Read this great review of ‘Targeting Bin Laden’ by the New York Post. Premiering TONIGHT on History US at 8pm!
Jane Root: reflections on a stellar career
by David Tiley, Editor of Screen Hub, Australia
Friday 12 November, 2010
Co-start Wall to Wall. Run BBC2. Move to US as Chair Discovery Network USA. Leave huge bureaucracies. Start Nutopia, a small production company. Do giant productions… and stay reasonably modest and human. Jane Root is delivering a plenary at SPAA next week.
The scale of Jane’s career is well described on Wikipedia – her professional biog, the Wall To Wall story, the Shed Media history, and the background on BBC2.
On the telephone, she was practical and unassuming. In the middle of writing her plenary speech, she explained that “I’m going to be talking about where ideas come from, and how organisations can run themselves to help people come with great ideas. And I’m going to be talking about some of the great ideas I’ve been fortunate enough to be close to, when they came to fruition. Some of them are my ideas, some are other people’s ideas.”
That notion of an idea underpinned the whole conversation. I asked her what gave her personal joy, and she briskly listed her family, nature and cooking. “I’m a person who enjoys a lot of things,” she said. Then she plunged into the personal dimension of ideas.
“I’m going to talk at some point how some of the best ideas in my life happened at a really terrible time. My mother was dying, and as a result of trying to have something to talk to my father about in hospital, I was coming up with ideas. We had a long discussion about Great Britain, which turned into this big, big show we did. In the middle of a terrible moment, I was finding a common language to have fun with people.”
Find the full article at Screenhub Article
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Jane Root has appointed former Channel 4 boss Michael Jackson and ex-Endemol chief creative officer Peter Bazalgette to the board of her new indie, Nutopia.
Jackson, currently non-executive chairman at STV, and Bazalgette, non-executive chairman of Sony Pictures Television’s UK production business, will form a four-strong team including managing director Laura Franses, who was previously acting managing director at Raw TV and chief operating officer of Amaze TV. continue
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Former BBC2 controller and Discovery Channel president Jane Root has resurfaced as head of a production start-up, Nutopia, which has already received its first commission.
There has been much speculation over Root’s next move since she left Discovery in November 2007 after three years, saying she wanted to return to the UK to pursue other opportunities. continue