Goldsmiths - University of London

Peter Lee-Wright

Peter is the Course Convenor for the M.A. in Television Journalism. He is a television documentary film-maker with over thirty years’ experience, mainly with the BBC and Channel 4. He has made over 100 films and worked in more than 40 countries, covering subjects from troubled youth to triumphant old age, from comedians’ roots to tragic deaths. Child Slaves (1990) charted western industrial exploitation of child labour around the world. The Stephen Lawrence Story won the 1997 Race in the Media Award for best Factual TV. Little Angels (2002) a feature-length BBC drama-documentary told the story of young offenders and their heroin addiction in North-East England.

Peter trained as a Current Affairs producer at the BBC World Service, before taking over the sole surviving Caribbean Service programme in 1975. On entering television, he directed film programmes with Barry Norman, before moving on to educational and youth material. He ended his BBC career as an executive producer in the Community Programme Unit. Since then he has been an independent producer, working with leading independent companies as well as on his own productions. Prior to his arrival at Goldsmiths, Peter taught aspiring film-makers at the National Film and Television School, Beaconsfield and at the Southampton Institute (now Southampton Solent University). He is also a participant in the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre.

Research interests

For the last three years, Peter has worked with the Leverhulme news group, charting the impact of technical, industrial and economic change on the practice of journalism, particularly in television news and its expansion into multimedia. At the same time, he has been undertaking field work in Kolkata for an independent research project on the imaging of poverty, and the practical implications for journalists and NGOs working in such places. He has also published a book on the evolution of the many different sub-genres of documentary practice in contemporary televisionand is currently writing a book about the BBC.

Selected publications

Changing Journalism (Sage 2011), co-authored with Angela Phillips & Tamara Witschge

The Documentary Handbook (Routledge 2010)

'Seeing Beyond the Slumdogs: Representations of Poverty in Western Media' World Journalism Educators’ Conference, Grahamstown SA, July 2010

'Culture Shock: New Media and Organizational Change in the BBC' in Natalie Fenton (ed.) New Media, Old News (Sage 2010)

Child Slaves (London: Earthscan, 2009 [1990] (also published as Kindren als slaven, Antwerp, de Kern, 1992; Child Slaves, Tokyo, Shobun-sha, 1995)

'The BBC and the multimedia world' ECREA's second European Communication Conference, Barcelona, November 2008

'Virtual News: BBC News at a "Future Media and Technology" Crossroads', Convergence: the International Journal in Research into New Media Technologies, 14: 3, August 2008

360° of Separation: The BBC's new network theories', Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre Annual Symposium: Spaces of the News, November 2007

Critical overview articles on trade union and sports documentary film for Ian Aitkin (ed.), Encyclopedia of Documentary Film, New York: Routledge, November 2005.

‘The Dubious Attractions of Rome’, London Magazine (December2005/January 2006)

‘Not going to jail’, Prison Service Journal, 115, January 1998.

Conference and symposium report (editor), ‘ChildRight Worldwide’ Amsterdam, 1994).