News

“Silk” screenwriter Peter Moffat is adapting Jonathan Freedland’s non-fiction book “The Escape Artist,” which tells the true story of two Jews who escaped from Auschwitz.

Margery Bone’s Bonafide Films has secured the rights to Freedland’s book, which is set to be made into a high-end limited series. Bonafide, who have a development and distribution deal with BBC Studios, recently produced Nicôle Lecky’s BAFTA-winning “Mood.”

“The Escape Artist” centers around nineteen-year-old Rudolf Vrba, a Slovakian Jew who manages to escape Auschwitz alongside fellow internee Fred Wetzler, and warn the world about what was happening. Their actions saved the lives of at least 200,000 Jews who were facing immediate deportation from Budapest to the world’s most notorious death camp.

“This is a story of how human beings can be pushed to the outer limits, and yet still somehow endure,” said Freeland. “How the actions of one individual, even a teenage boy,...

Peter Moffat is forging a TV adaptation of UK journalist Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist with Mood production outfit Bonafide Films.

The Your Honor and Criminal Justice BAFTA winner is onboard to write the show telling the astonishing, true-life story of how Rudolf Vrba, a 19-year-old Slovakian Jew, along with fellow inmate Fred Wetzler, escaped from Auschwitz to warn the world about the Holocaust. The pair’s report led to the saving of 200,000 Budapest Jews from immediate deportation to Auschwitz. The project is not yet attached to a network and Bonafide has secured rights for TV.

Freedland is a highly-regarded British journalist who mainly writes on politics and international affairs for The Guardian but has also penned numerous works of fiction, some of which are under the pseudonym Sam Bourne.

Margery Bone’s London-based Bonafide has previously worked with Moffat on BBC drama The Last Post, which starred Jessie Buckley...

Liz Truss is out as UK Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party after just six weeks in office.

Truss announced her resignation this morning during a nationally televised address, saying she had informed the King of her move.

“I recognize given the situation I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative party,” Truss said as she resigned.

A Conservative party leadership race will take place in the coming week to find Truss’s replacement. Her successor will be the UK’s third prime minister this year.

Truss and her beleaguered government have faced severe pressure from opposition parties as well as her colleagues since the publication of a ‘mini-budget’ by former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng in September, which resulted in the British pound falling to an all-time low against the dollar.

Under the plans, which Kwarteng described as a “new era” for the UK economy,...

The British government is conducting an inquiry into reality television after the recent suicide of a participant on ITV’s “The Jeremy Kyle Show,” which resulted in the long-running talk show’s cancellation. Parliament’s culture and media committee announced the probe Wednesday hours after ITV CEO Carolyn McCall confirmed that production on “The Jeremy Kyle Show” would be permanently closed down.

The Jerry Springer-style talk show found itself in the cross-hairs after a participant, Steve Dymond, was found dead last Thursday from an apparent suicide. The week before, Dymond had filmed an episode of show in which he reportedly took a lie-detector test to determine if he had cheated on his fiancée, which he failed. The episode has not aired.

Dymond’s death follows the recent suicides of two former “Love Island” contestants. Sophie Gradon, who appeared on the 2016 season of “Love Island,” died in June 2018. This was followed...

1980: As the World Turns' Wade Bookstore caught on fire.

1988: Another World's Mary and Jason were caught in an explosion.

1988: General Hospital's Anna was held hostage.

1997: Sunset Beach's Annie held a gun on Ben."History speaks to artists. It changes the artist's thinking and is constantly reshaping it into different and unexpected images."

― Anselm Kiefer

"Today in Soap Opera History" is a collection of the most memorable, interesting and influential events in the history of scripted, serialized programs. From birthdays and anniversaries to scandals and controversies, every day this column celebrates the soap opera in American culture.

On this date in...

1966: On Another World, an argument between John and Lee led to a devastating car crash.

1967: Actress Ann Sheridan died at age 51. She played Kathryn Corning in Another World.

1972: On The Edge of Night, Kate Sloan (Jan Farrand) told Cookie Pollock (Fran Sharon) that...

Benedict Cumberbatch’s production outfit SunnyMarch has pre-empted the TV rights to Ambrose Parry’s upcoming novel, The Way Of All Flesh, I can reveal. The book is the first in a new historical series set in the medical world of Edinburgh, Scotland, in the 1840s.

Ambrose Parry is the pseudonym for a collaboration between author Chris Brookmyre and consultant anaesthetist Marisa Haetzman. The novel will be published by Canongate as their superlead title in August 2018. SunnyMarch’s Managing Director Adam Ackland and Executive Producer Claire Marshall inked the deal with Charles Walker at United Agents and now plan to adapt the novel into a returning drama series but Cumberbatch is unlikely to star in this one, I understand.

Based on real historical figures, The Way of All Flesh is set in post-Enlightenment Edinburgh in 1847, a city home to brilliant advances in medical science but also great poverty with a truly unsavory,...

1980: As the World Turns' Wade Bookstore caught on fire.

1988: Another World's Mary and Jason were caught in an explosion.

1988: General Hospital's Anna was held hostage.

1997: Sunset Beach's Annie held a gun on Ben."Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results."

― Machiavelli

"Today in Soap Opera History" is a collection of the most memorable, interesting and influential events in the history of scripted, serialized programs. From birthdays and anniversaries to scandals and controversies, every day this column celebrates the soap opera in American culture.

On this date in...

1966: On Another World, an argument between John and Lee led to a devastating car crash.

Nashville retro-soul outfit The Dynamites and their 65-year-old frontman Charles Walker may not quite measure up to the high standard set by genre exemplars Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, but then again, who does? When The Dynamites follow The Dap-Kings’ lead and combine social commentary with horn-pumped funk on songs like “Somebody’s Got It Better,” and “Do The Right Thing,” the results are more than a little overbearing. But Walker has a likeably earthy, expressive voice, and The Dynamites are a tight, punchy combo capable of J.B.’s-level vamps like “Treadneck” and “The Third Degree,” marked by complex rhythms ...