TV producer and script editor John Yorke appeared on The Booking Club’s Live show at The Battle of Ideas Festival last year, where we spoke along side Nick Wallis and Maxie Allen about the longevity of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. As I say in the forthcoming episode, British listeners of The Booking Club will have heard and seen an awful lot of John’s work over the years. John Yorke is the man who commissioned the TV drama Waterloo Road. He turned the BBC Radio 4 serialisation of GK Chesterton’s Father Brown books into the hit TV detective show starring Mark Williams.He developed and, with some serious graft I imagine, redeveloped the original script for Life on Mars, after it was rejected by Channel 4 and later taken up by the BBC. Life on Mars is now a bona fide classic.He was the brain behind the script of some of the most iconic episodes of Eastenders back in the 2000s. One such episode, a finale remembered as the cliff-hanger Who Shot Phil? aired in 2001. It attracted 20,000,000 UK viewers. The population of the UK in 2001 was around 59 million. Let that sink in. UEFA had to move a semi final match to avoid competition with that one episode. Other TV and radio shows John has either commissioned or produced include Wolf Hall, Shameless, Spooks, The Wine Show and that evergreen staple of BBC radio programming, The Archers. Thanks to John for a great recording this week at The Fig and Walnut in Bloomsbury. This episode is fast-approaching. John’s new book 📚Trip to the Moon: Understanding the True Power of Storytelling📚 is OUT NOW.