Happy Birthday Bill Broomfield - 13 February

Bill Broomfield with some crew members on Motherland

Happy Birthday Bill Broomfield, Bafta winning and Emmy nominated Director and DP on many and varied iconic television shows ranging from Motherland, the IT Crowd, The Bill, Blackadder, Dalziel and Pascoe, Horizon, Newsnight, Panorama and many others over the course of a nearly fifty year career. Bill was always destined for the film industry, having started making Super 8 Films when he was still at school.

After A Levels he studied at the London College of Printing for two years and then applied to the BBC in 1977, when he was 20. He and five others were selected from hundreds of candidates and he started out at the Film Department of Television Film Studios, now Ealing Studios. He worked his way up from Trainee to Clapper Loader to Focus Puller to Operator and was a DoP by the time he was 27.

He started out in Documentaries, one of the many memorable ones being Inside Chernoybl, made for Horizon. He also worked on a number of projects for Arena in Music and Arts, including “Your Honour, I Object!”, a courtroom drama featuring Bob Guccione versus Ken Russell in a breach of contract case, regarding disagreements over a script for a film version of Daniel Defoe's "Moll Flanders". 

Bill left the BBC in 1995 and became a freelancer in order to work in drama. His first job was on “A Mind to Murder” for Anglia Television. Roy Marsden starred as Scotland Yard Commander Adam Dalgleish. Bill worked steadily on a great variety of productions between 1997 and 2006. One particularly impressive and enjoyable assignment was for the BBC World Service in 2004, helping to set up a Cambodian TV series along the lines of Casualty.

He worked as a drama consultant, training Cambodians to produce their own TV shows. A lovely spin off from this was that when the BBCWS project was finished, he helped to create an independent called KMF (Khmer Mekong Films) making films for cinema and TV, which is still going today more than 20 years later. An achievement to be proud of!

Bill’s final series was Count Arthur Strong, which he worked on from 2013 – 2017. He’s now enjoying his retirement and learning to play the drums. In his own words: “I was never bored, thanks to the experience I gained from working at BBC TFS, where I was required to work on all genres.

Bill on Count Arthur Strong with Steve Delaney (L)

I enjoyed the variety of being able to do a documentary one week and a drama shoot the next. I travelled all over the world and had great fun with great people.”