Broadcasting Group

Committee

Biographies

Roger Bolton began his broadcasting career in 1967 when he joined the BBC as a trainee. He stayed with the Corporation for twenty years and edited the Panorama, Nationwide and Tonight programmes, eventually becoming Deputy Head of Current Affairs. In 1983 he was made Head of Network Production in Manchester overseeing series such as Brass Tacks and In Search of the Trojan Wars. In 1986 he joined Thames Television as Editor of This Week and was responsible for the Death on the Rock documentary. His book Death on the Rock and Other Stories is published by W H Allen and Optomen.

As Controller of Factual Programmes at Thames Television he was responsible for a number of award-winning series, including The Kennedys (with PBS) and The Longest Hatred – A History of Anti-Semitism. For such work he was awarded the RTS Cyril Bennett Award for outstanding contribution to television programming. When Thames lost its franchise in 1992 he formed Roger Bolton Productions specialising in television programmes on religion and current affairs. The company produced BBC One’s Heart of the Matter from 1994 to 1997 and series such as The Devil – An Unauthorised Biography for the BBC. In 2000 they won the Andrew Cross Award and the Christian Broadcasting Council’s award for their BBC Two documentary Converting Convicts on the impact of religious conversions in Reading and Brixton jails.

Roger Bolton is now Chief Executive of Flame TV which he formed with Barbara Altounyan in 2001 making a wide variety of television programmes for terrestrial and digital channels. As a presenter he fronted Channel 4’s Right to Reply series for 6 years and has presented BBC Radio 4’s flagship religious news and current affairs programme Sunday since 1998. He is also known to Radio 4 audiences as the presenter of Feedback.
www.rogerbolton.co.uk

Siân Busby has worked in theatre, film and TV, on both sides of the footlights/ camera. After university she trained in film production, and was Bill Bryden’s assistant on the TV version of the National Theatre’s Mysteries; followed by five years with Opera Factory/London Sinfonietta, working on TV versions of several operas. Since 1985 she has worked on over 250 productions, as a researcher/writer, film editor, assistant director, producer and director.  

Her extensive experience encompasses live events, dance and opera film, and documentaries. She has worked all over the world with top international artists and companies. In 2000, she directed the acclaimed TV-film version of an 18-hour classical Chinese opera, The Peony Pavilion.

A trained dancer, she has made several experimental dance films and is the co-creator of numerous multi-media installations for public spaces including the Los Angeles Tolerance Museum and Hampton Court Palace in London. Her writing credits include scripted documentaries, an award-winning short film and three feature-length screenplays, as well as much educational writing including the script for the award-winning Holocaust Memorial Center in Detroit. Her first book, A Wonderful Little Girl: the True Story of Sarah Jacob, the Welsh Fasting Girl (2003) received widespread critical acclaim. Her second, The Cruel Mother, won the Mind Book of the Year award in 2005 and a children’s book, Boudicca is now available. She is currently working on a novel.

David Docherty (Chair) is a businessman, novelist, academic and columnist for Broadcast and the Guardian. As the Deputy Managing Director of Television, he was responsible for all the UKTV channels, BBC America, BBC Prime and for establishing BBC Three. As the BBC's first Director of New Media, he ran the team setting up bbc.co.uk, Europe's most successful content web site. He also served as a Member of the Board of Management.

He left the BBC in 2000 to lead Telewest's push into broadband media, and he was creatively responsbile for BlueYonder, Telewest's award-winning broadband portal. He then moved on to became chief executive of YooMedia, the UK's biggest independent interactive media group He left YooMedia in 2005 to develop a new convergence media company. He is Chairman of the University of Luton’s Board of Governors, and has served on several government committees on the future of media. He also served as a committee member of the Royal Television Society. His novels include: The Fifth Season, The Killing Jar and The Spirit Death. Non-fiction consists of The Last Picture Show, Running the Show: 21 years of London Weekend Television and Violence in Television Fiction.

Michael Dobbs began his career as an academic in nuclear defence studies and started working for Margaret Thatcher in 1975. Since then he has been both Chief of Staff and Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, Deputy Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi, a newspaper columnist and, from 1998-2001, was the presenter of the BBC’s current affairs programme Despatch Box.

His first political thriller House of Cards, the first of a trilogy featuring the character Francis Urquhart, and sequels To Play the King and The Final Cut were adapted by the BBC into three miniseries which cumulatively received fourteen BAFTA nominations and two wins. 

Since then Michael has written 14 other titles, including a much acclaimed series of novels about Winston Churchill. Winston’s War was shortlisted for the Channel 4 Political Book of the Year Award. He has also been a judge of the Whitbread Book Awards.
www.michaeldobbs.com

Joe Dunlop was born and educated in Scotland at Kilmarnock Academy, The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and for a time at Glasgow University. He started writing at school and penned many bad poems and plays. He was a successful young actor appearing at the RSC and in several tv series and films of the 70’s & 80’s during which time he began writing again. His first three stage plays were produced on tour. There followed radio commissions, first for BBC Schools Radio and then many original plays and dramatisations for BBC Radio Drama.

Joe has written for popular TV series like Fraggle Rock, The Bill and Where the Heart Is, and has written scripts for co-productions with RTL in Holland, with RTE in Dublin and with Scandinavian Radio. His radio work includes the dramatisations of Len Deighton’s Bomber and Iain Banks’ Espedair Street. Joe is currently working on a feature film screenplay Under the Sun, various radio projects as well as a stage play Hell's Gate.

Sarah Lefanu was born in Aberdeen in 1953, was educated in a number of schools in Scotland, East Africa and England, and at Newnham College, Cambridge. She worked for ten years at The Women’s Press, and was responsible for their science fiction list. In the 1990s she edited a series of fiction anthologies: Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind; Colours of A New Day: Writing for South Africa; How Maxine Learned to Love Her Legs and Other Tales of Growing Up; Letters from Home; God; Obsession; Sex, Drugs, Rock’n’Roll: Stories to End the Century. She is the author of In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (winner of the MLA Emily Toth Award) and, more recently, the biography Rose Macaulay. Her radio play about Rose Macaulay, Thin Woman in a Morris Minor, was broadcast on Radio 4.

She has been the presenter of Radio 4’s A Good Read and Radio 3’s Cabinet of Curiosities, and has contributed to Afternoon Story and Radio 3’s Twenty Minutes. Sarah has done numerous abridgements for Book of the Week and Book at Bedtime (including The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Life on Air, Mary Reilly and Purple Hibiscus). Since 2003 Sarah has been Artistic Director of the Bath Literature Festival. She has three children lives in North Somerset.

Nell Leyshon's first radio play, the co-written Milk, won the Imison Award. She adapted her play, The Farm for a Friday night play, and her novel, Black Dirt, for Radio 3. She has also written original dramas including a radio version of Glass Eels, The House in the Trees, and Soldier Boy, about a soldier returning form the Iraq war. The Home Field was a drama documentary for Radio 3. 

Nell’s stage play Comfort Me with Apples won the 2005 Charles Wintour Award for most promising playwright in the Evening Standard Awards, and was shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Award.  In 2007 her adaptation of Don’t Look Now was produced at Sheffield and the Lyric Hammersmith, her play Glass Eels, was produced at Hampstead Theatre, and a new one act play, Winter, appeared in a double bill in Newfoundland, Canada, followed by a UK tour.

Nell’s first novel, Black Dirt, is published by Picador, and was long-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Devotion, will be published in February 2008, also by Picador. She is currently working on projects with recovering drug addicts, and has been working with the Romany Theatre Company. In 2008 she will tutor on an Arvon Course with writers and performers from the Romany community.

Anne Sebba's first job was in the Arabic Services of the BBC. She left this for Reuters in London and Rome where for six years she worked as a foreign correspondent and made regular news broadcasts for LBC. Since then she has pursued a freelance career as a writer, lecturer and broadcaster.

In 2003 Anne proposed and was Associate Producer for the Channel 4 award-winning documentary, The Saint Making Business and in 2008 Anne was consultant for Lady Randy; Churchill’s Mother, also Channel 4, which used her latest biography Jennie Churchill, Winston’s American Mother, published by John Murray in UK and WW Norton in US.

Anne has written nine non-fiction books including Battling For News: The Rise of the Woman Reporter, The Exiled Collector, William Bankes and the Making of an English Country House Enid Bagnold: A Life; Laura Ashley: A Life by Design; Mother Teresa, Beyond the Image. Her books have been translated into Czech, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Japanese and Zulu. Anne has an interest in the future of biographies in the digital age and has addressed a British Library Multidisciplinary Colloquium on Memory where scientists and doctors examined the issue with writers and broadcasters. In 2009 Anne is writing and presenting a documentary for Radio 3 about the pianist, Harriet Cohen. She has written a number of short stories and a radio play about the 1833 trial of William Bankes.

She is on the Executive of English PEN, a member of the Richmond Arts Council Books Advisory Committee and is a trustee of YAD, a charity that aims to bring Palestinians and Israelis together through culture. She has judged several prizes for fiction and non fiction as well as the Biographer's Club prize for an unpublished proposal by a first time author. She has contributed to a variety of radio and television programmes including Start the Week, Woman's Hour and the Richard and Judy show.
www.annesebba.com

Michelene Wandor is a playwright, poet, fiction writer and musician. She is the first woman playwright to have had a drama on one of the National Theatre’s main stages – The Wandering Jew, in 1987, the same year her adaptation of The Belle of Amherst won an International Emmy for Thames TV.
Her radio plays include Orlando and Friends and Corridors of Light and Shadow (Radio 3). Tulips in Winter, a 90-minute drama about the philosopher Spinoza, will be broadcast on  Radio 3 in 2008. Dramatisations for Radio 4 include novels by Dostoyevsky, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Kipling, H.G. Wells, Sara Paretsky and Margaret Drabble. She also reviews and broadcasts regularly on Radios 3 and 4.

Michelene has just completed a new dramatisation of Pride and Prejudice, which returns the Word to Jane Austen and this will be performed at the Watford Palace Theatre in 2008. Her latest poetry collection Gardens of Eden Revisited and her most recent collection of short stories False Relations are published by Five Leaves.
She has also written two influential books on gender and contemporary theatre, Carry On, Understudies, and Postwar British drama: Looking Back in Gender and her history of Creative Writing in the UK, The Author is not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Conceived, and The Art of Writing Drama both published in 2008. As a musician she received a Millennium Lottery Fund Award, to make a CD of the music of Salamone Rossi, the 17th century Jewish Mantuan composer.
www.mwandor.co.uk

Nick Warburton has written scripts for stage, television and radio. He’s published children’s novels, short stories and stage plays, and has run courses on writing both here and abroad, particularly in the Middle East. Touch Wood was produced at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in 2007 and two linked plays under the title of Smoking Gun appeared there and toured in 2008.

His radio play Beast won the Peter Tinniswood Award for the best radio play of 2006. Witness, a five-part adaptation of St Luke’s gospel for BBC Radio Four, was broadcast in December 2007 and will be published on CD in 2009.

His television work includes scripts for Doctors, EastEnders, Born and Bred and Holby City. He was the guest interviewee on Test Match Special during the Headingley Test in 2007.
 

The committee would like to nominate the following to replace retiring members:
 
Mike Bartlett
Mike Bartlett’s stage play My Child was received with great critical acclaim at the Royal Court in May 2007 and that autumn Not Talking, his play for Radio 3, won both the Tinniswood and Imison Awards. His original series for Radio 4, The Family Man, about a politician’s daughter, was broadcast in June 2007 and Love Contract, also for Radio 4, was broadcast in November. He won the Old Vic New Voices Award in 2006 to develop his stage play Artefacts about Britain’s relationship with Iraq. Mike is currently writing a new play for the Royal Court main stage. He is also writing The Steps for Radio 3 and Miss St Andrews, an afternoon play for Radio 4.

Nazrin Choudhury is a writer working across film, television and radio. She embarked on her writing career after winning a 'Focus on Talent' award for her screenplay Scum and went on to complete an MA in Screenwriting at the Northern Film School following a Channel 4 Drama award. Since then she has written for several television shows including EastEnders, Doctors, Casualty and Waterloo Road as well as developing her own authorial drama work for both the screen and radio. Her first radio play, Mixed Blood, won the 2005 Imison Award and she is also the recipient of an Arts Council award for her novel My England. She also works as a professional actress and is currently developing a number of original projects.

Alison Joseph

Biography to follow.

http://alisonjoseph.com

Sue Limb grew up in Cheltenham, where her father worked for GCHQ and her mother was a Primary School teacher. The repressed 1950s gave Sue a sense of the subversive power of comedy, but though at Cambridge she directed plays and performed in Footlights, she never imagined she would be able to write for a living. On graduation, Sue started researching for a PhD in Elizabethan Literature but abandoned it eventually to teach English and Drama in a comprehensive school. It wasn’t until she was thirty that she dared to give in her notice, moved to London and lived a Bridget Jonesy life in a bedsit in Earl’s Court, writing quizzes and features for women’s and teenage magazines.

Her first books were a biography of Captain Oates (deriving from a teenage passion for Antarctica – a touch of Adriana Mole) and the novel Up The Garden Path, which eventually became a radio and a TV series, starring Imelda Staunton. Sue has always loved writing dialogue and the best known of her comedy series for Radio 4 was probably The Wordsmiths at Gorsemere, a Lake Poets parody. In 1989 she was invited to write a domestic column for The Guardian’s new Weekend section. This chronicle of domestic mayhem, Dulcie Domum’s Bad Housekeeping, continued for thirteen years. 

Most recently Sue has been writing comic novels for children and young adults – the Ruby Rogers series and Girl 15, Charming but Insane and sequels, all published by Bloomsbury. She lives on a remote farm in Gloucestershire and has one daughter.

www.suelimb.co.uk

Karen Liebreich studied at the European University Institute in Florence, received a history doctorate from Cambridge, and then worked as cultural assistant at the French Institute in London before going into television. She worked as a researcher and producer on TV documentaries, including The Royal Navy and The Great Ships for the History Channel, and several BBC series, including Timewatch, Cinema Europe and The Last Exodus (Critics' Gold Medal at the New York Film Festival), also writing books for the BBC on business and skiing.

The Complete Skier (BBC Books), became the website www.ifyouski.com. From 1996 she ran The Baby Directory, a publishing and website parenting business which she sold in 2002. Her recent books include The Letter in the Bottle (Atlantic 2006), and Fallen Order (Atlantic 2004). She also project-managed the BBC Masterclasses, an interactive media project for the BBC, and consulted on the Virtual Curriculum. She is a trustee for environmental charities The Dukes Meadows Trust, and the Chiswick House Kitchen Garden. The Family Kitchen Garden will be published in the UK and US in May 2009.

www.karenliebreich.com

The Society is happy to forward any e-mails that you would like to send any of the above.