Renowned prop master Bobby Warans is set to be honored with the BAFTA Special Award at this year’s British Academy Television Craft Awards, which is set to take place on April 23 in London. The award recognizes Warans’ outstanding contribution to production design across more than 100 television programs including Absolutely Fabulous, Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, French and Saunders, Harry Hill’s TV Burp and Strictly Come Dancing. Warans began his career in production buying with the BBC, where he took on a six-month contract and became their youngest prop buying assistant in early 1970. He then went on to be a production buyer on Top of the Pops and over the course of his career, he’s worked with legendary comedy duos Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise as well as Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett.
Investment group Tin Roof Media has taken a majority stake in London-based indie production company Outline Productions. With its focus on factual entertainment formats, Outline will sit alongside factual indie Blink Films, which Tin Roof acquired last year. Outline, which was founded in 1999 by Managing Director Laura Mansfield and Creative Director Helen Veale, has a solid factual entertainment slate that includes Channel 4’s UK’s Best Place to Live with Sarah Beeny, the Pixie McKenna fronted Staying Healthy: A Doctor’s Guide and Trevor Phillips fronted Has Political Correctness Gone Mad? as well as Geri’s 1990s: My Drive to Freedom, presented by former Spice Girl Geri Horner airing in March on BBC 2. It’s currently in production on social experiment Gender Neutral School for BBC2 and alternative medicine show Health Freaks, originally produced for Channel 4.
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James Murdoch, CEO of 21st Century Fox, is set to deliver a keynote address at the Royal Television Society’s Cambridge Convention in September 2017. Other speakers at the biennial event include: The Crown producer and Chief Exec of Left Bank Pictures Andy Harries; The Grand Tour Exec Producer Andy Wilman; Michelle Guthrie, Managing Director of Australian Broadcasting Corporation; and Sharon White, Chief Exec of Ofcom. Additional speakers are yet to be confirmed. The event, which takes place in Cambridge from September 13-15, is this year entitled A World of Opportunity. In a year in which the UK will start to forge its own new wider relationships, the convention will explore how the television industry can make the most of this and other opportunities at home and abroad.
