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THELEARNINGCURVE
THELEARNINGCURVE
Amanda Berry, The Academy’s new Chief Executive, talks to Quentin Falk
It is not, reflects Amanda Berry, just about the art of the possible. It’s also about getting a chance to indulge the improbable. “The really wonderful thing about this job,” says Berry, “is that every day is a vertical learning curve. For instance, with the film awards, now I know everything from how to get buses into Leicester Square, to how to transport 1800 people, to how you can get the best deal on a thousand bottles of champagne.
“But it’s also a job that allows you to have dreams. We once had a plan to bring a boat the size of the QE2 up the Thames for an awards dinner, and though we didn’t eventually pull it off, it was great just to have the opportunity to think we might manage it. Then, last year, we were looking to tent over the whole of Leicester Square but in the end we could- n’t get a big enough tent for the job.
“But I still managed to learn a lot about tent-building,” Berry smiles with the enthusiasm of the eternal optimist.
Berry, 39 and single, joined BAFTA
in October 1998 as their Director of Development and Events. An on-off member of the Academy for many years, she was first confronted with its most intimate workings when, in 1995, she produced the Production Awards ceremony in Glasgow while working for Scottish Television.
Her sojourn north of the border had been the latest rung in a pretty seamless career which was first kick-started after beginning as “second junior slave from the left” in a top talent agency, Duncan Heath Associates (later ICM). Rising to company director which combined “rep- resenting artistes and general manage- ment”, Berry eventually moved into tele- vision as a researcher at LWT.
In fact, she’d had her first taste of telly years earlier in her student incarna- tion as a self-confessed “zany” with bright blue hair. One of her placements while on a “wonderful” business stud- ies/graphic design course at Newcastle Poly was with Thames Television.
“They were absolutely fantastic with me, ” she recalled. “I loved London and felt I’d come home so I decided not to go back to Newcastle to finish my course. Instead I went for that job at Duncan’s.”
That move would also pay off in a rather serendipitous way much later on. The post at Heath had been found for her back in the early 80s by the recruit- ment agency Pathfinders who eventually set up a prestigious awards scheme which named Berry ‘Media Boss Of The Year’ in 1999.
“The award recognises people who, after achieving in their own career, have been instrumental in helping others.
“Apparently,” says Berry, disarmingly, “I’d done that throughout my career.”
When she finally arrived at 195, she quickly realised that “nothing I’d done before had quite prepared me for BAFTA. I had had a terrific background in both film and television – and though I haven’t worked in the new media, I’m learning fast – but what soon became clear was that I needed to hit the ground running at the Academy.”
And the pace has never let up since. After a spell as deputy executive director in charge of the awards, Berry was finally nailed for the top job which also sported a “more appropriate” new title.
“Did I think twice about taking it? Yes, oh yes. It’s a huge respon-
sibility. In some ways I think I’m far too young to be chief executive of an
internationally known organisation. I was really, really flattered to be asked. When I started at BAFTA, it wasn’t even some- thing that crossed my mind... or ever dreamt of.”
It was, says Berry, “the right time, BAFTA felt, to have a creative chief execu- tive. The Academy’s been through incredi- bly tough times in the past when it need- ed people who could run the business, and run it incredibly well. We’re not quite out of the woods yet but we can now see through the trees and so it was felt this was the moment to have a creative head and bring in somebody else to deal with business and operational matters.
“I took the job on the understanding I would, in many ways, continue to do my old job – which is the awards. They are a fantastic shop window, but my job also entails trying to develop BAFTA creative- ly, looking at other areas and opportuni- ties into which it can move. That means everything from increasing the public perception of BAFTA to growing dramati- cally the benefits of actual membership.
“I love being in a job where I can aim for the sky, to try and come up with plans which everyone else thinks are sheer madness... yet find a way of mak- ing them happen. That’s where my strengths lie.”
As a child growing up in Yorkshire, Berry was afflicted with chronic asthma. Spells in dust-encrusted seats at her local fleapit watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or the latest David Essex film would regularly, indeed inevitably, result in week-long bouts of debilitating illness. But as anyone will tell you now as, doubtless, then, she’s unstoppable. ■
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Academy Profile
Photographs of Amanda Berry, above and on Contents, as well as
Amy Minyard and Juliet McCulloch on News and Events by Richard Kendal