Disney+

Indies at the November event included Plimsoll Productions and Offspring Films, alongside ITV News West Country and post-production facilities Doghouse, Gorilla and Films at 59, which brought along camera kit for students to try out.

Sessions covered a host of topics, including directing skills with Ilaira Mallalieu (Queens, Disney+) discussing how to craft a story on location and develop narrative arcs, and film-maker Michael Jenkins talking about working with actors.

Was television really like that in the 1980s? That was the question from a thirtysomething producer, asked a little enviously perhaps, after seeing Rivals. “All that sex, drinking and smoking?” Yes, it absolutely was.

The raunchy Disney+ series is based faithfully on Jilly Cooper’s 1988 “bonkbuster”, one of the Rutshire Chronicles, set in a county inspired by the Cotswolds. Life here is dominated by rutting, closely followed by smoking, drinking and feuding.

The announcement came in the form of an Instagram reel of scenes and quotes from the first series. According to Alex Hassell's local lothario and MP Rupert Campbell-Black, the second helping is "guaranteed to be even more pleasurable." 

Dominic Treadwell-Collins and Laura Wade led the writers' room who adapted the first half of Jilly Cooper's 'bonkbuster', bringing to riotous life the heady days and TV franchise battles of Cooper's heightened 1980s.

Once upon a time, measuring TV was straightforward. Channel controllers and production heads would wait anxiously for the overnight viewing figures to land on their desks. Ratings would be assessed on a single broadcast transmission. The overnights could determine a show’s fate – and sometimes the jobs of those who had commissioned it.  

Multi-channel TV complicated the picture, but the arrival of catch-up, then streaming and platforms such as YouTube and TikTok really upset the applecart on collecting and analysing the vital data pored over by ad agencies and their clients.

“None of us could believe it hadn’t been done before,” recalled Chloe Sarosh, discussing Wildstar Films’ natural history series about female-led societies. As the series producer and writer of Queens, she was there from the start.

Five years, 12 countries and more than 1,700 days in the field later, seven engrossing episodes have come to National Geographic and Disney+.

New documentary Brawn was described as “Succession with racing cars” at an RTS Midlands event in November. Executive producer Neil Duncanson said of the thrilling story: “Conspiracy theories, money, power, betrayal – it’s all there.”

Brawn: The Impossible Formula 1 Story, a four-part Disney+ series, tells how an underfinanced team bought for £1 managed to defeat the greatest names in F1. And it certainly appeals to far more viewers than just motor racing fans, as director Daryl Goodrich explained.

The first saw world renowned chef Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) and Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach)—all returning for the upcoming series—just about manage to save his family's grimy Chicago sandwich restaurant from financial ruin, thanks to the huge tomato can cash windfall.

The second will see them look to transform the joint into the city's next best eatery which, given the windfall, you'd expect to be plain sailing. But, reads the press release, "it turns out that the only thing harder than running a restaurant is opening a new one."