RTS London

Can Perfect Curve save the Beeb?

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.

Lorraine Heggessey: Crises never go away

Lorraine Heggessey at the RTS London Christmas Lecture 2015

Top Gear was “an accident waiting to happen”, said Lorraine Heggessey, who told the audience enjoying her RTS London Christmas Lecture that she would have dealt with the programme’s presenter, Jeremy Clarkson, more quickly.

“Jeremy is a bit like a spoiled toddler,” she said. He had “crossed the line several times with quite racist remarks and got away with it”, added the former BBC and TalkbackThames executive.

Will people be manipulated by machines in future?

Renowned futurist David Wood has warned against a world in which “technology runs out of control” and viewers and consumers are “manipulated” by machines.

Wood was speaking on the “Accelerating digital revolution” at a special members-only London Centre event, hosted at IBC, in October.

The futurist, he explained, “anticipates a set of possible futures, including things that could go very badly [wrong], but, equally, is looking for opportunities”. Before embarking on a career as a technological seer, Wood was a pioneer of the smartphone industry.

RTS Conferences

Events in television don't get much bigger than the RTS Cambridge Convention and the RTS London Conference. Held on alternate years, each event brings together the senior leaders and CEOs from the global TV industry for discussion and debate, setting the agenda for the future media year. 

 

RTS Cambridge Convention

 

Every two years the most recognisable faces, influential names and powerful voices of television converge for three days of stimulating talks, chaired by one of the UK's main broadcasters. 

Memories of a world at war

Four years in the making and, at the time, the UK’s most expensive series, The World at War remains TV’s greatest documentary.  

 

Knitted together by Laurence Olivier’s narration and a Carl Davis score, the programme movingly tells the story of the Second World War using eyewitness accounts and interviews with important figures, including Albert Speer and Lord Mountbatten.  

 

Improv adds realism to cop show

Channel 5 is renowned neither for its homegrown drama nor for attracting critical praise, but Suspects gives it both. The cop show has notched up three series since its TV debut in February 2014 and, at the end of April, it was the subject of an RTS London event at ITV’s London Studios.