Fame Asylum is a 2006 documentary that followed the progress of a boy band made up of four asylum seekers and aired on Channel 4. The Guardian said it was among the worst ideas in TV history, [1] and the programme was also nominated for a Royal Television Society Award. [2]
It is available to watch on 40D, [3] and has some accompanying learning resources. [4]
The artist who initiated the documentary, Richard DeDomenici, has compiled an archive of material responding to the project, [5] and has written an article about it [6] for Refugee Week, who collaborated on the project.
Sir David Frederick Attenborough is a British broadcaster, biologist, natural historian, and writer. He is best known for writing and presenting, in conjunction with the BBC Studios Natural History Unit, the nine nature documentary series forming the Life collection, a comprehensive survey of animal and plant life on Earth.
John Richard Pilger was an Australian journalist, writer, scholar and documentary filmmaker. From 1962, he was based mainly in Britain. He was also a visiting professor at Cornell University in New York.
Sir David Courtney Suchet is an English actor. He is known for his work on stage and in television. He portrayed Edward Teller in the television serial Oppenheimer (1980) and received the RTS and BPG awards for his performance as Augustus Melmotte in the British serial The Way We Live Now (2001). International acclaim and recognition followed his performance as Agatha Christie's detective Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie's Poirot (1989–2013), for which he received a 1991 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) nomination.
Jessica Hynes is a British actress, director and writer. She is best known as one of the creators, writers and stars of the British sitcom Spaced.
Peter William Atkins is an English chemist and a Fellow of Lincoln College at the University of Oxford. He retired in 2007. He is a prolific writer of popular chemistry textbooks, including Physical Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, and Molecular Quantum Mechanics. Atkins is also the author of a number of popular science books, including Atkins' Molecules, Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science and On Being.
Clare Julia "Keeley" Hawes is an English actress. After beginning her career in a number of literary adaptations, including Our Mutual Friend (1998) and Tipping the Velvet (2002), Hawes rose to fame for her portrayal of Zoe Reynolds in the BBC series Spooks (2002–2004), followed by her co-lead performance as DI Alex Drake in Ashes to Ashes (2008–2010). She is also known for her roles in Jed Mercurio's Line of Duty as DI Lindsay Denton (2014–2016) and in BBC One drama Bodyguard (2018), in which she played Home Secretary Julia Montague.
David James Stuart Mitchell is a British comedian, actor and writer.
Juliet Anne Virginia Stevenson, is an English actress of stage and screen. She is known for her role in the film Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991), for which she was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. Her other film appearances include Emma (1996), Bend It Like Beckham (2002), Mona Lisa Smile (2003), Being Julia (2004), Infamous (2006), The Enfield Haunting (2015), Wolf (2023), and Reawakening (2024).
Patrick Kielty is a comedian, presenter and actor from Northern Ireland. He is the host of The Late Late Show on RTÉ One and presents a Saturday morning programme on BBC Radio 5 Live. His television credits include the BBC's Patrick Kielty Almost Live and Channel 4's Last Chance Lottery. He has also presented ITV's Love Island and This Morning.
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Paterson Davis Joseph is a British actor and author.
Peter Dougan Capaldi is a Scottish actor, director, singer and guitarist. He portrayed the twelfth incarnation of the Doctor in the science fiction series Doctor Who and Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It, for which he received four British Academy Television Award nominations, winning Best Male Comedy Performance in 2010.
Peter Kosminsky is a British writer, director and producer. He has directed Hollywood movies such as White Oleander and television films like Warriors, The Government Inspector, The Promise, Wolf Hall and The State.
Ruth Wilson is an English actress. She has played the eponymous protagonist in Jane Eyre (2006), Alice Morgan in the BBC psychological crime drama Luther, Alison Lockhart in the Showtime drama The Affair (2014–2018), and the eponymous character in Mrs Wilson (2018). From 2019 to 2022, she portrayed Marisa Coulter in the BBC/HBO fantasy series His Dark Materials, and for this role she won the 2020 BAFTA Cymru Award for Best Actress. Her film credits include The Lone Ranger (2013), Saving Mr. Banks (2013), I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), and Dark River (2017).
The Glasgow Girls is a group of seven young women in Glasgow, Scotland, who highlighted the poor treatment of asylum seekers whose rights of appeal had been exhausted. In 2005, the group campaigned against dawn raids, raised public awareness, and found support in the Scottish Parliament. Their story has been told in a musical and 2 documentaries.
Timothy David Samuels is an English documentary filmmaker, author and broadcaster. His work is characterised by approaching serious topics in provocative and entertaining ways to produce hard-hitting documentaries. Samuels formed older people's rock group The Zimmers for a BBC documentary and is a regular presenter on BBC television and radio in the UK. He has been referred to as a younger British Michael Moore, but without the political agenda. Samuels has won three Royal Television Society awards and best documentary at the World Television Festival in Banff.
Callum Macrae is a Scottish filmmaker, writer and journalist currently with Outsider Television, which he had co-founded with Alex Sutherland in 1993.
Chris Rogers is a British broadcast journalist specialising in investigative journalism, and news presenter. He is among the long line up of presenters that began their career presenting BBC Newsround moving on to present and report for Sky News including its BAFTA Award-winning coverage of the 9/11 attacks. He then joined the Channel 4 RI:SE presenting team before heading to ITN's ITV News, and ITV's Tonight documentary series, where he presented and reported for London Today, London Tonight, ITV Evening News and produced and fronted numerous investigations for the News at Ten and the Tonight programme as ITV's Investigative Correspondent. He left ITN in 2009 to present BBC News.
English pop girl group the Spice Girls have starred in one feature film, as well as several television specials, documentaries and commercials. They made their film debut in 1997, starring in their feature film Spice World. The film was a commercial success, but was widely panned by critics, earning the group the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress.
Alison Phipps OBE FRSE FRSA FAcSS a University of Glasgow professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies and holds the first UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts. She has been awarded the Minerva Medal of the Royal Philosophical Society and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.