Early Television Career
David Liddiment invited Bea to join BBC Entertainment as Head Of Talk and Specials. This led to re-launching Parkinson and devising a number of event specials – from the 2 hour gala celebrating BBC TV’s 60th Anniversary, TV 60 – Aunties All Time Greats, to BAFTA Awards, to Ruby Wax Meets Madonna, to documentaries series such as the Emmy winning Carrie Fisher on Hollywood (co-production with A&E).
She devised the weekly entertainment show Saturday Night Clive. Following its success on BBC TWO the show was transferred to BBC ONE.
Ballard also produced the majority of Clive James’ other output for the BBC. She devised and produced the award-winning, 8 part - documentary series Fame in the Twentieth a co-production with PBS, shown both in the UK and the US. Ballard also produced the documentary series for BBC ONE in which Clive James profiled various cities around the world - Clive James Postcards…. from Paris; New York; Miami; Paris.
Prior to joining the BBC Ballard worked at LWT in Entertainment where she produced a wide range of entertainment shows, from An Audience With (Peter Ustinov; Billy Connolly), to The Late Clive James, to Michael Aspel and Company, to BAFTA Awards.
Ballard started her television career at the BBC, on John Craven’s Newsround, where she worked as a journalist and assistant producer.
Read more about this topic: Bea Ballard
Famous quotes containing the words early, television and/or career:
“The girl must early be impressed with the idea that she is to be “a hand, not a mouth”; a worker, and not a drone, in the great hive of human activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to look forward to a life of self-dependence, and early prepare herself for some trade or profession.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.”
—Frederic Raphael (b. 1931)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)