Lunch with a Commissioner: Simon Raikes, National Geographic

Grab your homemade sandwich of choice and get ready to dine with a different commissioner every week. Over lunch, participants will be able to join a commissioner and listen to their insights as well as ask questions at the end of the hour.

These are great sessions for our freelance community who don’t normally get the opportunity to chat to commissioners. So, if you’re a head honcho who normally has all the commissioners on speed-dial this session isn’t for you! Please keep this in mind when booking. Thanks for your support and understanding.

Speaker

Simon Raikes joined National Geographic in May 2018 as commissioning executive producer, and became a commissioning editor in August 2018. He oversees and commissions a broad range of singles and series for the US and international Nat Geo channels and Disney + including Buried Secrets of the Bible, Drain the Oceans, Car SOS, Lost Cities with Albert Lin, Mars: One Day on the Red Planet, and The Real Right Stuff.

Before joining Nat Geo, Simon was creative director, Factual at Tony Jordan’s Red Planet Pictures, where he developed and delivered the hit series Secrets of the SAS: In Their Own Words and Inside Windsor Castle; before that, he spent 3 years as a factual commissioning editor at Channel 5 where he commissioned some of the channel’s most defining shows, including Can’t Pay – We’ll Take it Away, The Yorkshire Vet, Gangland, Britain’s Bloodiest Dynasty, 10,000BC, Body Donors and the Inside….and Year in the Wild strands.

Before Channel 5, Simon was co-founder and creative director of Wildfire TV, where he developed and delivered more than 100 hours of factual programming for international and UK broadcasters. Credits include: The Big Royal Dig Live, Who Downed Douglas Bader?, Digging the Great Escape, Wild Things with Dominic Monaghan, Combat Cars and Walking Through History with Tony Robinson. 

This event is supported by the ScreenSkills Television Skills Fund which invests in training for the freelance television workforce thanks to contributions from the BBC, Channel 4 and Channel 5.

It is part of a ScreenSkills programme managed by the Indie Training Fund to support freelancers to upskill and stay connected, helping keep the industry resilient in these difficult times.

This session will take place online via Zoom. Click ‘get ticket’ to reserve your place: you must login or register before you are able to get a ticket for this event. A booking confirmation with a joining link to the session will be sent to you via email. 

If you are no longer able to use your ticket, we ask you to please contact support@screenskills.com  so that we can release your place. Our sessions are often oversubscribed, so we’d like to give other freelancers the opportunity to fill available spots. Thank you for your consideration.