RT╔ has announced three high-profile appointments in the past week. Bride Rosney, the former special adviser to Mary Robinson during her time as president of Ireland and later as UN High Commissioner for Human rights, is the station's new director of communications. She will succeed Kevin Healy, who is due to retire shortly from his post as director of public affairs. After working for Robinson, Rosney returned to Ireland from Geneva in 1998 to work in public relations.
RT╔ has also appointed a new chief financial officer, Conor Hayes, who joins the organisation from the Cara Treasury Group, where he was deputy chairman. Hayes's background is in operational business management and he will replace Gerry O'Brien, who is to retire at the end of this year.
The new position of drama development manager for television is to be filled by Jo Calam, who is moving to RT╔ from BBC Choice, where she has been working as an editorial executive. Calam also worked for BBC Northern Ireland, where she developed the drama series, Macready and Daughter and Nice Guy Eddie. Prior to that, she was a script editor on ITV's The Bill and Sky One's Dream Team.
A DOCUMENTARY offering a personal perspective on three decades of violence in the North is to be screened tomorrow. Writer and director Lawrence Pitkethly, who is from Bangor, Co Down, was one of the first television reporters on the scene when trouble flared in Belfast in August 1969.
Since then, Pitkethly has lived and worked abroad but in 1999, he revisited Belfast to track some of the changes in the city and its people. The documentary, entitled Belfast My Love, is a mix of his 1969 archive and new footage of his return to the city.
In his first news report for the BBC, on August 16th 1969, Pitkethly focused on a newborn baby girl whose family had been burnt out of their home on the Falls Road. Thirty years later, he went back to discover what had happened to the baby and to tell her story.
Filmed over nine months in 1999, Belfast My Love is a co-production between Paris-based Les Films d'Ici and Vinegar Hill Productions. It will be shown on Network 2 tomorrow at 8 p.m.
THE editor of RT╔'s Questions and Answers, Betty Purcell, has left the post to take up a position with The Late Late Show, joining Brian Hayes as co-producer. Purcell has spent the past 10 years in RT╔ television's current affairs division and was also the staff representative on the RT╔ Authority from 1995 to 2000. She won the European Commission Humanitarian Award for broadcasting in 1998 for the international affairs programme, Divided World. She is succeeded as editor of Questions and Answers by Deirdre Younge.
A former television producer with Today Tonight, Younge was the editor of the business programme, Marketplace, and most recently, the editor of the late-night discussion programme, Later with O'Leary. The Late Late Show returns to RT╔1 on September 7th, while Questions and Answers is back on Monday nights from September 17th.
THE BBC has relegated the most expensive series bought by the channel to a slot on BBC2. Steven Spielberg's second World War epic, the 10-part Band of Brothers, was to have led BBC1's autumn schedule.
The surprise move was announced at this week's launch of the BBC's autumn television schedule. Defending the decision, BBC1's controller of programming, Lorraine Heggessey, said: "It's relatively niche and I'm running a mainstream channel. We felt it would be better suited to BBC2."
Band of Brothers was acquired for BBC1 by her predecessor, Peter Salmon, for £7 million. The series is said to be the most expensive television drama ever made, at a cost of around $100 million.
Highlights of the BBC's autumn schedule include two landmark factual series as well as a host of new dramas. Five years in the making, a major new series from David Attenborough, The Blue Planet, takes a look at life below sea level.
Walking with Beasts, meanwhile, recreates long-extinct creatures and their habitats, using the mix of live film and computer graphics first seen in Walking With Dinosaurs.
BBC's drama line-up includes a Bridget Jones-style series about thirty-something women, called Linda Green; a new police drama, Murphy's Law, scripted by novelist Colin Bateman and starring Cold Feet's James Nesbitt; and an adaptation of William Boyd's novel, Armadillo, starring Stephen Rea.
Absolutely Fabulous is set to return after a five-year absence and the new series will feature, among others, Boyzone's Stephen Gately as a celebrity guest.
mkearney@irish-times.com