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I'm a production executive at ITV, I work in the non-scripted department for ITV studios. I work with the entertainment development team which means that I budget their ideas once there's a spark of interest from somewhere I work with them to get together all of the figures, which is quite interesting because it's working on programmes that absolutely haven't been seen before, so I get first look at what we're up to which is great. I also work with the global entertainment formats consultant, assist her in getting the formats information out to the various companies that decide to make our formats, not just our own production companies but our formats get sold all over the world. We've also just sent somebody out to China a couple of times because there's a Chinese version of 'Surprise Surprise' which is in production at the moment. I came in on a three month contract and I've just enjoyed the people that I've worked with - it is the people that make the difference here.

Here at ITV I'm one of three drama commissioners, we commission new drama programmes for the channel and my job in particular is to spear head development of new projects, so what that means is I shepherd projects right from the start of the idea all the way through to production and then each project once it's shooting we divide up so we all take different kind of shows to sort of oversee while they're being made.

I've been in TV for about 19 years and my path to commissioning, I would say quite a classic one in that I started as a script reader, I became a script editor, I did 5 years of script editing, I was a producer, I made programmes for about 5 years and then I became an executive producer and then I became a commissioner, so my background is very much in making programmes and script based work. I feel really strongly that if you're going to do this job you have to know what it's like to make the programmes.