Last day of the sound mix for The Regime, starring Kate Winslet as the tyrannical leader of a fictional European country. Great fun to sit in a room full of talented people discussing how this made-up country should sound.
We spend a lot of time calculating the right levels for the off-screen, unseen war. A deluge of helicopters is silenced as we decide the rebel army can’t be that well-equipped.
Home from school run at 8:45am to missed calls from my producer asking me to go to Rotherham to interview a man who is living on a diet of soup and painkillers after losing his teeth 18 months ago.
I overslept the beginning of the invasion on 24 February. The evening before, I was at the cinema alone: my nervous friend had declined, saying, “Let’s meet after the war!” Around midnight, four hours before the attack, I finished writing a story about Hollywood movie Dog, starring Channing Tatum, which was due to be released in Ukraine.
Isn’t it odd how quickly time goes sometimes? Apparently, I have been at Channel 5 for over a year – which I can’t get my head around. When I first met the boss, Ben Frow, he told me he wanted me to anchor the news but also make loads of other programmes for them and he has been true to his word.
The art of relaxation has always eluded me, which is probably why, in my plural life, chairing three boards and sitting on another three makes my diary resemble a detailed train timetable. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
I have been looking forward to the CEO meeting of the Women’s Super League and Championship Clubs. It’s a chance to have a constructive, focused dialogue outside the board about our mission to be the most competitive and innovative leagues in the world.
I’ve got two films coming out this year so it’s going to look as if I’m really busy. In fact, one of them was written in 2006 and the other in 2009. Years of frustration and fiddling are now behind me.
At the end of last year, I was working frantically on a film and my new book. I finished the book, and the film was placed in a medically induced development coma. I know it will be woken from sleep any day but, for now, for the first time ever, I could just, you know, write. I could write that thing that I have always wanted to write. Face the blank page at last.
Being the editor of a national newsroom is one of the most fun and most challenging jobs around. And the run-up to Christmas heightens it all. After months of relentless agenda-shaping stories, we’ve finally returned to what feels like more normal times for news. A breakthrough drug for Alzheimer’s gives us the chance of a more positive lead on the programme – we jump on it.
One of the best things about being the political editor of a rolling 24-hour news channel is breaking news. Nothing feels as vital or as exhilarating as a big political moment, be it a knife-edge vote or the election of a new party leader, and there’s no greater privilege than being the person to relay that news to viewers and dissect what it means.
In April, I was doing some online research. “Boil the ocean”, “jump the shark”, “blue ocean market”, I read. What are they talking about? Are they advocating moving offshore, I wondered? I was preparing to become CEO of Cardiff Productions, taking sole charge of the indie I co-founded in 2020, and wondering whether I should immerse myself in business books. So, I did what any telly person would do, and jumped on Google.
It’s a burning hot Friday in August, and on a small islet in the Evros river that divides Greece from Turkey, a nine-year-old girl called Aya is dying of a scorpion sting. Her five-year-old sister, Maria, has already died.
Why is no doctor treating them? Because they are Syrian refugees, kicked like a football back and forth between the two countries. “No one hears us. No one wants us,” weeps 27-year-old Baida al Saleh, in a WhatsApp voice message she sends to Channel 4 News.
