After its most successful year to date in 2008, True North is beginning a strong 2009 with a raft of new commissions, including films for Cutting Edge, Dispatches, Extraordinary People and a new-six part crime series.
The commissions come hot on the heels of the company’s Panorama special, Shannon: The Mother of All Lies which gained BBC One’s highest current affairs audience of the year (5.6 million viewers and a 23.5% share) when it aired just hours after Karen Matthews was found guilty of the kidnap and false imprisonment of her daughter in December.
Cutting Edge: Addicted to Surrogacy for Channel 4 follows so-called serial surrogate mums – women who have had numerous babies for other people. Around a thousand surrogate babies have been born in the UK over the past two decades. And in recent years, half of them have been born to serial surrogates: women who’ve been surrogates more than once with some women having seven, eight or even twelve babies. But the truth behind what drives these women is far more complex than money or altruism. Addicted to Surrogacy follows the extraordinary stories of the women addicted to giving babies away. The film was commissioned for Channel 4 by Dominique Walker, produced and directed by Lucy Leveugle and Executive Produced for True North by Jess Fowle.
Extraordinary People: The Man Who Shared His Liver gets inside the unit pioneering live donor liver transplants at Leeds’ St James’ Hospital and follows one 35-year-old man as he risks his own life to donate half his liver to his terminally ill mother. The film was commissioned for Five by Sue Davidson, produced and directed by Peter Gordon and Executive Produced by Jess Fowle.
After gaining access to some of the highest profile crime stories of 2008, including back-from-the-dead canoeist John Darwin (ITV1’s One Man and His Canoe: The John Darwin Story), and ITV1 Real Crimes Angel of Death and Killer on the Run, True North has also been commissioned to make a number of crime films.
Killer in the Family
for the Crime & Investigation Network tells the stories of six cases of familicide. Authored by behavioural psychologist Laura Richards, the series uncovers the motives of family killers and traces the pre-existing signs of their potential to kill.
The six part series follows True North’s first commission for Crime & Investigation Network Killer Couples which is presented by best selling crime author Mark Billingham and is currently being broadcast on C&I’s new HD service. Both series are series produced by Luke McLaughlin, and Executive Produced by Glyn Middleton.
The company is also working on a forthcoming film for Channel 4’s Dispatches, its first history film for National Geographic International, and is currently delivering series five (episodes 80-100) of long-running obs-doc series Animal 24:7 which is due for transmission in the Spring on BBC One Daytime.
True North’s Chief Executive Glyn Middleton said
“This raft of new commissions is great news. It’s clear that working with a wide range of broadcasters is the best way to cope with the uncertain climate at the moment – and this list of challenging and substantial commissions supports that view.”