ABC head of factual Phil Craig to depart
The ABC’s head of factual Phil Craig is to depart the public broadcaster and return to London after accepting a role as chief creative officer for Discovery International.
Craig has been with the ABC since October 2012, with responsibility for some of ABC TV’s major documentaries including Whitlam, First Footprints, the recent Changing Minds documentary which was the centrepiece of the recent ABC Mental As… week, and also WWI Centenary series The War That Changed Us.
ABC Director of Television, Richard Finlayson, said: “During Phil’s tenure, the factual team has produced some outstanding programming including important external commissions such as Whitlam, First Footprints, Kakadu, Redesign My Brain and The Dreamhouse, but also in-house productions from the Compass and Catalyst teams and the upcoming ABC Adelaide specials on Countdown.
“We appreciate that some pressing family matters mean that Phil is departing a few months earlier than planned, but he’s left a number of excellent shows in the pipeline, including some of the expected highlights of 2015”.
This is what great content creator do – they join, they commission great work, they move onwards and upwards. It’s a pity this is not the narrative of ABC’s drama department.
Just watched Australian War Horse and in no way denigrating the achievements of the light horse but once again just like the pomme docs of ww1 you appear to have won it again on your own no mention of the other part of the Anzac mounted division the Nz mounted rifles nor that it was led by a New Zealander major general sir Edward Chaytor and no mention other than in passing of the thousands of mounted British yeomanry and although the Waler was a wonderful horse you will find if you bothered to read the records that NZ horses went the longest without water and survived better so much so that the British veterinary corps instituted a special inquiry into how this could be but I guess you don’t want to know that I have spent much time in Australia and have many relatives living there and I am convinced that if the six hundred thousand New Zealanders came back home Australia would experience a major disruption and I would predict many bankruptcies.