Earlier this year, Somewhere Boy won the audience award at the prestigious Series Mania television festival in France, fighting off some of the biggest new shows on Earth. And its creator Pete Jackson only heard about it at the very last moment.
“I live in Somerset. I was outside, digging up my garden, and I got a call saying: ‘Get on a train and get to Lille, you’ve won,’” he says. After a breakneck scrabble for London, the festival’s closing ceremony creeping ever closer, he finally found a seat on a Eurostar. “And when I got to Lille, there were police escort motorbikes, the whole shebang, all to race me to the thing. And I missed it by a minute. I got there as they were coming off stage.”
