Television Presenter
He recently presented Blueprint, a three-part television natural history series, which ran from 31 March 2008, as the centre-piece of the most ambitious multi-platform broadcasting project in the history of BBC Northern Ireland. The Blueprint season united TV, radio and online to explore 600 million years of Ireland's natural history. For this reason, the series provoked complaints to the BBC from young earth creationists ahead of transmission. The series was shortlisted for the Celtic Film and Television Awards. Other TV presenting roles include BBC Northern Ireland's weekly late-night television interview series "William Crawley Meets ...", face-to-face interviews of 30 minutes in duration with leading thinkers and social reformers from across the world, including the philosopher Peter Singer, the scientist Richard Dawkins, the writer and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, and the gay bishop Gene Robinson. He presented Frozen North (BBC One Northern Ireland), a documentary examining the possible future impact of global warming on Northern Ireland; Festival Nights (BBC Two Northern Ireland), television coverage of the 2005, 2006 and 2007 Belfast Festival at Queens; Hearts and Minds (BBC One), a television political review programme; What's Wrong With ...?" (BBC One), a six-part round-table current affairs discussion programme; and More Than Meets The Eye (BBC Two), a series investigating folklore in contemporary Ireland. In 2010, he presented a "Spotlight" television investigation about the Catholic clerical abuse crisis from Rome.
In his televised interview with the evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins, Crawley challenged the use of the term "delusion" in Dawkins's best-selling book The God Delusion. Dawkins accepted that likening the term "delusional" with mental illness may infer the wrong connotations.
On 26 February 2007, he wrote and presented Sorry For Your Trouble (BBC One), a one-hour documentary about death and dying, in which he spoke openly about a "struggling" relationship with his late father and made a visit to his father's grave for the first time in two decades. On 15 September 2008, he wrote and presented a follow-up documentary, Dying For A Drink, which examined Northern Ireland's relationship with alcohol, and in which he discussed his father's alcoholism. Crawley also got drunk on-screen as part of a binge-drinking experiment. In 2009, he wrote and presented Losing Our Religion, which looked at the place of faith in contemporary life and why an increasing number of people are abandoning organised religion. In 2010 and 2011, he was credited as "Associate Producer" on the network BBC One Sunday Morning Live programme fronted by Susanna Reid.
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