Elwen Rowlands

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Elwen Rowlands is a British television script editor. Born in Wales, after finishing school she lived for a time in New York City, where after briefly working as a waitress she gained a job as a receptionist at a television post-production company. During her work breaks she would sit in with the company's editors, becoming fascinated with the editing process and how it brought the stories together.

After returning to the UK she attended University, and after graduating gained a job as a production assistant. She then worked as a researcher on the Channel 4 documentary McLibel (1998), before moving across to work in the station's acquisitions department, which bought-in American programmes such as ER and Angel. There her job was to screen the episodes to ensure they complied with the guidelines of the British commercial television regulator, the Independent Television Commission.

Deciding she wanted to become closer to the production side of television, she moved to the Channel 4 drama department, where she became a script reader. She then briefly worked for the channel's film production arm, FilmFour, as a development assistant. In 2002 she moved to BBC Wales to become a script editor, gaining credits on various productions, including First Degree, and an adaptation of the classic children's novel Carrie's War, shown on BBC One on New Year's Day 2004.

Later in 2004, she started work as one of the two script editors of the first season of the revived science-fiction series Doctor Who. She left the programme after the conclusion of the successful first series to script edit a new science-fiction/crime drama called Life on Mars, produced independently by Kudos Film & Television for BBC Wales. This latter production began transmission on BBC One in January 2006.

Rowlands has also worked as a television producer, producing the fifteen-minute short Cake for the Brief Encounters strand on BBC One, shown in May 2006. This production was written by her fellow Doctor Who script editor Helen Raynor. Later in 2006 Rowlands produced an adaptation of Jean Rhys's novel Wide Sargasso Sea for digital television station BBC Four.^[1]