News

The UK entertainment industry has seen several notable announcements recently. Quay Street Productions, known for the hit Netflix series “Fool Me Once,” will produce a new BBC thriller titled “The Guest.” Starring Eve Myles and Gabrielle Creevy, the show explores the relationship between a business owner and her employee. As the employee works as a cleaner, she becomes enthralled by her employer’s encouragement but their bond evolves into psychological manipulation.

Writer Matthew Barry, who worked with Quay Street on “Men Up,” crafted compelling scripts for “The Guest” with tension, twists, and relatable characters. Producers Nicola Shindler and Davina Earl praised Barry’s incorporation of wit and humor into the complex characters and plot. Quay Street’s success with “Fool Me Once,” the most watched Netflix show earlier this year, shows their ability to engage audiences.

In other developments, the Creative Diversity Network (Cdn) joined with ScreenSkills to promote inclusion.

‘Fool Me Once’ Producer Quay Street Lands Next Project For BBC

Fool Me Once producer Quay Street Productions has landed a BBC thriller series starring Eve Myles and Gabrielle Creevy. The Guest comes from Matthew Barry, who was also behind Quay Street’s Russell Davies-produced Men Up drama for the Beeb. The Guest centers on the toxic and beguiling relationship between a successful business owner, Fran, and her employee, Ria. Ria has never had the time or opportunity to think about what she might actually want from the world. So, when she starts cleaning for Fran, she’s intoxicated by this confident and self-assured woman who encourages her to take control of her life, but soon a manipulative cat-and-mouse game emerges. Myles leads BBC hit drama Keeping Faith, while Gabrielle Creevy will soon star in Sky’s high-profile Mozart series Amadeus as the musical genius’s wife. The Guest...

HBO’s The Last of Us was named best English-language drama in the international program at the 2024 Rockie Awards on Tuesday night.

The hit series based on the video game franchise also earned the Grand Jury Prize at the marquee awards show for the Banff World Media Festival. The festival’s jury also named Fox’s The Masked Singer the best competition series and game show, and Peacock’s Poker Face series, created by Rian Johnson, was named the best English language comedy series.

Elsewhere, BBC’s The Graham Norton Show from the U.K. won for best comedy and variety show, and the U.K. pubcaster’s Best Interests picked up the best limited series crown. The 2024 Rockie Awards like previous years turned into a shoot-out between American and British TV producers, with BBC’s Men Up winning for best feature film and Fox’s Family Guy comedy coming...

Men Up is a brilliant new dramatic feature that aired on the BBC over Christmas, but is still available to watch on iPlayer. It’s a stirring true story about the rise of viagra in Wales, and manages to find a brilliant tonality, whereby it’s light in parts, yet takes the matter incredibly serious, resulting in a film that studies male mental health in a unique, and important way.

To mark the release of this film, we had the pleasure in speaking to the four leading roles, and below you can find our chats with Iwan Rheon and Paul Rhys, and then with Steffan Rhodri and Phaldut Sharma. We discuss the film in great detail – and we speak about the Welsh, and how this project celebrates Welshness in a unique (and deserving!) way. Watch both interviews in their entirety, below.

Iwan Rheon & Paul Rhys

Steffan Rhodri & Phaldut Sharma

Synopsis

Swansea,...

BBC drama The Tourist returned for its second season last night in the lucrative New Year’s Day 9 p.m. GMT (1 p.m. Pt) slot to just 2.2M viewers, beaten comfortably by ITV’s post office drama.

The episode, which peaked with 2.5M, attracted less than half of the audience of the first season’s opener from exactly the same slot two years ago, according to Barb ratings data supplied by overnights.tv. It will likely consolidate much higher as viewers watch on iPlayer over the coming weeks, where all eps are available.

The Jamie Dornan-starrer, which has moved from Australia to Ireland this season and follows a victim of a car crash who wakes up in hospital with amnesia, will launch on Netflix in the U.S. in several weeks and is also co-produced for Australia’s Stan and Germany’s Zdf. Season 1 was co-produced for the Max...

Iwan Rheon, perhaps best known for his portrayal of Ramsay Bolton in the hit series Game of Thrones, is starring in a new BBC drama called Men Up, and he had to film a particularly “awkward” scene for it involving his member.

The project documents early trials for the drug Viagra, which helps men who struggle to maintain an erection. In the project, Iwan, 38, plays one of the men who participates in the trial.

In one scene, a doctor played by his friend Aneurin Barnard has to measure his penis. Iwan unpacked filming the scene during a recent interview.

Read more about Iwan Rheon’s memorable scene…

“You’ve got to be professional,” Iwan reflected during a conversation with Digital Spy.

He continued, admitting, “Well, it’s funny, because Aneurin and I have got a long history. We pretty much did our first job together in drama school in London,...

He stars in two of this year’s most talked-about films and will be appearing in the BBC’s erectile comedy this Christmas. It’s a remarkable career resurgence for the Welsh actor, who didn’t really know what sex was till he was 24

When I arrive, slightly late, at the small restaurant near Paul Rhys’s home in central London, there he is, all in black, camouflaged against the dark walls, a thick journal in front of him. “I have to write every day or my head explodes,” he explains, putting it to one side. He has 30 years’ worth of material, which surely would make a brilliant memoir. I’m picturing witty asides about great co-stars, while he excoriates himself – and the tale of how a working-class Welsh boy became a posh actor, made some eccentric career decisions when Hollywood beckoned, and is now having a well-deserved career boost...

Amazon Prime Video has greenlit a UK comedy-thriller from It’s A Sin EP Nicola Shindler’s Quay Street and Stay Close scribe Charlotte Coben.

Dead Hot will star recent breakouts Bilal Hasna (Extraordinary) and Vivian Oparah (Rye Lane) as protagonists Elliot and Jess, while Penelope Wilton and Peter Serafinowicz have also boarded. It will launch next year on Prime Video in the UK and Ireland and be sold internationally by ITV Studios.

Show is set in present-day Liverpool, where twentysomethings Elliot and Jess are best friends united by a bond of grief at losing Peter—the first and only love of Elliot and Jess’ twin brother. When Elliot meets Will, he starts to think he can put the past behind him, but when Elliot learns Will has his own dark secrets, just as Jess is contacted by somebody claiming to be her brother, it sets into motion a determination for...

Shindler’s credits include ‘It’s A Sin’ and ‘Happy Valley’.

The scripted television industry has “changed enormously” for women, according to UK producer Nicola Shindler, who was honoured at Series Mania last night with the festival’s Women in Series Award 2023.

Shindler made her name producing Russell T Davies hit drama Queer as Folk in 2000. When she began her career as a script editor there had been very few female producers with whom to work. “But my generation kind of moved up in the UK to be producers. A lot of those women have gone on to be executive producers.

More details are emerging about the planned Doctor Who spin-offs, one of which is set to feature Jemma Redgrave, as showrunner Russell T. Davies says an episode of the new series is “one of the greatest things I’ve ever made in my life.”

Since striking a mega international distribution deal for the show with Disney+, Davies, who is showrunning the series for the second time, has been clear that spin-offs will arrive as part of an expanded ‘Whoniverse.’

One of those spin-offs will be based on military research organization Unit and will star Redgrave as Kate Stewart, BBC sources confirmed. Redgrave has played Stewart in 10 episodes of Doctor Who since 2012 and the spin-off will focus on her running of the unit, which has appeared on and off in Doctor Who for the past 50 years.

She will potentially appear in the Doctor Who Christmas special later this year alongside new Doctor Ncuti Gatwa.

Nicola Shindler, CEO of Quay Street Production and the producer of such acclaimed British series as It’s A Sin, Queer as Folk and Happy Valley, has been named the recipient of this year’s Woman in Series award by international television festival Series Mania.

Series Mania founder and general director Laurence Herszberg and Francesco Capurro, director of the festival’s industry section, the Series Mania Forum, unveiled the news on Wednesday, timed to International Women’s Day.

The Women in Series award, presented in association with female professionals associations the European Women’s Audiovisual Network and Pour Les Femmes Dans Les Médias, honors the vision and leadership of “a remarkable woman from the audiovisual industry.” Shindler will receive the prize at a gala ceremony in Lille, France on March 21.

A prolific producer, Shindler has been a driving force in high-end British drama for decades. She’s worked with the likes of Russell T. Davies,...