077299/Z/05/Z: All About Me / Changing Lives (DVD)

Project Summary:Changing Lives combines: a 50 minute television drama for a wide mainstream audience (or 2 xs 25 minutes) a website exploring some of the issues behind the programme an educational DVD, for secondary schools and colleges a teachers' support booklet regional seminars to launch and promote the drama and resources and provoke debate. The project will bring biomedical ethics to life through an original and compelling television drama aimed at a mainstream audience, with a focus on the under 35s. The drama will engage its audience through strong and distinctive characters who are struggling with complex experiences. It will challenge stereotypes and encourage our audience to think about the issues, their own choices and the collective responsibility of society. Our audience has an appetite for intelligent, enquiring drama featuring multi-dimensional characters who are authentic and believable, who grow and change. They have a curiosity about new and unfamiliar ideas, which can be easily undermined by polemical, single-issue dramas, removed from their own emotional experience. So it is our mission to feed their curiosity by developing a drama which is subtle, intriguing and exhilarating, both emotionally and intellectually. The story will raise biomedical ethical questions and reveal scientific issues that can be pursued in greater depth through the specially-created off-screen materials. These will form the basis of a general audience website and an educational DVD for use in secondary schools and colleges. They will also be the focus for our regional seminars.

Grant Holder:Ms Hilary Durman

Organisation:Resource-base

Financial Year:2004/2005