Friday 10 May 2013, 11:32
Writer Lucy Gannon explains how a character in search of a role, and a soundtrack, came to life for BBC One's new drama about district nurses.
Read more about Frankie: A character with her own soundtrack
Tuesday 21 May 2013, 11:07
The idea for Love And Death In City Hall was my mum's. She phoned when I was outside a magistrates' court making another film to ask: "Have you ever considered a registry office?"
I was excited about the idea of finding interesting stories in seemingly ordinary and bureaucratic situations. So I took off for a three-day tour of my native Northern Ireland, hoping to find an interesting register office there.
I came across several nice ones, but decided on Belfast City Hall, because of its stunning neo-baroque location and the great camaraderie that existed amongst the nine women (and one man) working there.
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Also, having never lived in the capital itself, I was excited to explore the everyday culture of Belfast – natural curiosity is probably the best motivation.
My basic approach to finding contributors was to sit on one of the waiting room chairs in the register office and speak to the public when I thought they were open to having a chat.
Body language was everything. If someone looked very upset, I would not approach them at all. If someone looked sad but open to conversation, I would speak to them as sensitively as I could...
Read more about Love And Death In City Hall: Stories from a register office
Thursday 16 May 2013, 10:18
During the last Ice Age the northern hemisphere was teeming with fabulous megamammals – terrifying sabre-toothed cats, huge woolly rhinos, bizarre glyptodonts – but they all disappeared as the planet moved into a new, warmer era.
I'm one of the producers on the new series Ice Age Giants, who along with the rest of the team, was tasked with bringing those long extinct animals back to life.
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The CGI brief was to create animals that looked as real as possible so that the animation could pass as natural history footage.
Having never worked on a creature animated show before, I was excited and curious about how it all worked.
We drafted a storyboard of what we wanted our animals to do, and set off to film the backplates - the 'real life' backgrounds that we drop our animated creatures into.
The shasta ground sloth has seven-inch long claws to defend itself
For the most part the backplates were shot where the animals once lived, so the sabre-toothed cat was shot in LA, the mammoths just outside San Francisco, the armadillo-like glyptodonts in Florida and the ground sloth in the Grand Canyon.
It's a complicated process, but the key things...
Read more about Ice Age Giants: Filming animated creatures in the wild
Sunday 12 May 2013, 15:00
Gillian Anderson stars in BBC Two's new psychological crime thriller The Fall. As Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson, she is brought in from the Metropolitan Police by the Police Service of Northern Ireland to review a stalled murder investigation.
What compelled you to take the role of DSI Stella Gibson?
She feels a little like an island but I find that interesting and it makes me want to know more, which is always a good thing where character and drama is concerned.
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Can you tell us a detail from the script where you felt a connection to Stella?
It's hard to say. I am intrigued by her no-nonsense way of being. And that over time we get to see warmth and what she cares about. She is an enigma.
What are the key factors behind Stella's professional decisions?
I think she is professional and driven and has a mind for this kind of work and knows that if she keeps at it she will crack it. I think on the whole she works from instinct but I think this case touches her much deeper and that's in part what is driving her. Her emotions have become engaged and that's unusual for her. She is thrown.
Are...
Read more about The Fall: Gillian Anderson on portraying an enigma
Friday 10 May 2013, 11:32
I've had Frankie battering around in my head for some time now - a passionate, strong woman, a competent professional who acts impulsively and not always wisely, and can be exasperating but is always well meaning.
What to do with her? She was a character in search of a role.
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And then BBC One asked me to write a drama series about district nurses and bingo! There she was, ready made, in her uniform, just raring to go.
I realised she was working as a character when the producer and script editors said they wanted to be a part of her...
Read more about Frankie: A character with her own soundtrack
Friday 19 April 2013, 10:16
I love flying as much as I love archaeology, so it was fantastic to get the opportunity to present The Flying Archaeologist series for BBC One and BBC Four.
At English Heritage, my role involves the challenging task of tackling heritage at risk; that is everything from the buried remains of Roman villas to important listed buildings that find themselves on the brink of extinction.
The four areas we visited in this series, Stonehenge and the River Avon, Hadrian's Wall, the Norfolk Broads and the Hoo Peninsula are all very different, but each is very special in its own distinctive way.
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Read more about The Flying Archaeologist: Revealing lost worlds
Thursday 18 April 2013, 09:58
What gift do you buy for a sultan? Comedian Bill Bailey's answer is a tin of biscuits.
We were heading out to Indonesia to film the second episode of Bill Bailey's Jungle Hero, about one of the great forgotten heroes of natural history – Alfred Russel Wallace.
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Bill first heard about Wallace 15 years ago when he was birdwatching in Indonesia and he's been fascinated by his story ever since.
Wallace was a bug collector who spent eight years travelling through Borneo and Indonesia in the 1850s, seeing orangutans...
Read more about Bill Bailey's Jungle Hero: An audience with the sultan
Friday 12 April 2013, 10:34
As the big brother of Formula 1's Susie Wolff, I obviously enjoy watching her drive, it makes me incredibly proud.
That doesn't mean that I don't get nervous at the beginning of each race, but I have so much confidence in her ability so I know she'll be fine.
I know how good she is. I'm lucky that Susie trusted me to make Driven: The Fastest Woman In The World.
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It's a BBC Two documentary filmed over a year of Susie's racing life, including her testing for the Williams Formula 1 team.
She knew...
Thursday 11 April 2013, 15:10
Keeping Britain Alive: The NHS In A Day was always going to be an ambitious project, to try and take a snapshot of the NHS at such a critical time in its history. After all it treats 1.5 million of us every day.
To get a sense of that scale, we wondered what it would be like if we filmed this enormous institution in just a single day.
What would that make us think about an organisation that touches all of our lives?
Surgeon Martin Drage removed Alan's kidney and transplanted it into his wife, Ann
As one of the executive producers I was responsible for helping to shape the initial concept...
Tuesday 2 April 2013, 17:28
It was about five years ago that The Village creator Peter Moffat and I first sat down to discuss his idea of telling a history of the 20th Century through a big drama in a small place.
What Peter was interested in was living memory, a history that wasn't coming from history books but from oral history, from real people who lived ordinary lives.
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Peter feels passionate that if you write about the past you must write about it as if you are writing about the present.
In our first episode of The Village set in 1914 on the week...
Read more about The Village: We wanted it to feel like living memory
Thursday 28 March 2013, 14:19
Director Marc Isaacs and contributor/co-writer Iqbal Ahmed gave this interview to the BBC TV blog about the upcoming Storyville documentary The Road, A Story Of Life And Death. The film follows people from around the world who have come to live and work around the A5, which runs from Holyhead, Anglesey to Edgware Road in London.
What were your first impressions when you met?
Marc: I had read Iqbal's book, Sorrows Of The Moon, and met him to discuss it. I found him to be extremely charming and sensitive. I also realised that he had his own story going on and was keen to have him in the film.
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