Did I say we had been busy? Well we have.
Hot on the heels of the Guardian article about female TV presenters, The Refinery was asked to write an article for a national magazine based on the experiences we had had making a documentary with Simon Donald (“Him Off The Viz” – yours for just £16.99 from Amazon).
Simon was fronting a documentary for us (which is still in production), courtesy of a broadcast development grant from the Wellcome Trust. The subject of the documentary was Multiple Sclerosis; Simon’s link to the condition being that his Mum, Kay had become debilitated with it when he was born. Her health declined over the years robbing her of her ability to walk, and subsequently, even to talk or communicate with Simon and his brothers; her “beautiful boys.”
She died in the 1990’s and the documentary was Simon’s way of looking back at events which he had felt unable to address emotionally at the time. Part of the process involved a visit to a neurologist to undergo an exam typical of the kind that a patient with MS would experience.
Imagine the bombshell when the neurologist turned to Simon and said “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but you have MS too”. The documentary follows Simon as he comes to terms with his diagnosis, and when they heard about it, MS Matters, the magazine for the MS Society, asked us to write up some of Simon’s story as an article which appeared in their July/August edition. He even got the front page, the handsome bugger.
As for the documentary – keep watching this space.
The Refinery has been *extremely* busy of late – which is no bad thing. One of the various commissions we have had have been written word. Lindsay was commissioned to write a piece in the Guardian about the dearth of female science presenters. Post-commission it became clear that there was not, in fact, a dearth of female science presenters so much as a dearth of commissioning editors putting them on screen.