Luke O’Neill joins TV production company Kite for science television venture

Television production company Kite Entertainment has joined forces with Prof Luke O’Neill to develop science-themed shows aimed at a global audience.

Kite’77, a partnership between the independent Dublin-based company and the scientist, writer and broadcaster, will be headed up by former BBC entertainment commissioning editor Suzanne McManus.

The venture, which has received funding from Enterprise Ireland, intends to focus on both Prof O’Neill’s own written works and the development of original science TV formats.

Kite managing director Darren Smith said: “Covid has undoubtedly given everyone a very real appetite for all things scientific. Luke’s emergence as such a strong presence during the pandemic led us to ask him if he might be up for a partnership that would focus on bringing science programming to a broad global TV audience.

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“Given science is borderless, our ambitions for Kite’77 will be focused on securing international commissions, with the streamers a primary target.”

‘A lot of science television shows talk down to people, but Attenborough and Sagan never talked down’

Prof O’Neill said he had been inspired as a teenager by television programmes made by David Attenborough and the late astronomer Carl Sagan and that they had encouraged him to pursue his interest in science.

“A lot of science television shows talk down to people, but Attenborough and Sagan never talked down to people,” he said, adding that there was also room for more science television “to be fun” through formats such as quiz shows.

Household name

A regular media contributor who became a household name during the Covid-19 crisis, Prof O’Neill said the “timing is perfect” for Kite’77 – the name references a Talking Heads album – to capitalise on pandemic-heightened interest in science.

“My overall dream is to get as much science out there to as many young people as possible,” he said.

The professor of biochemistry in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology at the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute at Trinity College Dublin is an expert on innate immunity and inflammation. He is the co-founder of Sitryx, which aims to develop new medicines for inflammatory diseases, while another company he co-founded, Inflazome, was acquired by Swiss pharma giant Roche in 2020.

The author of several popular science books, Prof O’Neill was initially approached by Kite – the maker of Ireland’s Fittest Family for RTÉ One and Gogglebox Ireland for Virgin Media One, among other productions – after Mr Smith saw adaptation potential in his titles Humanology: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Amazing Existence and Never Mind the B#ll*cks, Here’s the Science.

Ms McManus, the project lead for Kite’77, previously served as commissioning editor at BBC Three predecessor BBC Choice, and then as BBC commissioning editor in entertainment, executive-producing shows such as Have I Got News for You, The Graham Norton Show, Mock the Week, QI and Comic Relief. From Dublin, she has had a long-term “creative connection” with Mr Smith and was struck by Prof O’Neill’s charisma during an appearance on the Late Late Show.

“He just has wonderful natural authority and is so engaging,” she said.

While Kite‘77 is at “very early stages”, its prospects should be helped by recent growth in the number of channels and platforms – including ITV-controlled BritBox and BBC Studios-owned channel Dave – commissioning factual entertainment.

“There are so many more homes now for great content,” Ms McManus said.

Mr Smith, an experienced maker of television who also co-wrote Dustin the Turkey’s 2008 Eurovision entry Irelande Douze Pointe, joked that his ambitions for Kite’77 might help him “finally move on” from failing science in his Inter Cert in 1989.