Jury's Out

Nice guy Chris Jury. Talented too. He wrote a batch of episodes of The Bill in the days when they were 30 minutes long and again when they returned to an hour long slot.

I caught up with him recently and he told me how he landed the job putting the words in the mouths of Bill favourites.

How Lovejoy’s Catchpole became a punk director: Chris Jury goes behind the camera

Extract: Producing theatre is just one of the talents Chris Jury has developed since choosing life behind the camera instead of in front of it.

Indeed, since leaving Lovejoy he has enjoyed an interesting career directing episodes of EastEnders and Coronation Street and scripting episodes for The Bill.

“I’ve been writing and directing now for 15 years. I left Lovejoy to direct a short film and then retrained in areas such as post-production management using some of the money I had earned from Lovejoy.

“I then went on to make another couple of short films and set up a company. Later I was asked to join the BBC as a development executive but that didn’t work out so I left, only to find that suddenly I couldn’t get arrested.

“I’d had an idea for a cop show so I wrote it and sent it to the script editor of The Bill, and she asked if I wanted to do a script for them - that’s how I started writing for The Bill.”

When the producer of The Bill moved to the BBC’s Casualty, she took Jury with her.
“I then did Casualty, Holby City, Doctors . . .” he says.

“But while all this was going on I still wanted to be a director. Out of the blue a mate of mine on EastEnders rang up and said, ‘Do you want to direct a block of EastEnders?’ So, for five or six years I alternated between writing and directing.”

Edinburgh Evening News 21 Aug 2009