Speaking to the RTS he said: “It meant that people came to me with their ideas. Steve Coogan came to me with Philomena (Coogan and Pope’s screenplay was nominated for an Oscar and won best screenplay at the Venice Film Festival).
“Success gets you meetings, but it still doesn’t get something past the finishing line if it’s not good enough…It also means you can be more ambitious and more expansive.”
The factual drama focuses on the families of the victims of serial killer and rapist Stephen Port (Stephen Merchant), and their fight to find the truth about what happened to Anthony Walgate, Gabriel Kovari, Daniel Whitworth and Jack Taylor.
Now a widely criticised police investigation, the series will shed new light on the case and tell the story from the perspective of the victims’ families including Anthony Walgate’s mother Sarah Sak (Sheridan Smith) and Jack Taylor’s sister Donna Taylor (Jaime Winstone).
Based on Juckes’s real-life experiences, Care follows Jenny (Smith) a single mother of two, raising her children with the help of her widowed mother Mary (Steadman). When Mary suffers a devastating stroke and develops dementia, Jenny’s world falls apart, and everything changes for her and her sister Claire (Keenan). Torn between caring for her mother and following her own path, Jenny soon discovers that there could be another option, but it’s one she’ll have to fight for.
Clean Break follows the story of single mother and cleaning lady Sam (Sheridan Smith), who becomes caught up in the dangerous world of insider trading.
The drama focuses on the struggles of the working class protagonist leading a dual life in online gambling whilst acting as devoted mother fighting for custody of her two daughters.
She soon realises she has access to powerful stock market information and sees it as her opportunity to get her life back.
The two-part drama is made by ITV studios and comes from the same team that created the critically acclaimed drama Appropriate Adult which dramatised the case of serial killers Fred and Rose West.
The drama looks behind the headlines surrounding the disappearance of nine-year-old Yorkshire schoolgirl Shannon Matthews in 2008.
Reece Shearsmith has announced that a third series of Inside No 9 is in the pipeline. The dark BBC anthology series features self-contained stories which each take place in a location at number 9. Each episode features a different cast alongside one or both of the writers Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, the duo who jointly won Best Comedy Performance at this year’s RTS Programme Awards.
On 18 September 2016, Steve November has a problem. At 9:00pm that night, the slot arrives in ITV’s schedule that would normally be filled by the season premiere of Downton Abbey.
As Director of Drama for the ITV network, November has to find a replacement – Downton is ending, with the last ever episode to air this coming Christmas Day. And, given Downton’s blockbuster ratings performance, it’s going to be a fiendishly difficult act to follow.
