Hilary Martin

Hilary Martin has worked in the commissioning team at Sky, and has produced the series City Lights for Granada as well as script-editing No Angels, Linda Green, and A&E. She has recently been appointed as the Development Executive for BBC TV Drama North.

What's the BBC's vision for the North?

I think the BBC feel very strongly that they'd like to have a Drama presence in the region. In the past a lot of things have been filmed here, but they've not necessarily been developed here right from the opening stages, and I sometimes think that writers from the region feel short-changed - directors get work and the crews get work, but it still feels like the voice of the North isn't represented.  And that’s what we're here to do.

We have backing from people high up in the BBC that we are here for the duration and have time to turn strong ideas into commissionable programmes.   We're a very small team at the moment - it's just me and my boss Phil Collinson - and we're very busy trying to generate a development slate that reflects our taste and hopefully will find success within the BBC schedules. We’ve currently got a wonderful luxury, which feels frightening and brilliant all at the same time, of having a clean slate with which to fill projects.

What sort of things are you looking for?

Our best prize would be to get a BBC1 9pm popular series set in the North and filmed in the North off the ground.  We also feel very excited about opportunities at BBC3 for the post-watershed big series. 

What we're really pushing towards is trying to find these new channel-defining series that are loved by their audiences.  These are also the hardest thing to get away as the idea needs to be very special to demand that amount of screen time.  So, we're keeping our eye on that being the end goal, but also remembering that it’s all about the writer's vision and just going out there and meeting the northern-based writers, finding if there’s a relationship that we feel is productive and fruitful, and finding out if there are stories you want to tell that we want to watch on television.

What's your commitment to northern writers?

We're here for the long term to be able to build a relationship with the writers of the North, we feel very passionately that it's under-represented on screen.  It feels like the BBC have a lot of London-based shows, and that’s fine, it's our capital city and very filmic, but there are other places in the country and this needs to be reflected on screen.

Manchester is a fantastic city, but within an hour's filming time we have Liverpool, Leeds, York, even the Lake District.  We want to find projects that get that out there.  I think it's going to take time for people to trust us and know that we're here to stay.

We won't exclusively be working with Northern writers - I think of the incredible talents I've worked with the last ten years of my career, I’m not going to give up on them just because they live outside the area - but our primary focus will be harnessing the talent in the North of England.

 

Hilary Martin was talking at the recent Q&A for the Everyword Festival of New Writing, together with Daisy Coulam and Ellen Taylor. You can also read a full transcript of the event.