RTS London

Earlier this year, a joint bid from two Northern Ireland indies – Tern TV Belfast and Green Inc – won the tender to produce 24 episodes a year of Sunday Morning Live, BBC One’s ethical and religious current affairs show. 

The show is broadcast live from a London studio, using producers and directors in Glasgow, Manchester and Sheffield, but is produced and edited in Holywood, Northern Ireland. It sounds complicated but it works, as a recent joint RTS London/Yorkshire event discovered. 

Lucy Tallon, head of mental health and wellbeing at The Film and TV Charity, which organised the October event with RTS London, said one in seven people in the UK have some form of nuerodiversity. These are people, such as those with dyslexia and on the autism spectrum, whose “brains learn and function differently to a neurotypical person”.

The resilience and ingenuity of broadcasters and producers as they adapted their children’s content to lockdown was emphasised at a joint RTS London and Children’s Media Foundation (CMF) event, “Kids, Covid and content”, in October.

Louise Bucknole, VP of programming for kids at ViacomCBS Networks International UK & Ireland, recalled how Covid-19 had forced producers to make Channel 5’s pre-school service Milkshake! virtually.

Iuzzolino, who introduced an RTS London event in October, said: “It is one of the very few shows I’ve bought off-script.” In Witch Hunt, an accountant (Ida Waage, played by Westworld actor Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) blows the whistle on corruption, but finds herself subjected to harassment and false accusations.

Series creators and writers Anna Bache-Wiig and Siv Rajendram Eliassen were inspired by the true story of a whistleblower in Norway.

During a wide-ranging talk on the pioneering early years of BBC outside broadcasts, former ITV head of technology and RTS Fellow Norman Green showed what is believed to be the only surviving footage of the London 1948 television broadcasts.

To cover the first post-war Olympics, “the BBC built the first broadcasting centre for radio and television”, said Green. Based in the Palace of Arts at Wembley, it housed 16 studios, two TV control rooms, 350 engineers, 200 reporters and 200 support staff.

“This year has proved how important this industry is – I know for a fact that if I hadn’t had my TV in my house during lockdown, I would have been climbing the walls,” said the winner of Drag Race’s first UK series.

Looking at the “amazing young, fresh talent” brought together for the online ceremony by Zoom, The Vivienne added: “Knowing that the future of TV is in your hands really puts me at ease.”

But fans of the show discovered at an RTS London event that some of the show’s characters could yet draw new breath.

“The trilogy is over,” confirmed the show’s co-creator Jörg Winger, “but we are currently thinking about a spin-off that is not Deutschland, but maybe follows some of our characters into new territory”.