Meet the acclaimed producer behind your favourite TV shows 

A second chance

Thankfully, being in the BBC and building relationships there, had a positive outcome. A colleague suggested to Jane that her energy might be better matched to TV and helped her secure an interview to work as a secretary in that world. Jane approached this second chance with refreshed commitment.

'I was determined to get it right this time,' she explains. 'The BBC had an internal training scheme; I applied and became a Trainee Assistant Floor Manager. That was one of the established routes to moving your way up through the production floor and I was determined to succeed – I worked incredibly hard.'

It was Jane's willingness to work hard and seize opportunities that allowed her to briefly spend time on a show that she loved as a teenager and would feature later in her career.

She explains: 'When I was an Assistant Floor Manager in the 1980s, the first run of Doctor Who was coming to an end. One of the things you had to do as an assistant floor manager was mark out the rehearsal room floor with tape to define where the set would be so the actors could rehearse within its boundaries. One Saturday, I spent an afternoon marking up the floor plan of the TARDIS for somebody else because I really wanted to do it.'  

Brave new world

Jane's next move would be a stint at ITV, after which she returned to the BBC and began making shows that would become huge hits.

The early 2000s were a time of change at the BBC. The new Director General, Greg Dyke, had moved the main news from 21.00 to 22.00, meaning there was a new one-hour slot on BBC One.  

'We could do a new type of post-watershed drama,' recalls Jane. 'The BBC put a big cash injection into supporting this. I was lucky; I had more money and this new slot in the schedule. It was huge.'

'My plan was to create drama that embodied the values of BBC public service broadcasting: to educate, inform and entertain. I wanted to craft well-told stories that had something to say.' 

To fulfil this, Jane commissioned stylish shows such as Spooks, Life on Mars and Hustle.  

She continues: 'Their success was critical in terms of our audience seeing the modernisation of BBC drama. There were also more challenging pieces such as State of Play and Clocking Off, plus adaptations of classic novels like Bleak House and Little Dorrit.'  

There was also a Gallifreyan Time Lord in need of a makeover for a modern audience… 

An appointment with the Doctor

Some 15 years after her first adventures in time and space, Jane made the decision to relaunch Doctor Who. Considering the success of the reboot, we now know that this was inspired. But at the time, not everyone agreed.

Jane describes resistance from some areas: 'The marketing department at the BBC did research that told us people didn't want to see Doctor Who. We sort of hid that and carried on. But there was massive support from Lorraine Heggessey, who was Controller of BBC One at the time.'

Even with talent like writer Russell T Davies and actor Christopher Ecclestone on board, going against the grain and trusting her gut wasn't easy.

She explains: 'I was confident we'd made something good. What I didn't know is whether an audience would watch it.'

Jane needn't have worried. An average of eight million viewers watched each episode when Doctor Who returned in 2005. And they've stayed watching Ecclestone and his successors ever since.  

New challenges

Never one to rest on her laurels, in 2009 Jane made the decision to move to America and strengthen her understanding of commercial television, which differed from public service broadcasting because it had to make a profit. What she learnt there would go on to shape the rest of her career.

Jane recalls: 'I worked a lot in the studio system in New York. I looked at what they had, which was a flourishing eco-system that employed people for 52 weeks of the year, and thought, “I could do that in Wales!”'

Up until then, the standard model in the UK involved bringing productions to an area for a brief period, generating economic benefits for the community, and then leaving once filming wrapped.

After her time in America, Jane felt inspired to replicate the sustainable industry she had witnessed in New York, leading her to set up her production company Bad Wolf.