Richard Bradley

TV Real Weekly, February 27, 2008

Managing Director & VP of Content

Lion Television

Even before getting involved in television, Richard Bradley was fascinated by storytelling and history. He taught in Kenya, won the Gladstone Prize for History from Cambridge University and was an editor of African and Caribbean fiction and history at the publisher Longman. He then joined the BBC. “I spent 12 years traveling the world courtesy of the BBC’s documentary department, making dozens of programs on various subjects,” says Bradley. While acknowledging his great fortune at having worked on renowned BBC documentary strands such as Forty Minutes and Timewatch, Bradley started to feel the urge to produce programs on his own.

In 1997, with partners Jeremy Mills and Nick Catliff, and joined shortly after by Shahana Meer, Bradley set up Lion Television, which was acquired by All3Media in 2004. “The idea right from the start was to make programming that we believed in and cared about, but also to run the company as a business,” says Bradley. “There were lots of small independents out there who were really one-woman or one-man bands making a show now and again. But we believed if we could build a foundation and a reputation for delivering programs then people come back to us again.”

And indeed buyers have come back to Lion again and again after Bradley and his team gave proof of the quality they could deliver. Shows like Crusades for The History Channel; African School for the BBC; Guns Germs and Steel for National Geographic TV and PBS; the Emmy Award-winning Days That Shook the World for BBC and The History Channel; and Egypt’s Golden Empire for PBS and the BBC. Today, Lion Television has a production staff of more than 200 people in its London, Glasgow, New York and Los Angeles offices.

Bradley was among the first producers from the West to set productions in China and the rest of the Asia-Pacific region. He forged a joint venture with Phoenix Satellite Television and together they made Atlas: China for Discovery and Channel 4. He also began a series on China and the first two installments were The First Emperor. “Excerpts from our show are part of China’s Terracotta Army exhibit in the British Museum, which is exciting.” The third installment will make its debut at MIPTV and looks at the origins and secrets of the Forbidden City. “It tells the story of an extraordinary emperor called Yung-le, who is both a visionary and tyrannical Ming Dynasty emperor,” explains Bradley. “It’s very hard to imagine the place as it once might have been populated with tens of thousands of eunuchs and concubines and a city within a city within a city. I wanted to try to recapture the magic of that and we discovered that about eight years ago a Chinese businessman had rebuilt an 80-percent replica of Forbidden City just outside Shanghai. We used that as our backdrop to tell the story. It’s a co-production between the BBC, All3Media International and The History Channel.”

In line with his passion for history, Bradley is also working on Horrible Histories, 13 half hours for the BBC based on a series of very popular books for children by Terry Deary. “It’s history with all the nasty bits left in,” explains Bradley. “I like that because it gives us the chance to make a series that might influence a whole generation of young people.”

Making sure Lion Television’s programs have an impact on people is important to Bradley. “The dream of all producers is to create a show that defines a generation; I don’t think we’ve made that yet, but that remains the elusive goal,” he says. In the meantime he continues to enjoy his work. “It’s the best job in the world being able to follow your passions, explore things that you are interested in in a way that most people never can. Whether it’s going to parts of the Great Wall of China that people will never be able to see, or meeting a survivor of World War II who has an amazing story to tell.”

—By Anna Carugati