William Crawley
William Crawley is a BBC journalist and broadcaster.
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[edit] Radio presenter
On radio, he presents BBC Radio Ulster's weekly Sunday Sequence programme and is part of the presenting team for Radio 4's Sunday. He also presents The Book Programme, a literary review programme, for Radio Ulster. Crawley's special edition of Sunday Sequence from Cape Town won the Andrew Cross Award for UK speech radio programme of the year. His other regular radio presenting roles include: Talk Back, BBC Radio Ulster's daily news and current affairs programme; Evening Extra, the station's drive-time news programme and Arts Extra, a daily arts review programme. Previous radio programmes include: The Bonfire Makers (for BBC Radio Four), an examination of Northern Ireland's controversial annual loyalist bonfire tradition, and documentaries about George Bernard Shaw and the controversial Hugh Lane paintings for BBC Radio Three.
On 22 May 2009, the Hollywood screen legend Tony Curtis had to apologise to the BBC radio audience after he used three swear words in a six-minute interview with William Crawley on the BBC's Talk Back programme. William Crawley also apologised to the audience for 'that little bit of Holywood realism'. Curtis explained that he had forgotten that the interview was live.
[edit] Television presenter
He recently presented Blueprint, a three-part television natural history series, which ran from 31 March 2008, as the centre-piece of the most ambitious multi-platform broadcasting project in the history of BBC Northern Ireland. The Blueprint season united TV, radio and online to explore 600 million years of Ireland's natural history. For this reason, the series provoked complaints to the BBC from young earth creationists ahead of transmission.[1] The series was shortlisted for the Celtic Film and Television Awards.[2] Other TV presenting roles include BBC Northern Ireland's weekly late-night television interview series "William Crawley Meets ...", face-to-face interviews of 30 minutes in duration with leading thinkers and social reformers from across the world, including the philosopher Peter Singer, the scientist Richard Dawkins, the writer and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, and the gay bishop Gene Robinson. He presented Frozen North (BBC One Northern Ireland), a documentary examining the possible future impact of global warming on Northern Ireland; Festival Nights (BBC Two Northern Ireland), television coverage of the 2005, 2006 and 2007 Belfast Festival at Queens; Hearts and Minds (BBC One), a television political review programme; What's Wrong With ...?" (BBC One), a six-part round-table current affairs discussion programme; and More Than Meets The Eye (BBC Two), a series investigating folklore in contemporary Ireland. In 2010, he presented a "Spotlight" television investigation about the Catholic clerical abuse crisis from Rome.
In his televised interview with the evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins, Crawley challenged the use of the term "delusion" in Dawkins's best-selling book The God Delusion. Dawkins accepted that likening the term "delusional" with mental illness may infer the wrong connotations.
On 26 February 2007, he wrote and presented Sorry For Your Trouble (BBC One), a one-hour documentary about death and dying, in which he spoke openly about a "struggling" relationship with his late father and made a visit to his father's grave for the first time in two decades. On 15 September 2008, he wrote and presented a follow-up documentary, Dying For A Drink ([BBC One]), which examined Northern Ireland's relationship with alcohol, and in which he discussed his father's alcoholism. Crawley also got drunk on-screen as part of a binge-drinking experiment. In 2009, he wrote and presented Losing Our Religion ([BBC One]), which looked at the place of faith in contemporary life and why an increasing number of people are abandoning organised religion. In 2010 and 2011, he was credited as "Associate Producer" on the network BBC One Sunday Morning Live programme fronted by Susanna Reid.
[edit] Major interviews
Crawley's major set-piece interviews with leading cultural figures before live audiences include: the Nobel laureates Seamus Heaney and Amartya Sen, the political activist Noam Chomsky, the current Irish President Mary McAleese, her predecessor Mary Robinson, politicians Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, the writers John Banville, Edna O'Brien, Alexander McCall Smith, Michael Longley and Ian Rankin, the film-maker Ken Russell, former hostage and writer Brian Keenan, musicians Phil Coulter and Brian Kennedy, the historian Roy Foster, and the rugby legend Jack Kyle. In 2010, he launched the inaugural Belfast Media Festival, which included a keynote address by, and interview with, Sir Bob Geldof.[3] He hosted the Belfast Media Festival again in 2011, interviewing BBC Director-General Mark Thompson, Channel 4 Chief Executive David Abraham, other leading figures from the UK media industry, and celebrities including Rob Brydon.
[edit] On Film
In August 2010, Crawley curated 'Sex and the City of God', a season of films at the Queen's Film Theatre in Belfast. Writing in The Guardian's film guide, Steve Rose wrote of the season: "It's not often you'll find a movie season where you're offered Charlton Heston receiving the word of God one moment and a man supple enough to fellate himself the next, but such are the broad-minded tastes of William Crawley, journalist and BBC Northern Ireland presenter, who curates his own season here. A former Presbyterian minister and philosophy lecturer, Crawley's eclectic themes are summed up in the title, although the city in question is not Belfast but New York, which he regards as "a kind of urban divinity". So as well as the aforementioned The Ten Commandments and Shortbus, we get crowd-pleasing Twin Towers doc Man On Wire and stirring autobiopic Tarnation, alongside more overtly spiritual choices Inherit The Wind[disambiguation needed 
] and Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev."[4] He is a member of the board of the Belfast Film Festival and has presented story and production analysis event for the Festival on Inherit the Wind[disambiguation needed ], 12 Angry Men[disambiguation needed ], and Casablanca.
[edit] Blogging
Crawley writes a BBC blog entitled "Will & Testament", and has also presented a radio documentary on the blogging revolution for the BBC.
[edit] Awards and Memberships
- Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (FRSA).
- Fellow of the British-American Project.
- Recipient of Eisenhower Fellowship (2012).
- Andrew Cross Award for speech broadcaster of the year 2006, and other programme content awards.
- Thinker and Explainer of the Year, Slugger O'Toole/Channel 4 Poliitical Awards 2011.
- Member of Board of Belfast Film Festival.
- Member of Advisory Board of Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary Writing.
[edit] Public Events
In October 2011, Crawley hosted the final public engagement in Northern Ireland by the retiring Irish President Mary McAleese.
[edit] Biography
William Crawley was born and raised in north Belfast. Prior to his career in the media, he worked as a university lecturer in philosophy and theology and, having been licensed, then, subsequently ordained into the ministry of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland in the mid-90's, worked as assistant minister in First Presbyterian Church, New York City, and Fisherwick Presbyterian Church, Belfast, before serving as Presbyterian chaplain at the University of Ulster. He later resigned from the ordained ministry and from membership of the church before beginning his career as a journalist. William Crawley was educated at Grove Primary School, Belfast; Dunlambert Secondary School, Belfast; Belfast Royal Academy; Queen's University, Belfast, where he read philosophy (B.A., M.Phil.); Princeton Theological Seminary, where he read theology (M.Div.). He earned a doctorate in philosophy (Ph.D.) for a dissertation on the epistemology of the American philosopher Alvin Plantinga from Queen's University, Belfast. He has described himself as "a lapsed Protestant."[5]
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.ico.gov.uk/upload/documents/decisionnotices/2009/fs_50202422.pdf
- ^ http://www.celticmediafestival.co.uk/documents/00000010_full.pdf
- ^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ni/2006/03/about_the_authors.html
- ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/aug/07/this-weeks-new-film-events
- ^ Crawley, William; Malachi O'Doherty's Empty Pulpits, Will & Testament Blog, 24 September 2008
