It's Monday morning at 8:30am and I am on the Aberystwyth-London Euston train. That takes four-and-a-half hours on a good day, of which there are not many. I travel through spectacularly beautiful scenery on a spectacularly decrepit line. Why do I do it? No spoilers – you can find the answer at the end.
The Christmas before last, you might have expected the most streamed programme in the UK to be The Holiday or Elf. In fact, it was My Lover My Killer, the Netflix series exploring the cases of murder victims who meet tragic ends after relationships turn deadly. It’s not typical festive fare, but testament to the mushrooming market for true crime, via TV – both factual and drama – as well as podcasts and, increasingly, TikTok.
A funny thing happened on the stage of America’s Got Talent in 2022. Tom Graham brought gasps from the audience when, with the aid of a talented performer and a lot of deepfake technology, he brought a vision of Simon Cowell to life, apparently singing a ballad while swinging his arms around. Cowell looked equally bewildered and impressed, before asking: “Is it inappropriate to fall in love with a contestant?”
Many British entertainers have crossed the pond in search of fame and fortune in the uniquely competitive US TV market, but few have been as successful as James Corden and returned to the UK looking so at ease with themselves.
As the allegations against Russell Brand circled the broadcasters gathered at Cambridge, there was particular interest in this session about – as the panel chair, John Gapper, put it with an ironic smile – “the incredibly unlikely situation” in which a media crisis erupts involving a well-known TV figure.
How to launch new content depends on the platform you want to launch it on was the main message from some of the leading practitioners at the cutting edge of content creation and marketing.
During an entertaining and engaging session chaired by Roughcut Television Chief Executive, Ash Atalla, it emerged that word of mouth is a key attribute, especially when it comes to relatable and shareable material.
There was no closer pair of speakers on the stage at Cambridge than Bryan Lourd, co-chairman of Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and his good friend, the double Oscar winner Emma Thompson. This was fitting as the duo discussed the need for creatives and executives to work effectively together for the benefit of all.
The subject of regulation was highlighted in the second session on impartiality, which heard from the executives Angelos Frangopoulos (GB News), Deborah Turness (BBC News) and Jonathan Levy (Sky News).
When he sat down in Cambridge for a discussion about the vexed question of impartiality in television news presenters, Piers Morgan was clearly still licking his wounds from his abrupt departure in 2021 from ITV’s Good Morning Britain. He was quick off the mark, offering a “hypothetical” scenario:
As an industry and medium, television’s strength is its ability to constantly evolve – and the steady, if slow, improvement in disability representation is an important part of that.
Disability consultant and Gogglebox star Simon Minty opened the session by celebrating the progress (as well as noting points of regress), before writer and actor Steph Lacey (Stay Close, Creep) reflected on the work still to be done.
