ABOUT
NAOMI HARVEY
HPD SFH, MNCH ( Acc) NCP (Acc) BA Hons
Early years...
From a young age, I held a passion for storytelling.
I would get lost in books, engrossed in the lovable characters and fantastical worlds of Enid Blyton, Jill Murphy and Roald Dahl. I even tried my hand at journalism as a press packer for BBC's Newsround.
As a teenager, I was laughed at by my careers advisor for saying I wanted to work in Television.
I didn't listen but after being rejected for work experience by the BBC I experienced the first taste the resilience needed to survive a career in TV.
Refusing to give up, I tenaciously wrote to every production company across the UK seeking work experience. From the ages of 16 to 21 I spent every holiday on the sets of many film and TV shows. From making tea as a Runner on This Morning to locking off locations on Dr Who and herding audiences on Loose Women and Trisha.
Finally, I graduated and stepped into my first job as a Researcher with Endemol Studios in 2003 where I experience the thrill of live TV.
Television...
Over the next 16 years, I worked across
many genres, from factual entertainment through to drama, documentary and specialist factual.
I spent time as a Script Researcher for the BBC, a 3rd AD on Hot Fuzz and a Researcher on Dispatches. I worked up to Assistant Producer on observational documentaries, where Ifound a natural talent for developing contributor relationships and securing access with social services, the police, the NHS.
Finally, I found a long term home in Development. I spent over a decade developing ideas as a Producer and Head of Development from mega indies to small startups. I had doors opened to me by commissioners and I had to bash some down just to get noticed. However, I relished the challenge of finding new ideas, getting access and pushing them across the line.
In recent years I moved into story producing and have enjoyed the combination of developing ideas and then the opportunity to work on them directly. I noticed the space for true documentary began to shrink over the years and so I began to turn to audio documentaries to get my story fix.
Podcast...
Like so many millions of listeners out there, I have become a podcast addict.
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I still have a passion for visual storytelling. However, but long-form documentary podcasts have created a novel space to get back to the authored, investigative genre that has become rare on terrestrial television.
This new space for investigative storytelling that dives deep into characters and complex stories but with all the tropes of a thriller or drama which takes me back into the same place I got lost in as a child in my books. I loved to play armchair detective, riding alongside the author, as they unravel the story bit by bit.
So in 2019 I took a break from full-time TV and have been developing up new Podcats series ideas which can also translate into scripted mini-series.
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Watch this space!