Pilot Light TV Festival: Mad Men, Brass Eye & more

Is TV the new cinema? Despite a hundred think pieces telling us so, the answer is no. But that doesn’t mean TV isn’t going through a bit of a purple patch at the minute, and TV festival Pilot Light launched last year to honour this fact.

The festival celebrating the small screen on the big screen is back again with another eclectic lineup of television old and new. Already announced is a Brass Eye 20th anniversary event, which centres on a screening of the six episodes from the only full series of Brass Eye in 1997, as well as a new documentary about Chris Morris’s seminal show by Michael Cumming, Brass Eye’s director. Reports are the doc features plenty of unseen footage from the show’s cutting room floor.

Another highlight looks to be a retrospective of Sugar Rush, the cult drama based on the novel by Julie Burchill about Kim, a 15-year-old who has just moved to Brighton and develops an earth-shattering, hormone-surging crush on her new best friend, Sugar. Olivia Hallinan, who played Kim, joins the screening for a Q&A.

We’re keen to see some of the mint fresh shows served up by Walter Presents, the Channel 4 video-on-demand service which brings the best of European television to our TV screens. There biggest hit so far has undoubtedly been German Cold War spy thriller Deutschland 83 – will Professor T or Young & Promising, the two shows being premiered in Pilot Light’s Walter Meets strand, make similar impacts?

The former is a Belgian crime drama while the latter is tantalisingly described as “Norway’s answer to Lena Dunham’s Girls”. The three leads from Young & Promising – Siri Seljeseth, Gine Cornelia Pedersen, Alexandra Gjerpen – will be in attendance for a Q&A, while Italian producer Walter Iuzzolino, the man behind Walter Presents, will be in town to discuss curating the platform.

One of the shows that helped herald this current golden age of television was Mad Men, and Pilot Light mark the much-loved series' tenth anniversary with a rare big screen showing of pilot Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, followed by a panel of Mad Men experts assembled to discuss the show and its impact on pop culture and television.

Pilot Light also looks towards the future of TV with a selection of interesting-looking web series. The New Comedy Heroes programme promises to “look at emerging future comedy icons on the web”, although the most eye-catching show in this lineup looks to be the world premiere of mockumentary Getting Back with Dave Benson Phillips starring the legendary children’s TV entertainer from the title. Web series programme Life on Film, meanwhile, features web series that give us a glimpse into the everyday lives of people around the world, ranging from a Newcastle Chinese takeaway in Jade Dragon to an Israeli hairdresser in Hani’s Barber Shop.

Other web series programmes include Best of the Fests, which offers up a selection of award-winning short form series from various web show festivals, including Berlin, Vancouver, Sicily, Toulouse and Dublin; Web Series Shuffle, meanwhile, features an eclectic selection of web series content for all over the world, from Lebanese documentary Zyara to craft ale comedy Brewstars; and the fina web series lineup is Independent TV Pilot Showcase, which includes the world premiere of comedy Life in Black starring Liam Neeson, among others.

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Pilot Light TV Festival, 4-7 May, HOME, Gorilla and Manchester Central Library

For full programme details and tickets, head to pilotlightfestival.co.uk