are people, such as those with dyslexia and on the autism spectrum, whose “brains learn and function differently to a neurotypical person”.

The resilience and ingenuity of broadcasters and producers as they adapted their children’s content to lockdown was emphasised at a joint RTS London and Children’s Media Foundation (CMF) event, “Kids, Covid and content”, in October.

Louise Bucknole, VP of programming for kids at ViacomCBS Networks International UK & Ireland, recalled how Covid-19 had forced producers to make Channel 5’s pre-school service Milkshake! virtually.

Iuzzolino, who introduced an RTS London event in October, said: “It is one of the very few shows I’ve bought off-script.” In Witch Hunt, an accountant (Ida Waage, played by Westworld actor Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) blows the whistle on corruption, but finds herself subjected to harassment and false accusations.

Series creators and writers Anna Bache-Wiig and Siv Rajendram Eliassen were inspired by the true story of a whistleblower in Norway.

During a wide-ranging talk on the pioneering early years of BBC outside broadcasts, former ITV head of technology and RTS Fellow Norman Green showed what is believed to be the only surviving footage of the London 1948 television broadcasts.

To cover the first post-war Olympics, “the BBC built the first broadcasting centre for radio and television”, said Green. Based in the Palace of Arts at Wembley, it housed 16 studios, two TV control rooms, 350 engineers, 200 reporters and 200 support staff.