Will Charles Lighting Ltd

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email : will@willcharles.comCopied

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Will Charles - Lighting Director

I specialise in multi-camera television lighting design and direction, with more than forty years’ experience across studio, entertainment, music, live events and outside broadcasts.

I began my career at BBC Television Centre in 1984, spending fifteen years in BBC studios and learning my craft across an extraordinary range of productions. Those years gave me the opportunity to work alongside some of television’s finest Lighting Directors and crews, progressing from studio engineering and vision control through board and console operation to Lighting Director.

During that time I worked on many of the programmes that defined British multi-camera television. These included classic studio comedies such as Blackadder, Absolutely Fabulous, One Foot in the Grave and Keeping Up Appearances, as well as major entertainment programmes including Noel’s House Party, The Generation Game, The National Lottery, Parkinson and Top of the Pops.

I left the BBC in 1998 to establish Will Charles Lighting Ltd and have since worked as a Lighting Designer and Lighting Director for production companies in the UK and around the world. My career has taken me from small television studios to some of the world’s largest venues and live productions. Highlights include working on three Olympic Games — Barcelona 1992, Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000 — the Queen’s Golden Jubilee concerts at Buckingham Palace, the Eurovision Song Contest in Jerusalem, The BRIT Awards in London, The X Factor in China, and many years of studio and live entertainment including Britain’s Got Talent, Mock the Week, Taskmaster and the BBC Proms.

In 2009 I received a Knight of Illumination Award for my lighting design on Channel 4’s The Album Chart Show at KOKO.

One of the great privileges of my career has been learning from and working alongside generations of outstanding Television Lighting Directors, engineers, electricians, camera crews and programmers. The technology has changed enormously since I first walked into Television Centre, but the essential challenge has not: to make every production look its very best, whatever the venue, scale or budget.