22 March 2012

Endemol UK today announced that Dick Colthurst has been promoted to Managing Director of its factual indie Tigress Productions.

Dick joined Tigress in 2005 from the BBC where he was an Executive Producer responsible for programmes including ‘999’, ‘Ray Mears’ Bushcraft’ and innovative projects such as ‘The Trench’.

His brief as Executive Producer at Tigress was to develop a portfolio of adventure programming for the company, which had previously been best known as a wildlife producer. This started with three series of Everest: Beyond the Limit for Discovery, following ordinary people to the summit.

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09 December 2011

We’re a little way into our conversation and adventurer Aron Ralston is lost in thought. ‘It was the most beautiful moment of my life’, he says. ‘The intensity of emotion, the euphoria…It was ecstacy’.

He can see from my face I’m having trouble believing him. So he tries again.

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01 October 2011

Alone in the Wild. That’s the title of the television programme this is all about. On another island (a much nicer island, I might add) at this moment, Dancing on Ice judge Jason Gardiner is beginning his second of seven days’ isolaton, having moved in after Aron Ralston moved out. Ralston is the chap who sawed off his own arm when trapped by rocks on a hiking trip up a canyon in Utah, an episode immortalised in 127 Hours Later.

Full article below

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30 September 2011

Parachuting celebrities into the wild to survive on their own for a week was considered by many to be too great a risk, says Dick Colthurst.

When an experienced fixer in Africa says your project is so dangerous that they want nothing to do with it, you’re obliged to think hard about what you’re trying to do.

The idea was simple enough. We wanted to drop well-known personalities in the wilderness to find out what it’s like to survive in the wild completely on your own. The experience had to be absolutely authentic – and that was the fixer’s problem. They were used to carefully arranged ‘jeopardy’ and ‘danger’ for TV programmes, and took fright when someone wanted to do it for real.

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