Here at Sky Arts, we like to think of ourselves as a bit avant-garde; a bit cutting-edge and really, really keen on the arts. Which is why our newest project is live theatre – or Theatre Live!, as we prefer to call it.

Combining six bestselling authors; five established directors, twenty brilliant actors and six brand new Sky Arts-commissioned plays, Theatre Live! is an ambitious new project that brings live drama back to the small screen for the first time since the mid-Seventies. (Or the mid-Eighties if you count the time Nicholas Witchell and Sue Lawley’s studio got invaded on the Six O’Clock News.) Better still, we’re also broadcasting these six theatrical world premieres in high definition.

We can’t take all the credit though: the idea is the brainchild of polymath Sandi Toksvig, who realised that literary festivals were full of established writers who would welcome the challenge of becoming first-time playwrights. As she noted in a recent Telegraph interview, “There’s been a big attempt over the past five years to find new writing talent for television, but the one place they never looked was literary festivals. I thought, ‘Why don’t we go to people who already know about words?” Here at Sky Arts, we couldn’t argue with such impeccable logic, and after a few pow-wows down the pub, the legendary Ms Toksvig agreed to make her debut as artistic director of the Theatre Live! company.

As a result, six acclaimed authors – Jackie Kay; Kate Mosse; Morag Joss; Nicci French; Tina Mcbuig and Michael Dobbs – make their collective debut as playwrights, collaborating with respected directors (Pip Broughton, Fiona Laird, Sue Tully and Patrick Sandford) and high-profile actors including Pauline Collins and Siobhan Redmond to create original plays, performed to a live audience in the purpose built Sky Arts Theatre Live! studio. You may wonder about Tina Mcbuig - we have a surprise in store for you there!

We think Theatre Live! is an invigorating new initiative in the fields of both theatre and television; not least because it’s live, and anything can happen. As Sandi Toksvig notes, “Live drama has a rawness and immediacy in which anything can and did happen including on one sad occasion the death of the leading actor (Gareth Jones in ‘Underground’ on Armchair Theatre in 1958). Now Sky Arts brings back genuine ‘reality’ television – drama as it happens, whatever happens.” We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.

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