Nick Bamford

Born in 1952 Nick grew up in Kent and was educated at Gravesend School for Boys and Christ Church, Oxford where he read English, obtaining an M.A., 2nd Class Hons.
He moved to London to begin his career at the BBC as a Studio Manager in Radio, soon moving to Television as an Assistant Producer in Presentation.
In 1983 he took a year out to work as a Flotilla Skipper in the Sporades Islands of Greece before returning to the BBC to take a Producer job in Presentation.
In 1986 he left again to pursue his other love – the theatre, and moved to the West Country to attend the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School on a Director’s Attachment.  For the next 24 years he worked freelance in both television and theatre before beginning an academic career on a part-time basis for both Bournemouth and Aberystwyth Universities. In September 2010 he took up a full-time post as Senior Lecturer in Television Production at Bournemouth University, where he completed his PhD in Adaptation 'Emancipating Madame Butterfly: Intention and Process in Adapting and Queering a Text'.

In 2019 he moved to Cornwall to teach TV Drama at Falmouth University, which he continues to do part-time

Throughout his career Nick has continued to pursue his interest in creative and dramatic writing with 2 stage plays and 3 screenplays to his name.
He is currently developing his UK/Thai feature Bangkok Butterfly with Christopher Granier-Deferre at Poisson Rouge Pictures, and he was recently commissioned to write the screenplay for CLP Productions' Free to Be (W/T). ​
​His beginner’s guide to TV production - Directing Television: A Professional Survival Guide - was published by Bloomsbury in May 2012.  It is available in paperback and on Kindle.  And his chapter on creating Bangkok Butterfly has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan in Queer Adaptation.
​His academic research has led to 5 published international conference papers



South West (Wessex)



Dramatic:

Rough Trade – adapted from La Traviata (stage)                               – produced Bristol 1988

Love and War – adapted from Carmen (screen)

Enigma – (screen short)                                            - broadcast:- HTV (Brief Encounters)  1999

- screened: British Short Film Festival + Brief Encounters 1999, Kinofilm 2000

Queer Counsel – (stage)       – Arts Council funded tour to Croydon, Bristol, Hereford 2004

Cleaning Up - (screen)

Bangkok Butterfly – adapted from Madama Butterfly) (screen)

– in development with Poisson Rough Pictures, 2019

Free to Be – (adapted from Breaking Free, by Chrisopher Lee Power) (screen)

- commissioned by CLP Productions 2019

Books and papers:

Directing Television – A Professional Survival Guide, 2012 London, Bloomsbury.

it has become the bible by my side’ (University of Westminster student, 2015)

Emancipating Madame Butterfly

– chapter in Queer Adaptation.  Palgrave Macmillan, LA. 2019‘unusually and helpfully analytical for an author’s discussion of his own work’  Thomas Leitch

 Academic Papers:

JMComm. Phuket, 2013: From ‘Madame Butterfly’ to ‘Miss Saigon’: political and practical uses and abuses of a story.

Paper published in Conference Proceedings.

Cross-Cultural Communication Conference. Bangkok, 2016: East is East and West is West: a literary and historical view from the perspective of ‘Madame Butterfly’.

Paper published in Conference Proceedings.

ASPERA. Canberra, 2016: Looking in a Mirror or Through a Window: mainstream audiences and gay men portrayed in film and television.

*Peer-reviewed paper published online in Conference Proceedings.

JMComm. Singapore, 2017: Event Cinema as Adaptation: a stage, a screen or a compromised experience?   Peer-reviewed paper published online in Conference Proceedings.

Cross-Cultural Communication Conference. Barcelona, 2016: The Strangers’ Case: harnessing the power of screen entertainment to communicate between cultures.

*Paper to be published in JCA, Bangkok. September 2019

PhD. 2016: Emancipating ‘Madame Butterfly’: Intention and Process in Adapting and Queering a Text.

Books, Film, Theatre