 |
| BBC Radio 4’s docu-drama podcast about efforts to tunnel under the Berlin Wall seems set to be made into a TV show. |
One of last autumn’s audio successes was Tunnel 29, the docudrama series on Radio 4. Since then, the riveting yarn about the digging of a secret tunnel in 1962 under the Berlin Wall to help people escape from the east has been listened to by about 5 million people. Now it is to be turned into a TV series by Sister Pictures, makers of the award-winning Chernobyl, with Johan Renck, who directed the Soviet nuclear disaster drama, expected to be at the helm.
Rights to Tunnel 29, which are held by the BBC, were fought over in a fierce contest which also involved Neal Street, producers of Sam Mendes’s 1917 movie, and See-Saw, whose past credits include the Oscar- winning The King’s Speech. And, as if that’s not enough spin-offs for the Radio 4 hit, its writer/narrator Helena Merriman has been commissioned by Hodder&Stoughton to write a book about the remarkable escape. For this, she has obtained stories from further survivors and gained access to thousands of pages of documents from the Stasi, the East German secret police. What next? Tunnel 29: The Musical?
More artistic “morphing” - this time from the hyperproductive writer and dramatist James Graham, who is turning his play Ink, which tells of Rupert Murdoch and the early days of his Sun, into a film. The play premiered at London’s Almeida theatre in 2017, before moving to the West End. The movie will be made by Canada’s Bron Studios, which was also behind Bombshell - another story about a Murdoch creation, Fox News. Starring Nicole Kidman and Charlize Theron, it centred on the appalling Roger Ailes, boss of Donald Trump’s favourite channel, and the sexual abuse of female presenters.
Graham, whose Channel 4 drama Brexit: The Uncivil War starred Benedict Cumberbatch as Dominic Cummings, has also recently adapted another of his own plays, Quiz, as a three-parter for ITV, to be shown next month. ITV, of course, is home to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? from which Quiz’s ‘coughing major’ incident emerged.
Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester, knows the value of the arts. After all, he was secretary of state for culture in 2008/09 before leaving the Commons. Burnham established a special arts fund for the city and its surrounding areas as a top-up to Arts Council financing. Now he has increased its budget by nearly a quarter, mainly for smaller
venues like Sheba Arts, which helps immigrants and refugees, and places outside the city such as Wigan Steam and the Oldham Coliseum theatre.
It’s interesting that a smaller percentage of people attend arts events and venues in Manchester than in Birmingham or nearby Liverpool. While it’s good that Burnham has boosted this fund, I wonder if the move was linked to the now postponed mayoral election in early May. Worrying, however, for Burnham are the continuing delays and rising costs of the city’s huge new arts centre, the Factory, currently being built on the site of the old Granada TV studios. I hope it’s ready, as planned, for Manchester’s biennial international arts festival in 2021.
