“If I were running the ABC, it would have a 10 o’clock timeslot devoted to new talent,” says Andrew Knight. “We are pumping 6000 graduates a year out of our film courses into what? The aim of people at film school seems to be to do one film and then head for Hollywood and drive down Santa Monica Boulevard with Ben Affleck in an open-topped Porsche.

“That’s our aspiration because we can’t get validated here.”

In an extensive interview in The Sunday Age, Andrew Knight talks about his glory years on Fast Forward, Full Frontal and Seachange. Together with Steve Vizard, their production company Artist Services ruled the airwaves. They eventually sold it for $25m to Granada, though Knight says he lost a whack after his divorce.

But it was the axing of Tripping Over in 2006 that saw him slow down creatively, a decision he says that devastated him.

But he is again working on new projects. Knight has been attending Sydney meetings with Andrew Denton and a group of writers developing a Foxtel comedy drama set in the advertising world. At the same time he has been working with former Fast Forward director Ted Emery and former ABC drama boss Penny Chapman on an SBS pilot for a comedy series set on Thursday Island. There is also a long-standing plan, with World Vision chief Tim Costello, for a TV series on the topic of “compassion”.

Then there’s a film script with Max Dann, along with a plan to film the Christopher Koch novel Highways to a War and a recently begun script for a miniseries, The Mighty Quinns, based on a family of petty criminals and con artists.

Next month he will be in Turkey, researching a script idea based on the experiences of four Australians who were sent to Istanbul in 1918.

You can read more at The Sunday Age.

Photo: Sunday Age