PBS NOVA Premiere for Wingspan exclusive ...
Archie is Creative Director at Wingspan which he founded in 2008 and Executive Producer of most of its productions. Previously he co-ran Takeaway Media, having spent 12 years moving from Production Trainee to Series Producer at the BBC. In 2019 he was re-elected to serve a third term on the Council of PACT, the UK's trade association for independent film and television.
As a director, Archie has won British and international awards and nominations for films as varied as Joanna Lumley in the Land of the Northern Lights (NTA Nominated), Motherland-A Genetic Journey (RTS Winner, Grierson nominated), Alexander Solzhenitsyn – the Homecoming (RTS Winner, BAFTA nominated) and the Ian Hislop episode from the format-defining first series of Who Do You Think You Are?. As an exec, his credits include all Ian Hislop’s documentaries for the BBC dating back to Ian Hislop's Scouting for Boys (Grierson shortlisted) and such eclectic Wingspan titles as Our Gay Wedding: The Musical (Grierson, Prix Italia and Rose D'Or winner, BAFTA nominated), Don’t Panic: The Truth About Population (RTS Winner), Catholics (Grierson shortlisted Best Documentary Series) , The Joy of Stats (Grierson Winner), How to be Bohemian with Victoria Coren Mitchell and Tunes for Tyrants.
Amongst more obvious fayre, Archie also relishes making entertaining but uncompromising primetime programmes about seemingly unprepossessing subjects. These range from statistics, probability, logic, demography and genetics to sacred music (Angelic Voices), historiography (Ian Hislop’s Olden Days) and diplomacy (Getting Our Way). In 2016 he became an unlikely Musical Theatre impressario, staging the Greenham Common production Beyond the Fence in the West End as the climax to a huge scientific experiment, conceived by Wingspan (and documented in our Sky Arts series Computer Says Show) to explore computer creativity, by seeing how far computers could get in writing a full-length musical. Archie is especially proud of the fact that thanks to the two series of BBC Two’s unlikely etymology hit Balderdash & Piffle, of which he was Series Editor, 69 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary have been revised.
He is less proud of the fact that, back when he was a lowly AP at the BBC he co-originated the idea for Have I Got News For You?, securing its commission in its pre-Hat-Trick development phase, but showed so little business savvy that he told his bosses he didn't want to work on a quiz show but that he knew some people who did...
Since 1999 Archie has also been involved in one capacity or another in the long-running UK Confidential programmes for BBC TWO and Radio 4, based on the state papers released annually to the National Archives.
Archie’s book, An Indian Affair – From Riches to Raj charts the relationship between Britain and India before 1857.
.jpg)
