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Simon Berthon, recently described by the Daily Telegraph as a “formidable Second World War historian”, is one of Britain’s most distinguished writers and producers of television history. His previous book was ALLIES AT WAR (pub. Harper Collins) on the bitter sweet relationship between Churchill, Roosevelt and de Gaulle. He also made the 3 x 1 hour television series for BBC-2. Allies at War was variously described as: ‘brilliant .. if you enjoyed this series, there’s a handsome book by Simon Berthon to accompany it’ (Time Out); ‘one of the best history programmes I’ve seen in ages’ (Daily Telegraph); ‘compelling and thoroughly refreshing’ (Independent); ‘full of astonishing revelations and insights which made your mind boggle’ (Guardian).
Simon joined the BBC’s elite journalist trainee scheme in 1973 and, at the age of 27, became editor of BBC Northern Ireland’s controversial investigative current affairs programme ‘Spotlight’. In 1980 he moved to ITV’s investigative series “World in Action” where he won a Gold Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival. In 1990 Simon made his first major historical series, ‘The Shape of the World’, which won a Gold Medal at the New York Film and Television Festival. He co-wrote the accompanying book.
In 1996 he became a founding partner of 3BM Television, of which he is now chariman, and has presided over a stream of high quality historical and investigative documentaries ranging from ‘Cannibal’, ‘A World in Arms’ and ‘The Age of Terror’ (winner of the Broadcast multi-channel award) to ‘World War One in Colour’ and ‘Ten Days to D-Day’.
how I found the agency
I first met Andrew in my role as a TV producer when he was energetically and assiduously passing on to me suggestions for documentaries based on his author’s books. When I mooted the idea of a book based on my series Warlords, Andrew was immediately encouraging and informative on the style of pitch etc that was needed to attract publishers’ interest and responded quickly to my and my co-author Joanna Potts’s ideas and outlines. Since then Andrew has worked with great industry and ingenuity to sell the book well beyond the UK and US publishers. The great thing, as he rightly stresses himself., is the personal attention he finds time to give his authors.
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