Television Magazine

Or ,“That will never work!” – before debating with your household exactly how you’d catapult a shoe into a bath using a home-made contraption.

Taskmaster has returned to our screens on its new home, Channel 4, bringing some much-needed joy to Thursday evenings, with a new companion, Taskmaster: The Podcast.

Hosted by series nine Taskmaster champion Ed Gamble, the weekly podcast welcomes past and present contestants to unpack the most recent programme and relive some iconic Taskmaster moments.

A question – who wrote: “There are three structural things that the right needs to happen in terms of communications... 1) the undermining of the BBC’s credibility; 2) the creation of a Fox News equivalent / talk radio shows / bloggers, etc, to shift the centre of gravity; 3) the end of the ban on TV political advertising”?

In April, Haworth was the first TV journalist to interview Captain Tom Moore, the Second World War veteran who walked around his garden to raise money for the NHS.

“We were right at the beginning of the lockdown and there was really grim news coming out about the virus,” she recalled. “At Anglia, we were always trying to find good news stories to lift the audience’s spirits – [Captain Tom] was just perfect.

“It’s really draining reporting on the pandemic because you’re living and breathing it, so it was really nice to have [a positive story] to report.”

In 2010, Tracey Scoffield, co-founder of Turbine Studios and executive producer of the Emmy-winning movie The Gathering Storm, received an email that would change not only the course of her next 10 years, but the boundaries of television drama.

It was from Steve McQueen’s agent. At the time, the London-born director had just made a name for himself with his debut feature film, Hunger, the story of Bobby Sands and the IRA hunger strikes.

RTS Craft Skills Masterclasses

The craft masterclasses demonstrated television’s huge variety of creative roles. The cinematography session offered two experts from opposite ends of the shooting spectrum. Georgina Kiedrowski is frequently embedded with the cast on reality shows such as Channel 4’s The Island with Bear Grylls. “I have to concen­trate on the editorial as well as [the shooting],” said the self-shooting producer.

To “intervene earlier and prevent folks from getting sick before they do” is the grand hope of Dr Alan Karthikesalingam, a surgeon scientist and research lead at Google Health UK. His aspirational vision “may take a long time”, he conceded.

As part of the RTS Digital Convention 2020, he was in conversation with Professor Lord (Ara) Darzi, President of the British Science Association. The two surgeons quickly set the tone as they discussed the difficulties confronting them during the pandemic.

Carolyn McCall offered a robust defence of public service broadcasting during the course of a revealing and wide-ranging interview at the RTS Digital Convention 2020. ITV’s CEO – who was probed by ITV News London and Loose Women presenter Charlene White – also discussed the Black Lives Matter movement, BritBox, ITV’s digital strategy and its response to the corona­virus epidemic.

McCall said that the first Covid-19 lockdown had “brought home to a lot of people” the importance of having “a trusted [TV] source, [with no] disinformation”.

This is the fourth version of this piece that I’ve written. I scrapped the previous three as “the news” made them immediately out of date. I’m going to plough on with this one, although I fear that, by the time it is published, it will be entirely irrele­vant thanks to world events, but hey ho. Like everyone, I’m resigned to the fact that there’s no way of predicting anything this year…

In September, when dance troupe Diversity took to the stage for prime-time TV’s most controversial four minutes of 2020, one woman was watching especially intently – Ade Rawcliffe, ITV’s freshly promoted group director of diversity and inclusion.

“I was told they were going to do the dance. I thought it was incredibly moving, a wonderful creative expression,” she says of the group’s routine inspired by some of the year’s seminal events, not least the global Black Lives Matter protests.

Fifty years ago, the BBC almost made a big mistake – one that would have changed the course of broadcasting history. After trying out a new recruit, head of television talks Mary Adams decided that her discovery had much to recommend him but, frankly, lacked the bland good looks considered necessary for the presenter’s art.

“David Attenborough is intelligent and promising and may well be producer material, but he is not to be used again as an interviewer. His teeth are too big,” ordered Adams.