Created by James Richardson and brothers Tom and Jez Butterworth, the latest series will return to ancient Britannia where Cait, played by Eleanor Worthington-Cox, is carrying out her prophecy as the ‘Chosen One’ who will save her war-torn land of Druids and Celts from the Romans.
Writers Daniel Fajemisin-Duncan and Marlon Smith discussed their influences and writing relationship at the RTS Student Masterclasses 2019.
Click here to read the session report.
“It all started in sixth form college,” recalled Daniel Fajemisin-Duncan. “We were already friends, having grown up in the same area, and we discovered we were very much into movies; not just watching them but actually wanting to make them – and, specifically, to write them.
“We would write scripts on notepads… and I would exchange my pages with Marlon and we discovered we were ripping off… the same film-makers and doing really bad versions of their movies.”
But the makers of Sky Atlantic’s Britannia starring David Morrissey, Mackenzie Crook and Zoe Wanamaker took a more imaginative and freewheeling approach to their costume creation.
The series is set approximately 2000 years ago when the Romans are attempting to stamp their bloody authority on a tribal land made up of Celts and Druids.
What a difference two years makes. In 2017, Sky was one of the crown jewels of the vast Murdoch media empire, beloved by investors and publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange. Spool forward to 2019 and Sky is part of Comcast, the US cable conglomerate, which successfully outbid Disney to buy Europe’s biggest pay-TV provider for a staggering $39bn.
Musician and comedian Tim Minchin writes and stars in Upright, a series about the unlikely friendship forged by two misfits in the middle of the Australian Outback.
Upright follows Lucky Flynn (Minchin), a self-destructive yet talented pianist struggling to make ends meet. On discovering that his mother has only days left to live, the estranged son embarks on a 4000km journey across Australia, from Sydney to Perth, armed only with his battered but beloved upright piano.
I Hate Suzie follows Suzie Pickles (Piper), a celebrity whose career is put in jeopardy when she becomes the victim of a hacking scandal that causes a compromising photo of herself to be leaked.
The eight-part series follows Suzie’s excruciating journey to hold her life together alongside her best friend and manager Naomi (Farzad), as she struggles to keep her career afloat and her marriage to her husband, Cob (Ings), begins to hang by a thread.
Shocking. Bleak. Controversial. Devastatingly brilliant. All these descriptions are true of HBO and Sky’s five-part retelling of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The HBO and Sky series has been one of the most talked-about dramas of the year so far, lauded by critics and helping to confirm the current golden age of TV.
At times, the events depicted in the programme were so incredible that many viewers have questioned what was real and what is made up.
Based on the famous London heist which took place in April 2015, Hatton Garden follows Brian Reader (Kenneth Cranham) as he leads a gang of ageing thieves organising the theft of a lifetime.
