Toxteth TV

By Alan Thompson

The Windsor Road Mission Hall, on the border between Toxteth and the town centre, plays host to an extraordinary production venture organised to get local kids working in film. With a recent ERDF (European Regional Development Fund) grant award, they are currently building state-of-the-art studio premises opposite to harness the mass of young talent desperate for a chance to develop their skills. The name of the organisation is Toxteth TV. Kim Laycock is their Director, and after some worrying minutes when we thought we’d been stood up, she bursts through the door, offers Nerve a cuppa and tells us what the word is on the street.

Kim, what will the ERDF fund for expansion pay for and how did the bid come about?

We received notification of it in January this year, which means that the project is assured for the next two to three years and that we can depend on the money. I’ve only been here twelve months, but about three years ago a woman called Todd Davies came to Liverpool with a view to living here and working here. She saw the potential within this area and did want to run a training scheme for young people in the area of television, because that’s what Exterminating Angel, her company, does. She made a few approaches after looking at Windsor Street and deciding that there were a number of buildings where she could set it up. The Department of Education and Skills said that they had a pilot project based on a London training model for young people and that they would see whether it would be suitable for here. They jumped on this because Liverpool is the only city outside London to have an infrastructure to support a film industry. We now have an active business cluster. In the Mission Hall we have media businesses and the Media Station, the semi-commercial side of Liverpool Community College.

What is the role of Exterminating Angel in Toxteth TV at the moment (Todd Davies and hubby Alex Cox’s production company)?

Well, Todd is the project champion. She was the woman who made all the initial approaches. Alex, while not involved directly in Toxteth TV, will have an input as he could be a really good patron and we’re hoping that he will become one of our film advisors on an ongoing basis. That’s to be established though.

A major part of your social remit is to aid underprivileged children who have dropped out of formal education structures. Tell us more about your role in this.

Before we set up, we had a major community consultation and an education and organisation one. Our idea is to feed young people in from the area. Every year the first people to be approached for our intakes will be from our referral agencies: our local schools, Barnado’s and everybody else who deals with disadvantaged young people. Then there will be a further intake from Liverpool Community College. One of the reasons we wanted to give these people the opportunity first is because in Liverpool 8, there’s a history of young people falling out of schools for one reason or another. That is also about schools not being able to cater for kids’ creative needs. There’s a lot of creativity in this area and it gets channelled in the wrong direction.

What have been your biggest challenges?

Waiting for the ERDF fund to be approved! Seriously though, I think that because we have such a strong team here, we rarely get into any crisis. I think that one problem was getting the support of the community, because in the past the community was very wary of anyone coming in from the outside and saying ‘we’re gonna give you a project and we’re gonna include your kids’, because what happens at the end of the day is kids coming in from elsewhere. But because of our efforts to work with the community, this problem was overcome very, very early. It’s up to us to prove our commitment.

What courses are you doing this year?

There will be vocational courses in Toxteth TV, there will be accredited courses such as HND’s, BTEC’s etc. There will also be some shorter-term projects because we have realised that if you just take people from when they are fourteen, you are losing a lot of that early creativity and talent. So we will be running a lot of these courses in and around the area for 10 – 14 year olds. These will be very short-term projects to make them familiar with editing and so-forth and that will enable them to come in at a later stage and get more advanced. And we will be looking and have been talking with major TV companies. We have very good links with Channel 4 and with the BBC and will be looking for broadcast time somewhere, and eventually hope to set up our own community channel.