UK: Katie Boyd joins Screenchannel as creative director

With experience on a string of major factual and factual-entertainment series for several of the UK’s top production companies, including Nutopia, Maverick TV, Optomen TV and Endemol, Boyd arrives to Screenchannel with the objective of expanding its portfolio of returnable series. She'll focus on identifying UK factual and factual entertainment programmes with global potential.

Among her production credits are the Home Front and Restoration for BBC One and Two respectively, Good Sex Guide for ITV, Relocation, Relocation, Gok’s Fashion Fix and Gordon Ramsay’s Cookalong for Channel 4, and House Doctor for Channel 5.

She was a commissioning editor at Channel 4, where she developed, commissioned and executive produced the brands Embarrassing Bodies, Location, Location, Location and SuperScrimpers.

Antony Fraser, CEO of the Rare TV Group, said: ‘There are few professionals with Katie’s breadth of experience and huge network of broadcast contacts, which include commissioners, talent and agents across the UK and US industries. She will be an invaluable asset in our mission to evolve our brands into global properties while consolidating our UK position’.

And Boyd added: ‘The opportunity to expand Screenchannel’s existing slate of programmes and move into new areas is one I couldn’t resist. The Screenchannel team is hugely respected, not only for its track record of successful returning franchises but its journalistic rigour. Combined with my more populist expertise, this is a powerful proposition, both domestically and internationally’.

The production company has just won its first ever Dispatches commission for Channel 4, with other recent commissions including an animated series of shorts, The Real History of Sex, for BBC Three. Other BBC projects include two re-commissions: the eighth series of hard-hitting consumer show Fake Britain and the sixth and seventh series of observational documentary The Sheriffs Are Coming.