MacTaggart Lecture
The Edinburgh International Television Festival is an annual media event held in the United Kingdom each August which brings together delegates from the television and digital world to debate the major issues facing the industry. The Festival draws about 2,000 delegates from the major networks and production companies internationally. Although the festival is held in Edinburgh, its headquarters are in London. History and outline Over the years, the Festival has attracted industry figures including Kevin Spacey, Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, Ricky Gervais, Vince Gilligan, Tessa Ross, Jamie Oliver, Simon Cowell, Ted Sarandos and Elisabeth Murdoch, as well as people from related fields such as Al Gore and Germaine Greer. Established in 1976, the Festival takes place every August at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre concurrently with the Edinburgh International Festival, and similar events, in the city. The Edinburgh International Television Festival remains the only e ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Edinburgh
Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth. Edinburgh is Scotland's List of towns and cities in Scotland by population, second-most populous city, after Glasgow, and the List of cities in the United Kingdom, seventh-most populous city in the United Kingdom. Recognised as the capital of Scotland since at least the 15th century, Edinburgh is the seat of the Scottish Government, the Scottish Parliament and the Courts of Scotland, highest courts in Scotland. The city's Holyrood Palace, Palace of Holyroodhouse is the official residence of the Monarchy of the United Kingdom, British monarchy in Scotland. The city has long been a centre of education, particularly in the fields of medicine, Scots law, Scottish law, literature, philosophy, the sc ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
James MacTaggart
James MacTaggart (25 April 1928 – 29 May 1974) was a Scottish television producer, director and writer. He worked in London from 1961. Early life MacTaggart was born in Glasgow and served in the Royal Army Service Corps from 1946, rising to the rank of Captain by the time he was demobbed in 1949. After his military service, he studied Political Economy and Social Economics at the University of Glasgow, from which he graduated with an MA in 1954. Career After an initial career as an actor, MacTaggart worked as a producer for BBC Radio in Scotland before moving into television. He relocated to London around 1961, at the request of his friend, scriptwriter Troy Kennedy Martin. MacTaggart aimed to break down the use of naturalism in television drama: "We were going to destroy naturalism", Kennedy Martin once said, "if possible, before Christmas". In a television career of almost 20 years, MacTaggart wrote, directed or produced nearly 100 plays or episodes. After his involvement ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Verity Lambert
Verity Ann Lambert (27 November 1935 – 22 November 2007) was an English television and film producer. Lambert began working in television in the 1950s. She began her career as a producer at the BBC by becoming the founding producer of the science-fiction series ''Doctor Who'' from 1963 until 1965. She left the BBC in 1969 and worked for other television companies, notably having a long association with Thames Television and its Euston Films offshoot in the 1970s and 1980s. Her many credits as producer include ''Adam Adamant Lives!'', '' The Naked Civil Servant'', ''Rock Follies'', ''Minder'', ''Widows'', '' G.B.H.'', ''Jonathan Creek'', ''Love Soup'' and ''Eldorado''. She also worked in the film industry for Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment. From 1985 she ran her own production company, Cinema Verity. She continued to work as a producer until the year she died. Women were rarely television producers in Britain at the beginning of Lambert's career. When she was appointed ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Christine Ockrent
Christine Ockrent (born 24 April 1944) is a Belgian journalist whose career has principally centered on French television. She interviewed Amir Abbas Hoveyda, the former Iranian prime minister, in Evin prison after the Islamic revolution in 1979. It was the last interview with Hoveyda before his execution. Early life Ockrent was born in Brussels, Belgium, daughter of Belgian diplomat Roger Ockrent. She attended the Cours Hattemer, a private school in Paris. She graduated from the ''Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po)'' in 1965. Career She worked for the CBS news magazine, ''60 Minutes'', while in charge of morning news for Europe 1 in France. In 1981, she became the first female anchor of the 8 pm news on the Antenne 2 television channel. Afterwards, she worked for TF1 as anchor of the evening news at France 2; and since 1990 for France 3 as the host of different news magazines. She was chief of the ''L'Express'' editorial office. For over a decade she ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Phillip Whitehead
Phillip Whitehead (30 May 1937 – 31 December 2005) was a British Labour politician, television producer and writer. Early life Born in Matlock Bath, Derbyshire, he was adopted by a local family in Rowsley, and attended Lady Manners School in Bakewell and Exeter College, Oxford, where he obtained his BA degree. Whitehead went up to Oxford following in his adoptive parents' footsteps as a Conservative. He was President of the Oxford University Conservative Association and the Oxford Union in 1961. Career Whitehead was an independent documentary producer in the early 1960s and later an editor with the BBC and ITV from 1967 to 1970. House of Commons After standing unsuccessfully at West Derbyshire in 1966, he represented Derby North as a Labour MP from 1970 to 1983, when he was defeated by the Conservative Greg Knight. He tried to win back the seat in 1987 but was beaten once again. Whitehead was a member of several parliamentary committees: * Member, Council of Europe/WEU ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Troy Kennedy Martin
Troy Kennedy Martin (15 February 1932 – 15 September 2009) was a Scottish-born film and television screenwriter. He created the long-running BBC TV police series ''Z-Cars'' (1962–1978), and the award-winning 1985 anti-nuclear drama ''Edge of Darkness''. He also wrote the screenplay for the original version of ''The Italian Job'' (1969). Biography Early life He was born in Rothesay, Isle of Bute, and educated at Finchley Catholic Grammar School and Trinity College, Dublin. He had a younger brother Ian, who is also a television writer best known for creating ''The Sweeney''. 1960s He began writing for BBC Television in 1958, beginning with the play ''Incident at Echo Six'', and he wrote four further plays for the BBC over the following three years, before in 1961 creating his first series, ''Storyboard'', a six-part anthology series that consisted both of original scripts and adaptations. The same year, he wrote the police drama ''The Interrogator''. He wrote an important man ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
John Schlesinger
John Richard Schlesinger (; 16 February 1926 – 25 July 2003) was an English film and stage director. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for ''Midnight Cowboy'', and was nominated for the same award for two other films ('' Darling'' and ''Sunday Bloody Sunday''). Early life Schlesinger was born and raised in Hampstead, London, in a Jewish family, the eldest of five children of distinguished Emmanuel College, Cambridge-educated paediatrician and physician Bernard Edward Schlesinger (1896–1984), OBE, FRCP, who had also served in the Royal Army Medical Corps as a brigadier, and his wife Winifred Henrietta, daughter of Hermann Regensburg, a stockbroker from Frankfurt. She had left school at 14 to study at the Trinity College of Music, and later studied languages at the University of Oxford for three years. Bernard Schlesinger's father Richard, a stockbroker, had come to England in the 1880s from Frankfurt. After St Edmund's School, Hindhead and Uppingham School (whe ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Denis Forman
Sir John Denis Forman (13 October 1917 – 24 February 2013) was a Scottish executive in the British television industry long associated with the ITV contractor Granada, and with various charitable and governmental bodies in the arts. Career Forman was born in 1917 in Cragielands, near Moffat, in Dumfries, to the Rev Adam Forman, an Episcopalian vicar and country gentleman who later became a Presbyterian minister. The family lived in a house built in the Palladian style and were devout. Forman recounted his childhood in his memoir ''Son of Adam'' (1990, filmed as ''My Life So Far'' in 1999). He was educated at Loretto School, Musselburgh and Pembroke College, Cambridge. Forman had a distinguished military career during the Second World War and was wounded at Monte Cassino, losing a leg. After the war he joined the British Film Institute and was its Director from 1948 to 1955. Later he was Chair of its Board of Governors, from 1971 to 1973. After his main period of work at th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Jonathan Miller
Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller CBE (21 July 1934 – 27 November 2019) was an English theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter, humourist and physician. After training in medicine and specialising in neurology in the late 1950s, he came to prominence in the early 1960s in the comedy revue '' Beyond the Fringe'' with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett. Miller began directing operas in the 1970s. His 1982 production of a "Mafia"-styled ''Rigoletto'' was set in 1950s Little Italy, Manhattan. In its early days, he was an associate director at the National Theatre. He later ran the Old Vic Theatre. As a writer and presenter of more than a dozen BBC documentaries, Miller became a television personality and public intellectual in Britain and the United States. Life and career Early life Miller grew up in St John's Wood, London, in a well-connected Jewish family. His father Emanuel (1892–1970), who was of Lithuanian descent and suffered from severe rh ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Peter Jay (diplomat)
Peter Jay (born 7 February 1937) is an English economist, broadcaster and former diplomat. Personal life Peter Jay is the son of Douglas Jay, Baron Jay, and Peggy Jay, both of whom were Labour Party politicians. He was educated at The Dragon School, Oxford (the ''alma mater'' of several senior Labour politicians, including Hugh Gaitskell), followed by Winchester College (where he was Senior Commoner Prefect) and Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated with a first class honours degree in PPE. In Trinity Term 1960, he was president of the Oxford Union. He was commissioned in the Royal Navy, then worked as a civil servant at HM Treasury before becoming a journalist and, for 10 years, economics editor with ''The Times''. Jay married Margaret Callaghan, the daughter of Labour politician James Callaghan, in 1961. In 1977, when his father-in-law had become Prime Minister, Jay was appointed to the post of Ambassador to the United States by the Foreign Secretary, his friend Davi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
John Mortimer
Sir John Clifford Mortimer (21 April 1923 – 16 January 2009) was a British barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author. He is best known for novels about a barrister named Horace Rumpole. Early life Mortimer was born in Hampstead, London, the only child of Kathleen May (née Smith) and (Herbert) Clifford Mortimer (1884–1961), a divorce and probate barrister who became blind in 1936 when he hit his head on the door frame of a London taxi but still pursued his career. Clifford's loss of sight was not acknowledged openly by the family.Helen T. Verongo"John Mortimer, barrister and creator of Rumpole, is dead" ''International Herald Tribune'', 16 January 2009. This obituary was also carried by ''The New York Times''; a more complete version than the version on the ''IHT'' website is onlin John Mortimer was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford, and Harrow School, where he joined the Communist Party, [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Jeremy Isaacs
Sir Jeremy Israel Isaacs (born 28 September 1932) is a Scottish television producer and executive, opera manager, and a recipient of many British Academy Television Awards and International Emmy Awards. He won the British Film Institute Fellowship in 1986, the International Emmy Directorate Award in 1987 and the BAFTA Fellowship in 1985. He was also the General Director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden from 1987 to 1996. Isaacs was knighted in the 1996 Birthday Honours "for services to Broadcasting and to the Arts." Early life Isaacs was born in Glasgow from what were described as "Scottish Jewish roots". He grew up in Hillhead, the son of a jeweller and a GP, and is a cousin to virologist Alick Isaacs. He was educated at the independent Glasgow Academy and Merton College, Oxford, where he read Classics. He did his National Service in the Highland Light Infantry. Television career Isaacs began his career in television when he joined Granada Television in Mancheste ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |