What happens in The Taming of the Shrew?
 The Making of The Taming of the Shrew - page one
Diederick Santer is a producer for ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Drama Series & Serials, where he produced the first three series of the hit hairdressing drama Cutting It. He has also worked as a script editor for Granada and for United Productions, where we worked on ITV series including The Last Train, Always and Everyone and the first two series of Where The Heart Is.
Here he describes the process of producing the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ ONE updating of The Taming of the Shrew.
The shoot
One of the excitements throughout the shoot was the knowledge that after three weeks in and around London, we'd be finishing off with a week near Sienna in Italy. We weren't able to take all the crew, sadly, mainly just the heads of department and cast.
The rest of the crew for that week were Italian, based in Rome or Milan. We'd found the Italian locations a few weeks before. David, Alan, Phil, line producer Carmel Maloney, first assistant director Martin Harrison and I had spent a freezing January weekend in a small minibus being driven around some of the most stunning properties in Tuscany.
Although it was lovely to spend time in Italy with these interesting people and to see these beautiful houses, on one level the weekend was quite upsetting. Every time we arrived at another amazing, vast, stylish, tastefully-furnished villa all any of us could think was, "I will never be able to afford a place like this." The experience showed us very clearly the plain poverty of our empty, colourless lives.
Nevertheless the Italian shoot was happy, and a success. I'd got stuck in London trying to sort out money and practical problems on the next drama to shoot, Much Ado. So David led the cast and crew to Italy, and I found them on the last day tanned (despite it being only late March), relaxed, full of delicious Italian food, and ready for the final push.
It was a night shoot - all the material around the pool for the end of the Italy sequence. Sally Wainwright had brought her family to the area for a holiday, and she joined me, David, Shirley, Rufus, Stephen Tompkinson and the rest of the British and Italian crew as we stood by a pool near a villa on a hill.
And as we watched the sun go down, we were certain in the knowledge that, in fact, life wasn't all so bad and that we had the best jobs in all of the world.
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