The Television Workshop celebrates 40 years of nurturing Nottingham's acting talent

A lot of people think you have to study in a London Drama School to have any chance at a career in the screen industry, but The Television Workshop have proved that that just simply isn’t true.

When Lewis Rudd opened The Television Workshop in 1983, he wanted children’s television to have genuine accents and whilst ‘actors are actors’ and should have the capability to speak in different tones, executive artistic director, Alison Rashley tells Nottingham World that many tend to struggle with the Nottingham accent.

Training students from the ages of seven to twenty-one, the young people at the workshop are taught two important lessons, hard work and authenticity. Taught by alumni, whose teaching has less emphasis on scripts, in favour of the skills learnt from improv, the calibre of performance achieved truly speaks for itself.

Students can expect an environment where their well-being is of utmost importance. Children will only be auditioned for roles if it is believed they’d be able to handle what is a very adult environment however with this being said, on set, winning awards and in Hollywood is exactly where they can expect to land.

If you’ve watched ‘The Theory of Everything’, ‘She Said’, ‘Skins’, ‘The Last of Us’ or even ‘Line of Duty’ then you’ve watched onscreen talent bred in Nottingham by the wonderful staff at The Television Workshop, but since 2012 The Television Workshop has run as a charity and Alison Rashley says finding funding is one of the biggest tasks of her job role and she fears that with the economic crisis, the accessibility of acting for ordinary people could diminish.

It really would be a tragedy for this establishment to be forced to increase its fees or to limit its numbers. Seeing yourself on screen and in those you admire shouldn’t be a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence and it’s people like Alison Ramsey who help young people realise their dreams and develop into industry professionals that keep our screens diverse and ‘real’.

You can support The Television Workshop with a one-time donation or by sponsoring a bursary via their website.