Factual Entertainment 

Wil, Aeron a'r Inca/Wil, Aeron and The Inca - S4C

Comedy 

Still Game - BBC Scotland

Factual Series

Scotland’s Game - BBC Scotland

Kieran Hegarty Award for Innovation

Voices 16 - BBC Northern Ireland

Drama series

Line of Duty - BBC

Radio Documentary

Aberfan - BBC Radio Cymru

Radio Magazine Show

Rhaglen Aled Hughes/Aled Hughes Programme - BBC Radio Cymru

Radio Music Programme (Live)

Blas Ceoil - BBC Radio Ulster

Radio Sports

Spòrs na Seachdain/Weekly Sport - BBC Radio nan Gaidheal

Radio Station of the Year

BBC Radio Cymru

Single Documentary

Dunblane – Our Story - BBC One

Sports Documentary

Crash and Burn - BBC NI and RTE

Spirit of the Festival & History

Eoin Mac Néill: Fear Dearmadta 1916/Eoin MacNeill: The Forgotten Man of 1916 - BBC Two NI and TG4

For the full list of winners visit the Celtic Media Festival website.

A new BBC One Drama My Mother and Other Strangers, starts on Sunday 13 November. Set in Northern Ireland during World War Two, it follows the fortunes of the Coyne family and their neighbours as they struggle to maintain a normal life after a huge United States Army Air Force (USAAF) airfield, with 4,000 service men and women, lands in the middle of their rural parish. Writer Barry Devlin blogs about his background and how he came to create the drama.

I was born after the Second World War in the parish of Ardboe, a flat alluvial region on the western shore of Lough Neagh: the nearest high ground was Slieve Gallion 20 miles away: fishing for eels was the livelihood of 60% of the parish.

Ardboe was unremarkable except for two things. It had one of the finest Celtic crosses to be found anywhere in Ireland, dating from the ninth century and it had a vast airbase slap bang in its middle, dating from 1942.

USAAF Station 238 – Cluntoe airfield - was a Combat Crew Replacement Centre which trained B17 and B 24 pilots to fly in the cloudy skies over Europe. It was a big base with more than 4,000 servicemen stationed within its perimeter. The Americans left in late 1944 but the RAF took over and No 2 Flying Training Centre stayed there until 1955.

That’s the version of Cluntoe that I remember vividly. The way home from school ran along the perimeter of the airfield and the planes took off and landed directly overhead.

It was impossible not to be excited by how low they flew, so close that every panel and oil streak and stencil mark was visible, so close that the faces of the instructors and the (sometimes whey- faced) students could be clearly seen.

To this day I can still remember the fluttery burble of the Gypsy engines of the Prentices and the vivid rasp of the radial engined Harvards (the ones with the hole in the nose, as the local boys called them).

Even more unforgettable were the heart-stopping moments when the Harvard engines cut out at the top of a loop directly above and it seemed like they might never start… and then the reassuring chainsaw buzz as they headed off across the lough.

Those are my memories. 

But there were other memories in play: the recollections of my mother and father and of the local men and women who vividly remembered the Yanks: even my oldest two sisters, Anne and Marie had been taken for a quick taxi in a bomber on VE day and sent home laden with goodies by the jubilant airmen.

It was these stories – and the sense of loss that permeated them at the way the parish had been divided and the community at its centre had been uprooted and moved - that started me thinking about a series set in the period when the airfield was at its busiest.

I imagined a family facing two ways: outwards, towards the airfield and its exciting but hugely intrusive new life: and inwards towards the parish which had remained the same in essence for hundreds of years.

My father owned a pub and I remember the RAF officers who came to drink there, sometimes bringing their wives: the locals drank there too and sometimes - packing bottles for my father - I caught a glimpse of the incongruity of two sets of lives in a juxtaposition desired by neither and often heightened by the ongoing matter of the Six Counties and Irish nationhood.

So I made Michael Coyne a publican/farmer. My mother was a teacher and so I made Rose Coyne a teacher. I knew the body language, as it were, of both occupations backwards, so writing their diurnal tasks was easy: second nature.

At the same time I took care to distance my creations from these people whom I knew so well.

Rose Coyne is English: wilful and volatile and exotic: a blow in, a stranger. She is a creature entirely of my imagination.

Michael is closer to my father in that he is a local hero. But my father’s moral compass was even stronger than Michael’s: he did what was right whatever people thought about its wisdom or utility.

There was no Emma. I had six sisters but none of them is a bit like the geeky ingénue of the series.

If anyone is close to a person who really existed, it’s probably Francis: geeky, priggish, wanting to be loved and usually a yard or two off the pace. Now, what small boy does that remind me of..?

My Mother and Other Strangers, starts at 9pm  on Sunday 13 November on BBC One.

Barry Devlin is writer, My Mother and Other Strangers

• Read the press pack on the Media Centre

On Friday (7 October) the PPI (Phonographic Performance Ireland) Radio Awards 2016 were held in a ceremony in Kilkenny. BBC Radio Ulster/Foyle took home 12 awards, including winning Gold in the Full Service Station of the Year category.

The station won six Gold, three Silver and three Bronze awards at the prestigious event. BBC Radio Ulster/Foyle secured 20 nominations in all across its full range of output, including speech, news and current affairs, specialist music, comedy and Irish Language.

The BBC award winners were:

• BBC Radio Ulster was named Full Service Station Of The Year
• BBC Radio Foyle was awarded a Bronze in the Local Station Of The Year category
• BBC Radio Foyle won Gold in the News Story category
• BBC Radio Foyle Breakfast won Silver in the News Programme category
• BBC Radio Ulster’s Seamus McKee was named as News Broadcaster of the Year, while BBC Radio Foyle’s Enda McClafferty picked up the Silver award    
• The Nolan Show – When Nolan Met Sir James Galway  - won Silver in the Interactive Speech Programme category, while Talkback, presented by William Crawley was awarded Bronze in the Interactive Speech Programme category for their programme on Black Eye Friday
• ATL, which this year celebrates 30 years on the air, won Gold in the New Irish Music category
• Live at the Sunflower won Bronze in the Comedy programme category
• Sound superviser John Benson received a Gold in the Best Live Sound category for his work on the BBC’s coverage of the City of Derry Jazz Festival
• John Toal was awarded Gold in the Specialist Music Broadcaster category

Fergus Keeling, Head of Radio for BBC Northern Ireland said: “We are passionate about providing our audiences with programmes that reflect their lives and their interests and we work hard daily to deliver fresh, engaging and informative content. This has been an incredible year for BBC Radio Ulster/Foyle as we remain the most listened to station in Northern Ireland, but it is also a measure of our success that our efforts have been recognised by our peers in this way, at the PPI Awards. I’m enormously proud of the presenters and teams for their success.”

BBC presenters the late Sir Terry Wogan and Paddy O’Flaherty were remembered for their work in the ‘Lest We Forget’ section of the awards.

See a full list of winners on the PPI website

Almost four decades have passed since The Undertones, a young band from Londonderry in Northern Ireland, hit the headlines with their coming of age anthem ‘Teenage Kicks’. To mark their 40 years together, the band performed a special gig at the BBC’s Blackstaff studios in Belfast. In this post, BBC Radio Ulster Senior Producer Owen McFadden, reflects on four decades of music memories.

It’s hard to believe that it was nearly forty years ago. I was ‘mis-spending’ my youth in Belfast’s now legendary Good Vibrations record shop when boxes of the in-house label’s fourth single release arrived.

Terri Hooley, whose shop and record label these were, eagerly put the 7” vinyl on his turntable. Billy Doherty’s drums signalled the arrival of a genuine classic. Teenage Kicks had landed. Days later, the band would be climbing the narrow stairs at Good Vibrations to fold the picture sleeves of their first 45.

It seemed as if The Undertones had come from nowhere, but of course they’d been together for two years by then, energised by punk and rocking the Casbah in Derry.

However, once they’d committed their talents to tape in a tiny Belfast studio, news travelled fast. And the rest really is history. A besotted John Peel played Teenage Kicks twice in a row one evening in September 1978. Seymour Stein, boss of Sire records, tuned in on his car radio, immediately dispatched an A&R man to Derry to sign the band. Soon, they were on Top Of The Pops. They had a hit record.

The Undertones success and the positivity it brought to this part of the world have endured. Everyone knows (and loves) an Undertones song: Jimmy Jimmy, Here Comes The Summer,Get Over You, My Perfect Cousin.

And now, incredibly, the band is celebrating its fortieth birthday, skilfully combining rock ‘n’ roll with the everyday commitments of families and day jobs.

In a special performance at the BBC’s Blackstaff Studios in Belfast to be broadcast on BBC Radio Ulster on Bank Holiday Monday, they’ll be playing their debut LP in all its wonderful entirety, and looking back to how it all began in conversation with presenter Stephen McCauley.

And if I close my eyes, I might just find myself back in Good Vibrations, with Terri Hooley pogoing ecstatically to that musical magic conjured in the Derry air.

So hard to beat.

Owen McFadden is Senior Producer at BBC Radio Ulster

• The Undertones at the BBC is on BBC Radio Ulster, Monday 30 May at 3pm
  
• BBC Radio Ulster is available via 92-95FM & DAB digital radio, digital TV and online at bbc.co.uk/radioulster
• Catch-up on the programme via BBC iPlayer from Monday 30 May after broadcast

Applications are open for this year’s Aim High training scheme, a partnership between BBC Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland Screen. Here, former recruit, Dominic Coyle looks back on his participation in the scheme in 2011/12 and reflects on how the training helped him achieve his goal of directing and producing his own documentary.

In 2011 I was working various part-time jobs, supporting my ‘voluntary’ (re: unpaid) job as a musician. I had little previous media experience, apart from a short stint taking listener’s calls at BBC Radio Ulster. I really liked (and still do) speech radio and was hoping to find work in radio production.

I found out about the Aim High scheme through the newsletter sent out from the Careers section of the BBC website. All BBC trainee schemes are advertised here and it is well worth signing up to the mailing list. I was interested in the potential creative side of television production and so applied.

It was a fairly long application process with many stages, culminating in a ten day ‘bootcamp’ to select the final trainees. The bootcamp was an intense week and a half at BBC Wood Norton training centre. Whilst there, we were given many talks and several tasks to work on both individually and in groups. One task was to make a short documentary film using the basic filming/editing techniques we had learned. We also filmed an episode of a studio-based current affairs discussion programme, taking turns at working in various parts of the production (gallery/camera/floor managing etc.)  These tasks were more about finding out how we worked under pressure and with others, rather than to simply see how much we already knew about making television. There was a huge amount of pressure on at this competitive stage, but this was good grounding for the everyday challenges that occur in television production.

When I first got accepted onto the 18 month scheme in October 2011, I had no idea about which part of TV I wanted to work in, let alone the role I was best suited for. Aim High trainees could be placed in either a BBC Northern Ireland department (factual/current affairs/entertainment/radio) or in one of Northern Ireland’s several successful independent production companies.

I ended up working only for independent production companies during my time on Aim High, mainly making programmes commissioned for the BBC. My first two placements saw me working on the development of entertainment/game show formats. I really enjoyed the creative side of this role, and spent a lot of my time coming up with fun gameplay ideas. There were also drama/film placements available and some ended up working as trainee Assistant Directors/Sound Recordists on Game of Thrones and The Fall.

We formed a tight group on the course right from the start and I am still in contact with most of my fellow trainees, who are all continuing to develop their careers in various parts of the television and film industries. I currently work in the same BBC department as a fellow past ‘Aim High-er’. There have been moments where we have been working together on particularly exciting shoots and caught each other’s eye in disbelief, recognising the fun we’re having three years on from being fresh faced recruits.

The Aim High scheme is individually tailored for each trainee, and real thought from the scheme’s organisers is put into which placements would best suit each trainee. Training was mainly organised through NI Screen (BBC’s main partner in the scheme). We received frequent training in everything from story-telling to self-shooting camera courses. The scheme provides each trainee with a mentor. There were mentors from senior parts of both the BBC and the indie sector. My mentor was Dermot Lavery from Double Band Films, who gave me invaluable guidance on how to make the most of the Aim High scheme and beyond.

All of the trainees were quite worried about whether or not we would find work after finishing Aim High. We all did soon after the end of the scheme. I got my first TV job within BBC working on an observational documentary. I then went on to work on The One Show for the next 18 months (BBC NI has a small team making around 50 VTs for the show each year). Being a former Aim High trainee seemed to be well regarded, and thankfully the BBC were keen to help me progress with my development.

After one year as researcher on the show I was sent on a single camera directing course and was given a handful of films to produce and direct for The One Show as a trainee director. My first film was with Warwick Davis, taking him back to the home where he grew up. Warwick couldn’t have been a better person to work with on my first film – he was very funny and at ease and the finished piece turned out well.

In February 2014, BBC Northern Ireland made a call for documentary ideas. I submitted an observational documentary idea which I had been thinking about for several years (before I had even worked at all in media) about life at Clogher Cattle Mart (one of NI’s largest cattle markets).  I had already filmed a little with some of the potential characters and was able to show a taster tape to help get the idea fully commissioned. I spent the last three months of 2014 in the countryside among farmers and their cattle, self-shooting material which I then edited at the beginning of 2015.

The programme aired in April 2015 and, much to my relief, it went down very well with both the people of Clogher and within the BBC. This has been my proudest moment in my career so far - seeing an idea right through, producing and directing from beginning to end. It was just a little over two years ago that I was pushing to get my first researcher credit, and I think it’s completely thanks to the training and support provided by the Aim High scheme that I have been able to progress so quickly to producing and directing my own film.

Aim High is open to people of all ages and backgrounds, ensuring that the industry finds its new creative talent from the largest possible pool of people. These schemes recruit on a what you know, not who you know basis - the way it should be. 

Those who are thinking of applying should look at the application now - don’t leave it in until the night before the deadline! I can’t recommend that enough. There’s quite a bit of thinking required and it’s well worth reading the questions and thinking for a day or two about how you could answer before typing anything. It’s worth writing a draft version of your responses and having someone else read through them to ensure your answers are clear, concise and are actually answering the question you have been asked.

Dominic Coyle, Assistant Producer and Director

• Watch Dominic's films To the highest bidder and Making a bullock
• Read the press release about Aim High
• Apply for the Aim Higher scheme (Deadline 24 July 2015)

From modest beginnings in 1924, local BBC services have grown in scope and editorial ambition. Local voices, talent and the creative industries are now better represented on the BBC’s networks. And we continue to be a major sponsor of writing and performing talent – commissioning plays, readings and music and providing a unique mix of programmes that reflect the needs, experiences, hopes and concerns of local people.

Innovation, editorial and technical, is the lifeblood of broadcasting. It’s been a feature of our work from the very beginning. We are always looking for new ways of doing things, using the power of technology to extend the reach of BBC programmes and to make them fuller, better and more engaging. In all of this, we retain the excitement and idealism of 2BE’s radio pioneers and the BBC’s deep commitment to its audiences – who are the only reason we exist.

Broadcasting’s golden age is always still to be created. There are always new stories to be told, talent to be discovered and improvements to be made. With your continued support, the BBC’s airwaves will remain a place of gathering and transformation. We have a rich heritage and want to build on all that it has taught us and to make it anew.

Happy Birthday BBC Northern Ireland, and here’s to the centenary of local broadcasting…

Peter Johnston is Director, BBC Northern Ireland

• Listen to the concert online via BBC Radio Ulster
• Director General Tony Hall visit BBC Northern Ireland on 8 October. A speech he gave at Ulster Hall is available on the BBC Media Centre website. 

When we first piloted the project in the West Midlands and in the West of England, we were worried we might not find enough stories. We need not have been concerned; the quality so far has been incredible and we think they’ll surprise, shock, inspire and delight you.

As we prepare to launch them early next year (the stories will go out on the BBC’s Local Radio stations, with highlights on Regional TV in England and on national TV and Radio in the Nations), our ambition is for World War One at Home to shine a new light on a devastating war which changed the course of world history. I hope you will come away with new insight into its impact right on your own doorstep too. 

Craig Henderson is Head of English Regions Programming.

• Read Adrian Van Klaveren's blog 'Introducing the World War One Centenary on the BBC'.
• Details of the launch of the World War One Centenary are available in a press pack on the BBC Media Centre website.