Benjamin Till

In 1997, Till was approached by playwright Sir Arnold Wesker to collaborate with him on a one-woman musical play that he had written in 1990. The piece was called Letter to a Daughter, and the UK premiere opened at the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh on Till's birthday, 8 August 1998.

Film and television

Casting

From 2004 to 2006, Till worked as a casting assistant to casting director Shaheen Baig, and worked on such films as Control, Notes on a Scandal, Brick Lane and 28 Weeks Later, the last of which he also worked on closely with the two young leads, Imogen Poots and Mackintosh Muggleton.

BBC films

In early 2005, he submitted a pitch to

BBC producer Penny Wrout then commissioned him to make a three-minute musical film for the Children in Need telethon,^[10] showcasing the bizarre and wacky ways that people were raising money for the popular charity: the film was shown twice during the telethon in November that year.

The Busker Symphony (2006)

In 2006, Till made four short films for Channel 4's Three-Minute Wonder season. The project was called The Busker Symphony, and a four-movement piece he composed was performed by buskers past and present at various locations around London. Each film featured one movement from the Symphony, variously entitled Andante, Adagio, Scherzo and Finalé: the films were broadcast in April 2006.

A1: the Road Musical (2008)

In April 2008, Till started work on his largest-scale project to date, A1: the Road Musical, again for Channel 4. The half-hour film was produced by Endemol, and followed a lorry driver's journey up the A1, from London to Edinburgh, during which he met various people along the way; they all tell their stories, either in song or set to a specially composed soundtrack.

The film starts with Londoners singing their thoughts while stuck in city traffic, then further up the road a young Polish man is introduced: he is deliberating whether or not to leave England and return to Poland. We then meet a woman who was involved in a severe car accident and the mysterious stranger who helped her, a choir of ex-miners lamenting the demise of the coal industry, a young man who lost his brother in an accident on the A1, two motorbikers railing at the government red tape that threatens to stifle people's independence and a Berwick-upon-Tweed resident who is campaigning to have the Scottish border redrawn to make his town part of Scotland, where he feels it rightly belongs.

The film was broadcast on 29 August 2008, and became the fourth most-praised programme aired on Channel 4 that month, based on telephone calls to the station to congratulate the makers.^[11]

Coventry Market: The Musical (2008)

On 4 November 2008,

On 24 March 2011, BBC Look North, premiered Till's Metro: The Musical.^[14] The work celebrated 30 years of the Tyne and Wear Metro carrying the North-Eastern community from the busy epicentre of Monument to the sunny coast of Tynemouth, or the bustling runways of Newcastle Airport. It featured a cast of 180 – all of whom have worked or been passengers on the network since 1980 – sharing their stories.

Our Gay Wedding: The Musical (2014)

On 29 March 2014, Till married his long-term partner Nathan Taylor, in the process becoming one of the first same-sex couples to get married in the UK. They were married in a musical, which was commissioned by Channel 4, in Alexandra Palace Theatre^[15][16] and broadcast two days after the wedding itself. The multi-award-winning film received wide praise. Ed Power, writing in The Daily Telegraph said it was "more powerful than anything all the romcom writers in the world could have put together".^[17]

The Guardian's Tim Dowling wrote "When I say I cried I cried all the way through [...] an hour of unbridled joy, an inventive and wholly appropriate way to celebrate the advent of equal marriage [...] better than perfect, it was fabulous."^[18] In Metro, Simon Swift reviewed it as "The wedding that was better than Kate and Will's [...] a heartwarming, uplifting, tear-jerking celebration of gay marriage [...] Best. Wedding. Ever."

100 Faces (2018)

In 2018, Benjamin made the film 100 Faces which features 100 Jewish British people, one born every year between 1918 and 2017. Some sing, some speak, all state what being Jewish means to them in a single sentence. The film is accompanied by a soundtrack recorded by the Israel Camerata orchestra. The film was premiered at the UK Jewish Film Festival in 2018 and has subsequently been screened in festivals around the world. In 2019, it shared the gold prize at the prestigious Robinson Short Film Awards.

Awards

Radio

Till worked with long-term friend Sir Arnold Wesker again in 2007, when he was asked to write the featured song (to Wesker's lyrics) and incidental music for Wesker's radio play, The Rocking Horse, commissioned by the BBC World Service to celebrate theirs and Wesker's 75th birthday.^[19] The play was aired in November 2007.

Personal life

Benjamin Till is married to actor and knitting guru Nathan Taylor.^[20] The couple live in London.

References