Nick Johns joins STV Productions as Head of entertainment

STV Productions, one of the UK’s leading content businesses, has appointed Nick Johns to the newly-created role of Head of Entertainment Development.

“Nick has great ideas, great taste and a real feel for entertainment telly. I’m delighted that he’s accepted this new role to help us build on the successes we’ve achieved to date.” – Gary Chippington, Head of Entertainment at STV Productions

The position has been established to enable the business to consolidate its strengths in the genre having already built up a record of entertainment successes and mass audience hits. The most popular has been returning series Catchphrase which is produced for ITV.  The returning format’s last series reached 14.8 million viewers overall, and in autumn 2017 the channel commissioned a sixth series of the peak-time show.

Johns joined STV Productions in 2014 and has worked on a series of entertainment commissions including ITV2 ‘comedy roast’ series SafeWord – which was co-developed and co-produced by STV Productions and Motion Content Group and has since been remade for MTV in the US – and high-stakes game show Babushka, which was conceived by Armoza Formats.  The show, which aired on ITV Daytime, was nominated for the prestigious international Rose d’Or awards.

Other STV Productions entertainment commissions which Johns has developed include The Dressing Room – the sports club changing rooms fixed rig show which was produced for UKTV with the format now being remade in Holland and Norway – and more recently, he developed And They’re Off …For Sport Relief for BBC One.  Presented by sports presenter and Strictly Come Dancing 2016 champion Ore Oduba, the six-part show featured a host of famous faces taking part in fun, unpredictable and messy obstacle courses.

Prior to joining STV Productions, Johns – who gave up his earlier career as a barrister to pursue his dream of a career in television production – worked on a freelance basis for a number of channels, gaining extensive experience in entertainment development on a range of projects including the first series of Dancing On Ice for ITV and BBC One’s Let’s Dance for Comic Relief.

“I love everything about entertainment and I couldn’t be more excited to be working with the amazing team at STV Productions to bring more big and brilliant ideas to life.” – Nick Johns