Neil Baldwin, Celebrity
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book would not have been commissioned if the multi-award-winning BBC TV drama Marvellous, based on Neil’s life, had not been such an outstanding success. To adapt a line from Marvellous: ‘Acknowledgements, I wouldn’t know where to start.’ Or indeed to finish. But I’ll try. We thank the writer and executive director, Peter Bowker, for his brilliantly perceptive and funny script, which truly captured Neil’s spirit, so outstandingly portrayed on screen by Toby Jones, without which there would have been no film. His fellow executive director, Patrick Spence, managing director of Fifty Fathoms, part of the Tiger Aspect group, had the wisdom to see the potential of the film, and sell it to the BBC. He managed the whole process with sensitive professionalism. Patrick was the figurehead and representation of a brilliant directing, production, acting and publicity team, who have gained the professional recognition they so richly deserve, and who had Neil’s best interests at the heart of all their work. It seems invidious to selectively name and praise individuals here. Thank you all, guys, for a job superbly well done. Marvellous itself would not have been conceived and made without the article written about Neil in The Guardian in 2010 by our longstanding friend, Francis Beckett. But Francis’s contribution certainly did not end there. He conducted some of the interviews for the book, edited the whole text and drew upon his extensive experience as an author and journalist to provide invaluable advice on structure and content, and provided an introduction and afterword.
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