Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964) and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993) and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works.
Adam Offord Buxton is an English actor, comedian, podcaster and writer. With the filmmaker Joe Cornish, he is part of the comedy duo Adam and Joe. They presented the Channel 4 television series The Adam and Joe Show (1996–2001) and the BBC Radio 6 Music series Adam and Joe.
The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize was a literary prize awarded annually for the best work of literature by an author from the Commonwealth aged 35 or under, written in English and published in the United Kingdom. Established in 1942, it was one of the oldest literary awards in the UK.
Toni Collette is an Australian actress and producer. Known for her work in television and independent films, she has received various accolades, including a Golden Globe Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and five AACTA Awards, with nominations for an Academy Award and a Tony Award.
Nádia Conceição Almada is a Portuguese-born British television personality. She is known for winning the fifth series of Big Brother.
MI19 was a section of the British Directorate of Military Intelligence, part of the War Office. During the Second World War it was responsible for obtaining information from enemy prisoners of war.
Grierson: The British Documentary Awards or more informally, The Grierson Awards as they are known, are awards bestowed by The Grierson Trust to recognise innovative and exciting documentary films, in honour of the pioneering Scottish documentary filmmaker John Grierson.
David Abraham is a British media executive, who is the former chief executive of Channel 4 Television Corporation. In 1997 he co-founded the creative agency St. Luke's. Abraham then went on to senior creative roles at Discovery Communications in the UK and the US before becoming CEO of UKTV in 2007 and then CEO of Channel 4 from 2010 to 2017. In 2018, Abraham co-founded Wonderhood Studios where he is now Group CEO.
Bedsitcom is a British reality television hoax series that was broadcast on Channel 4 in December 2003. Pitched as "somewhere between a sitcom and a reality TV show", the show documented the lives of six young people living in a loft flat in London. Its hook was that its TV audience was aware that three of the participants—named Mel, Paul and Rufus—were actually actors being directed by a trio of "writers" in a garage on the ground floor.
In 2002, a con was perpetrated by Nik Russian, a British man who, at the time, was working at an entry-level position in a branch of the UK book chain Waterstone's. Russian placed advertisements in major publications that invited people to audition for a year-long reality television programme where they could potentially win a prize of £100,000. After receiving hundreds of responses, he auditioned some of them on Raven's Ait in London, then selected 30 successful auditionees to take part, without informing them that no actual programme had been commissioned. Telling them that the show—which he had dubbed Project MS-2—would last for an entire year, Russian instructed the participants to leave their homes, quit their jobs and then meet him in London on 10 June, where they would be divided into teams of ten and set their challenge for the next twelve months.
The People's Book of Records was a comedy game show made in the United Kingdom, which offered members of the public the opportunity to set unofficial records for any activity that they chose. Examples of records featured in the series included eating peanut butter from nappies, swimming while singing the main theme from Jaws, and placing a novel by Jilly Cooper near a horse without it noticing. The show was first broadcast on 21 March 2003, and was presented by actor Dominic Coleman. British production company Zeppotron produced the programme after being commissioned in 2002 by the Channel Four Television Corporation, who broadcast the show on their eponymous channel. The People's Book of Records was featured as part of a £430 million season of new television programming on Channel 4 during 2003, and ran for a single series of nine 30-minute weekly episodes. Each episode was directed by Atul Malhotra, whose previous directing work had included the 2002 series of Comedy Lab.
Jennifer Louise Worth RN RM was a British memoirist. She wrote a best-selling trilogy about her work as a nurse and midwife practising in the poverty-stricken East End of London in the 1950s: Call the Midwife (2002), Shadows of the Workhouse (2005) and Farewell to The East End (2009). A television series, Call the Midwife, based on her books, began broadcasting on BBC One on 15 January 2012. After leaving nursing, she re-trained as a musician.
Totally Viral is a British comedy television programme, composed entirely of clips from video-sharing Internet websites such as YouTube. It featured narration from English actor Donald Sinden, and premiered in the UK on 27 November 2006. The series' target audience was 16 to 34-year-old men – it was produced by Spun Gold TV in association with RDF Television. It featured jokes from DV3 Productions, an animated opening title sequence created by Jonti Picking of Sumo Dojo, and "Sweet Talk", a short film by Lorcan Finnegan. In promotion of the show, the channel boss Steve North remarked that virals were "truly ... the entertainment of the future". Totally Viral was initially broadcast on weeknights on UKTV G2, before moving to Dave when the channel was rebranded in October 2007 – at this time, a new season of 10 episodes was commissioned, which began on 26 October 2007.
The Dance Years is a British documentary series created by Glenn Sims and written and presented by radio DJ Dave Pearce. It premiered on 21 July 2001 on the British channel ITV. The 14-episode series focused on dance music in the UK between 1988 and 2001, with each episode charting Pearce's personal top 10 dance tracks for a particular year. The programme also explored the year's most influential people, songs and nightclubs. Each episode was broadcast on ITV on Saturday mornings at approximately 1 a.m. Dorian Lynskey of The Guardian described The Dance Years as being part of a "bumper year" for retrospectives of dance music.
Andrew Newman is a British television executive and producer.
Thomas Michael Gillan Gutteridge is a British television director, producer and executive. He was formerly Chief Executive of FremantleMedia NA, having previously been founder and Chief Executive of Mentorn, from 1985 to 2001. In 2016 he was appointed Executive Producer of the television series BattleBots, which, after two seasons on ABC, in 2018 moved to the Discovery and Science Channels. He started his career as a BBC journalist.
Top of the Box is a British television series created by BBC Studios for Channel 5, who have re-titled the series under names such as Greatest TV Moments of the 1980s, Greatest TV Moments of the 1990s and TV Gold since is original transmission.
Alice Birch is a British playwright and screenwriter. Birch has written several plays, including Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. for which she was awarded the George Devine Award for Most Promising New Playwright, and Anatomy of a Suicide for which she won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Birch was also the screenwriter for the film Lady Macbeth and has written for such television shows as Succession, Normal People, and Dead Ringers.
The 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the British playwright Harold Pinter (1930–2008) "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." He is the 11th British writer to become a recipient of the prize after William Golding in 1983 and was followed later by Doris Lessing in 2007 and Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017.
