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Script : Ronan Bennett and Alan Rusbridger Director : Bill Anderson Notes : Anna Friel is perhaps best known for her role as Beth Jordache in the Channel 4 soap opera Brookside and, in particular, for 'that' kiss with Nicola Stephenson. The role made more headlines when her character was imprisoned, along with her mother, for the murder and subsequent burial under the patio of her father… Other series she has appeared in include GBH, Cadfael (A Morbid Taste for Bones) and Tales From the Crypt (About Face). · Phil Davis has appeared in numerous film and television series including Quadrophenia, Robin of Sherwood (King John in The Prophecy, The Betrayal and The Pretender) and Births, Marriages and Deaths. More recently he has appeared as DI Baird in The Safe House, as Archie Jones in the Channel 4 adaptation of Zadie Smith's White Teeth and played Chaz Hadley in Favours, an episode of BBC One's Murder in Mind. · Max Beesley first came to public attention when he starred in the BBC's adaptation of the Henry Fielding novel Tom Jones in 1997 and managed to stay in the headlines due to a relationship with ex-Spice Girl Mel B. ·
Over the past twenty-five years Tony Haygarth has appeared in
a number of other telefantasy programmes including Count
Dracula, Kinvig in which he played Des Kinvig, both
seasons of The Borrowers, and The Wanderer
in which he played Godbold. For the past five years he has played
Vic Snow in ITV's Sunday evening drama Where the Heart
Is. In 1995 he played Father Spode in The Prophecy,
the first episode of the ITV anthology series Chiller.
Script : Ronan Bennett and Alan Rusbridger Director : Bill Anderson Notes : · Ron Cook also appeared in the BBC's 2002 adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles as Barrymore, Sir Henry Baskerville's butler, and has been cast as Parker, Lady Penelope's chauffeur, in the forthcoming, live-action Thunderbirds movie. ·
Ronan Bennett was also responsible for writing the highly-controversial
Rebel Heart, the 2001 drama series that detailed
the 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland.
·
FTW - Feed the World ·
Horizontal gene transfer ·
VRSA - Vancomycin-resistant staphylococcus aureus. ·
Zomede
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 After receiving a tip-off about a number of deaths in a country hospital, Roy Lodge and Lucia Merritt, old hack and photographer for The Post newspaper respectively, are despatched to investigate. Expecting to find nothing more than a Doctor killing his patients, events take an unusual turn when Lucia is kidnapped and her camera, containing photos of a meeting between the hospital's Dr Tolkin and Rachel Greenlaw, the head of corporate affairs at pharmaceutical company Zomede, is stolen. As
their investigations continue, they discover that Lucia's kidnappers
and the mystery infection at the hospital are connected, in a conspiracy
that not only involves Zomede, but also MI5 and the multinational
corporation FTW. All of the links lead back to Hurst Farm,
a test site for a new strain of genetically modified wheat… In a particularly ironic twist, Fields of Gold found itself at the centre of a media frenzy in the weeks prior to its broadcast, due to the comments of Dr Mark Tester, a researcher into GM crops at Cambridge University, who had been asked to review the scientific content of the script. Accusing the script-writers of ignoring his recommendations, he went on to question the validity of many claims made in the programme and, in particular, the methods used by Mark Hurst to transfer the gene from hospital waste to the GM wheat. Unsurprisingly,
the resultant press frenzy managed to split along the usual lines, with
The Times and The Daily Telegraph taking the side of Mark
Tester and getting in some rather personal jibes at Bennett
and Rusbridger. The Guardian and Observer, backing
their own, took the opposing view with Ronan Bennett penning
an article for The Observer on June 2nd in which he claimed
Fields of Gold had 'become the centre of an ugly little conspiracy
by those with a vested interest in discrediting it and personal grudges
to settle.' Whatever
the merits of the programme, the resulting publicity seemed to do little
for the viewing figures as the opening episode on June 8th was
watched by only 5.7 million viewers, with 5.4 million tuning in for
the second episode a night later which, rather disappointingly, had
a fifteen minute news bulletin in the middle. Only 5 million people
tuned in for the final half hour. To date, Fields of Gold hasn't
been repeated on any channel or released on DVD or video. |