Gentleman Jack wowed critics and audiences alike when it aired on BBC One earlier this year. This was a Sunday-night period drama with a difference – based on the diaries of early 19th-century landowner, industrialist and traveller Anne Lister, it revealed a woman determined to explore her lesbian sexuality.
“We’ve seen big audience demands for shows on iPlayer after their initial TV release. You can’t judge numbers on the overnights anymore. We don’t aim for a focused demographic. It has to appeal to the whole audience and there needs to be a big sense of purpose that shines through,” added Holland, who was interviewed by RTS West of England Chair Lynn Barlow at the Everyman Cinema in Bristol.
Wainwright was joined on stage by series consultant Anne Choma and folk duo O’Hooley & Tidow, the creators of the drama’s closing song, who also played a live set.
Four years in the making, the film has been described as “Gravity meets Touching the Void – 100 metres underwater” and tells the story of a commercial diver, Chris Lemons, who is stranded on the seabed with five minutes of oxygen left – but no chance of rescue for more than half an hour.
David Nath – the co-founder of Story Films – picked up the Director award, while Joe Carey won the Editing prize. Nath’s script for the programme was taken verbatim from the police interview recordings of Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer who shot a fleeing burglar dead in 1999. The judges described it as a “truly exciting piece of television, so well done technically and very well cast”.
The two media lawyers looked at the contractual, legal and regulatory issues that can crop up in access docs – films that that require access to institutions such as hospitals or communities – including data protection, defamation and advice on drafting access agreements.
They also tackled other thorny issues such as the police requesting rushes and contributors withdrawing consent.
