Edinburgh TV Festival Unveils Event Dates, First Sessions

The Edinburgh TV Festival has revealed the event dates and first sessions of the 2020 lineup, as well as an overview of how this year’s digital festival will look.

This year’s Edinburgh TV Festival is slated to take place from August 24 to 27 in a digital format. There will be a full timetable of sessions over four days, taking in the most pressing issues and exploring them with insight, analysis, humor, irreverence and forensic dissection.

The BBC One drama Sitting in Limbo will be the subject of a session exploring how writer Stephen S. Thompson took his brother Anthony’s lived experience of the ongoing Windrush controversy to the TV screen. Thompson will be joined by director Stella Corradi and lead actor Patrick Robinson to discuss the impact the drama has had and what it tells us about bringing black British stories to TV.

Festival Masterclasses will include Normal People, with the stars of the BBC Three drama Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal in conversation with their director Lenny Abrahamson and executive producer Ed Guiney from Element Pictures.

In an exclusive, interactive session, Grayson Perry will encourage delegates to create art. He will be joined by Philippa Perry to bring the Swan Films and all3media international show for Channel 4, Grayson’s Art Club, to the Edinburgh TV Festival in an Edinburgh Does… special. Introduced by Sunetra Sarker, Art Club will reflect on the role of art on TV, the importance of culture in a crisis and appraise the artistic efforts of submissions from delegates.

Further speakers and sessions will be announced in the next few weeks. The MacTaggart Lecture, controller sessions, masterclasses, interviews and panel discussions, as well as the TV Foundation’s talent schemes—The Network, Ones to Watch and TV PhD—will all be on the agenda. Delegates will also still be able to discuss the issues, hold networking meetings and partake in speed-pitching sessions with commissioners.

Festival passes can be purchased through www.thetvfestival.com/passes and will include access to all events at the festival and the pre-festival digital weeklies program. All events and activities for this year’s festival will be free to freelancers.

Further, a free pre-festival digital session has been scheduled for June 16 with Rita Daniels and Danny Horan from Channel 4, and executive producer Lucy Pilkington from Milk and Honey Productions, to discuss the upcoming films from black British filmmakers that will explore racial issues within society that have been given new urgency with the Black Lives Matter movement in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of law enforcement.