Meet Lord Black

Toronto: Tapestry Pictures is shopping for a screenwriter to adapt Conrad Black’s life story for the little screen, having struck a development deal with CTV and optioned the Richard Siklos book Shades of Black.

The MOW is still in its early stages, but will likely air sometime in 2005, says exec producer and Tapestry principal Mary Young Leckie. She and partner Heather Haldane are talking to Brits for a possible copro deal, noting that the media baron’s adventures are ‘split quite nicely between Canada and the U.K.’

CTV may fund the project through its Heroes, Champions and Villains stream, part of the BCE Benefits package.

No other names are attached yet, although news of the project has prompted much speculation about who will play the larger-than-life Lord Black. According to Young Leckie, the best suggestion so far came from one of her staff, who recommended Albert Finney. SD

The Brit pack

Toronto: Decode Entertainment has inked a deal with the U.K.’s Hat Trick Productions and Channel 4 to make ‘England’s answer to South Park.’

Bromwell High is the working title of a 13 x 30 2D animated series set to air on the Beeb in 2005, following the lives of three Brit schoolgirls and their hapless teachers. The copro will be animated in Canada at Collideascope Digital Pictures, and voiced and written in Blighty to the tune of $525,000 per ep.

It is the first primetime toon ever commissioned by Channel 4. Decode will distribute worldwide, barring the U.K. and Ireland, and has already sold the adult-aimed series at home to Teletoon. The cable caster will air Bromwell in ’05 in its night-time block.

Hat Trick’s Anil Gupta (The Office, The Kumars at No. 42) will produce with Decode’s Beth Stevenson (Undergrads), under exec producers Jimmy Mulville, Denise O’Donoghue, Mario Stylianides, Neil Court and Steven DeNure. Line producer Elena Adair (Undergrads) will lead the animation team.

Production is already underway – working with scripts by Richard Osman, and Kumars vets Richard Pinto and Sharat Sardana – and voiced by Nina Conti, Jo Wyatt and Gina Yashere, among others.

Casters at home and abroad have also renewed three of Decode’s youth titles.

Family Channel wants another 26 half-hours of King, a copro with Ottawa’s Funbag Productions, and has also called for an additional 13 eps of the preschooler skein Franny’s Feet, along with Channel Five in the U.K. A second 26 x 22 season of Radio Free Roscoe has also been ordered by Family and teen net The N.

Meanwhile, the prodco’s factual arm will turn out a second run of 13 one-hours of the Kratt Brothers’ Be the Creature for CBC and National Geographic Channel in the U.S., while moving forward on two new projects. TVO has picked up the one-hour special Going for Gold, about an international football tournament. Decode is also developing a 26 x 30 series aimed at three- to seven-year-olds called Your Big Backyard. The partly animated show teaches kids about animals and is being made in cooperation with the National Wildlife Federation. SD