Working here

At ITV I'm the rights manager for commercial affairs for ITV network and what we essentially do is acquire rights from producers such as Talkback for the X-Factor where we buy transmissions for the ITV1 and the ITV2 transmission, plus we have exploitation online, so itv.com, we have 30 day catch-up on that website so it's my responsibility to make sure that our dot com team are aware that they have those rights and then they can make that content available for viewers online. My career at ITV started in 1998, I started here on a modern apprenticeships scheme at Granada TV in Manchester, as it was called then, in the HR department, I then went from there to the casting department where I was a casting assistant on lots of different ITV dramas including Coronation Street. I then moved to business affairs, in 2007 I relocated to London and then I came to work in commercial affairs and that's how I've ended up what I'm doing now. I really enjoy working at ITV, hence being here for 13 years, it's really good for opportunities to work in different departments, the environment's great because it's a nice creative atmosphere and everyone's really friendly and approachable and I hope to be here for much longer.

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.