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New TV festival launches in Manchester

Calling all TV fans! Manchester’s first ever festival of TV, Pilot Light, takes place from May 5th-8th
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Pilot Light is a brand new festival dedicated to celebrating the best in episodic content from around the world.

Taking place in Manchester and Salford over four days, the festival will feature screenings of all kinds of TV shows new and old and exclusive panels featuring the writers, producers, directors, actors, and commissioners behind them.

The festival kicks off with the season 2 premiere of UKTV’s critically acclaimed comedy Hoff The Record followed by a Q&A with the cast.

The show follows 80’s icon David Hasselhoff playing a parody of himself as The Hoff, down on his luck, relocating to England to look for new career opportunities. He is backed up by his beautifully British UK team, a morally bankrupt, sweary and inept gallery of characters akin to the slightly useless rabble in The Thick of It. Following the screening there will be a Q&A with actors Mark Quarterly (soon to appear in Red Dwarf) and comedian Fergus Craig.

Friday’s festival highlight is a retrospective screening and panel surrounding Nathan Barley, Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker’s scarily prophetic satire about an idiotic, pretentious media figure living in East London. As part of the event there will be a Q&A with Charlie Condu (Coronation Street) who played Jonatton Yeah? in the show. Chairing the Q&A will be Andrew Harrison who wrote ‘Totally Mexico, how the Nathan Barley nightmare came true’ for the Guardian.

On Saturday evening, the festival will screen the banned BBC drama The War Game. 50 years on from its initial cinema release, The War Game remains one of the most challenging & unsettling works ever produced for British TV.

It follows a fictional story of a nuclear attack on Kent that seemed so real, that it was deemed unsuitable for broadcast and would be banned for 20 years, despite being nominated and winning the Oscar for Best Documentary in 1967. The screening will be accompanied by a rare Q&A with the film’s editor Michael Bradsell, who will give audiences a rare opportunity to hear about his and Peter Watkins work on this controversial film.

One of the biggest festival highlights is a 10th anniversary screening and panel dedicated to 2006’s Snuff Box, the short-lived but legendary black comedy created by Matt Berry and Rich Fulcher. Find out why the likes of Simon Pegg, Paul Rudd and more regard the show as one of the peak achievements in modern British comedy. The screening will be followed by a very special Q&A with Matt Berry (The IT Crowd), Michael Cumming (Brass Eye) and Charlie Hanson (Extras).

In addition to television highlights, Pilot Light TV Festival will also play host to an eclectic selection of panels and screenings based around some of the best indie and web series from around the world. Be sure to reserve tickets as most of the web series screenings and panels are free of charge.

The Pilot Light TV Festival will take place at two venues -HOME and the University of Salford

For more info www.pilotlightfestival.co.uk

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