Meet the Delegates: Factual Fast Track

Factual Fast Track is a
reputation-building career development programme that fast tracks established, ambitious,
Producers and Series Producers to move up the career ladder and work on larger scale and higher
budget productions.

Bernadette Morris has worked for almost 20 years across factual entertainment, drama
and documentaries for RTE, C4, HBO, BBC and TG4.

Starting her career in television as a script supervisor on TG4 soap opera; ‘Ros na Rún’, she then
made the transition into factual production.  Since 2012, she has worked as a freelance
producer/director and Series Producer for many of the independent production companies in
Ireland.  Projects include award winning feature Documentary “How to Defuse a bomb” and Celtic
Media Festival Award winning show “Collusion”  for RTÉ.

Denise Glass is a self-shooting Producer/Director who has worked on everything from
science to blue light obs doc, to consumer, to the outdoors – and everything in between.

Her credits include C4s Food Unwrapped and Supershoppers; BBC1s The One Show and Bargain Hunt; and
BBC Scotland’s Paramedics on Scene and Landward.  During her career she has lived and worked in
all four nations, but Scotland is most definitely home. Denise has a background in journalism and
loves the opportunities that TV gives to learn about new subjects and places.

Jane Magowan is an RTS NI award-winning director and producer with a track record in
intelligent, thought-provoking, and entertaining documentaries, factual and factual entertainment
series.

She began her career in London working on history documentaries at Wall to Wall and on RDF’s Bafta
award-winning series ‘Faking It’. Back home in Northern Ireland she has continued to work on a wide
range of factual content, from ‘The unswung 60s!’ with Cilla Black for UKTV, to the archaeology
series ‘Bone Detectives: Britain’s Buried Secrets’ for Channel 4.

Jon Morrice spent 18 years working for the BBC in both London and Glasgow, working
his way up from runner through to series director.

He has produced and directed multiple long form documentaries across a variety of genres, many of
which he self-shot, and has directed hundreds of VTs for prime-time magazine shows like The One
Show, The Culture Show and Landward. Now freelancing, he is currently working as the lead producer
on a forthcoming landmark natural history series made by Maramedia in Glasgow for Terra Mater in
Austria and BBC Scotland/BBC2.

Jude McCaffrey is a Belfast-based Series Producer with over a decade of experience
working on entertainment formats.

Since getting his start on Northern Ireland Screen’s ‘Aim High’ training scheme, he has worked in
both development and production across different genres including fact-ent, formatted factual and
studio entertainment. In recent years, he’s been working as a Producer and Series Producer on
established formats including ‘Mastermind’, and ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ as well as new
series such as ‘The Hit List’, and ‘Fastest Finger First.’

Linda Sands is an award-winning documentary producer director.

Her film Sex, Myths and the Menopause with Davina McCall (C4) recently won the AIB
International Award for Broadcasting. She has just finished an Imagine documentary on Booker prize
winning author Douglas Stuart, and is about to start a Lucy Worsley drama doc. Linda cut her teeth
as a BBC production trainee in Belfast before PD-ing on various projects such as the living history
franchise Back in Time (BBC Two), and Britain’s Most Historic Town (C4).

Laura-Jane McRae is an experienced producer/director and edit producer who has
worked across a variety of genres including observational documentary (Mountain Vets BBC2), Arts
(Young Musician BBC 4), and CBBC (All Over the Place, Saturday Mash Up), as well as originating her
own commissions (Making Babies, BBC Scotland).

After 13 years at BBC Scotland, she became freelance and has recently enjoyed working on Series 3
& 4 of Susan Calman’s Grand Day Out for Channel 5, and Series Producing Scotland’s People 2021
and 2022 for BBC One Scotland.

Richard Weller has worked across Factual Entertainment, Specialist Factual, and
Documentary.

He has spent the last 10 years working as a Series Producer/Director on Irish and UK productions,
including “Expert Witness”, “Blitz Cities”,  and “Matron Medicine and Me” for BBC1, “The
Shelbourne” for RTE1, “The Big House” for TV3 , “Holidays and Roads from Hell” for Channel 4 and
five series of The Chronicles for BBCNI, receiving nominations for RTS, Broadcast and IFTA awards.
Richard  began in TV as a runner on commercials, and now lives and works in Northern Ireland.

Ruth Mulcahy has worked across a range of genres, from WWII History documentaries to
True Crime to lighthearted list shows.

Ruth has also worked overseas in factual TV from Australia to Germany, and has seen how each has
their own unique way of developing shows and how that knowledge might be transferred to the UK. For
the past 4 years Ruth has been Series Producing, starting with a fast turnaround current affairs
series for BBC Scotland, and is currently completing the 2nd series of “Spooked” a flagship
paranormal series for the Discovery Channel.