Timewasters follows a London jazz quartet who reluctantly time travel to the 1920s, encountering a host of bizarre situations and characters.
Among the band is Nick (Daniel Lawrence Taylor), Jason (Kadiff Kirwan), Lauren (Adelayo Adedayo) and Horace (Samson Kayo).
More than 1,600 tickets were sold for the RTS Futures Careers Fair in Islington, London, in early February – a record number for an in-person fair. The fair welcomed close to 50 industry exhibitors, while at the CV clinic more than 350 attendees had their CVs tweaked by media professionals and 100 TV experts offered advice in the “ask me anything” area.
What does 2024 hold for the TV industry? Hosted by Katie Prescott, panellists Claire Enders, Dan Clays, Ash Atalla, Patrick Holland and Evan Shapiro discuss their 2024 TV predictions at an RTS event, from freelancing, to viewing habits, to the effects of geopolitical events and AI.
Panel
Paul Wells, series director of BBC One doc Soldier, and Mark Tattersall, executive producer of Channel 4’s Top Guns: Inside the RAF, discussed making the docs at an online RTS Yorkshire event last month.
For Top Guns, Leeds-based True North Productions took cameras inside Scotland’s Lossiemouth airbase and the planes policing Nato airspace. Tattersall, an experienced hand at making military docs – he worked on Channel 5’s Warship: Life at Sea – said the RAF wanted to “showcase what it did [and was offering] access to nearly all areas”.
After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, many companies worldwide issued statements of solidarity and support, and posted black squares on their websites and social media feeds. In the UK, the movement galvanised the TV industry. Broadcasters took stock of the sometimes paltry proportion of their output they were commissioning from black people. ITV announced a Diversity Acceleration Plan while Sky pledged £30m to support anti-racism and improve diversity and inclusion. As a result, there was an uplift in demand for diverse talent, on-screen and behind the camera.
Brand-funded content has long been the goal of TV’s money-makers; but, although much-promised, it has been frustratingly slow to emerge. The brands, too, are keen to promote their goods and services on TV, where audiences tend to be large and highly engaged. But, if the expert panel assembled for a sold-out RTS national event in mid-January is correct, brand-funded TV is finally going to take off.
This panel discussion looks at this new trend of brands investing in entertainment – TV series and films – as a way to engage new customers. As a new revenue stream for production companies and TV professionals, the panel asks: how can they maximise on this new trend? What will the impact be of brands funding our TV entertainment? How can the TV industry maintain its gold quality standards? Will most of our TV be paid for by brands in the next 10 years?
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Watch Matt Risley, MD of 4Studio, Channel 4, Lucy Luke, Head of UK Partnerships, Snap Inc, James Loveridge, Director of Entertainment, Little Dot Studios and Neil Price, Head of TV and Film, YouTube, discuss how broadcasters are collaborating with the tech businesses to reach new audiences and how the future of viewing is evolving.
Sir Peter Bazalgette – known simply as “Baz” to colleagues and so many others across the creative industries over which he has towered for the past four decades – recently stood down as Chair of ITV, marking the end of another chapter in his long career.
Once the preserve of petrol heads, Formula 1 has become a hugely popular television sport. On the eve of the British Grand Prix at Silverstone, an RTS panel – featuring experts from three broadcasters – discussed how the motor sport has found its va-va-voom.
