“I’d never work again. It’s three different people – they’re all in the business and they’re all very powerful, so I’m never going to say – but I love them all dearly.”
Parish and her husband and fellow actor, James Murray, were discussing their careers with ITV News Meridian presenter Sangeeta Bhabra at an RTS Southern event in March.
Both Monty Python’s Flying Circus and W1A – shows produced by the BBC Comedy department five decades apart – featured a gag in which the BBC head of comedy is revealed to be a dour, humourless figure on the brink of clinical depression.
“Yes. And Episodes did a bit of that, as well,” laughs Shane Allen, when the long-running gag about his job is mentioned, thereby establishing that it could not apply to him. The tape of our conversation is fittingly – though, given some of his predecessors, not inevitably – punctuated with his deep laugh.
Few media moguls can count an ice-cream van as part of their empire, but Forces TV's Simon Bucks can
Award-winning comedy W1A is back!
This is the year in which the BBC’s Royal Charter is up for renewal and Head of Values Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville) is tasked with seeing what they do best.
It's an exciting time as the BBC’s Head of Values Ian Fletcher (Hugh Bonneville), formerly Olympic Head of Deliverance, is throwing open the revolving doors of the organisation in this six-part series.
The cameras will be following Fletcher and his team during and post-Charter as the attempt to decipher the BBC’s new mission statement of doing More Of Less, something Head of Output Anna Rampton (Sarah Parish) described succinctly as “putting what we do best front and centre and about identifying better ways of doing less of it more.”
Welsh comedian Griff Rhys Jones will star in the drama, alongside Angela Griffin (Waterloo Road), Matt Di Angelo (Hustle), Kimberly Nixon (Fresh Meat), Con O’Neill (Happy Valley) and Joel Fry (
W1A has enjoyed two successful series gently mocking its BBC paymaster and delighting audiences. But with government pressure on the corporation mounting, Writer/Director John Morton faces some tricky decisions as he prepares a third series.
“It will be harder to pretend that I don’t hope the BBC survives,” Morton told a packed RTS London Centre event, “W1A: the story behind the series”, at the end of January.
Writer/director John Morton explained to a packed London Centre event at the end of January that the show’s forerunner, London Olympics mockumentary Twenty Twelve, was initially poorly received by the BBC.
“Twenty Twelve had a bit of a bumpy start – it wasn’t always liked very much in the BBC,” revealed Morton. “When it went out and did okay the music changed from ‘We don’t think this is very good’ to ‘Can we have more of these wonderful characters?’.”
In London sky-high rent means that young people are looking for an affordable alternative.
Crashing is a comedy from writer and actress Phoebe Waller-Bridges (Broadchurch, Bad Education, The Iron Lady).
It follows the lives of six twenty-something property guardians who live in the abandoned Great London Hospital.
The news was announced in a blog post by Nikki Carr, the channel’s Head of Marketing, as she unveiled the brand’s new visual identity.
“BBC Three's logo hasn't changed in 8 years,” wrote Carr, “so in an age of smartphones we needed a whole new system that fits the digital world, not something analogue just shoehorned into it.”
