After university Bill worked two years of manual labour on the Fulmar Alpha oil-rig in the North Sea whilst weaning himself off writing dialogue-driven TV dramas like Nailed and lurching towards telling stories with moving pictures.
Creatures of Light, his graduation film from the National Film and Television School won the Chaplin Award for Best First Feature at the Edinburgh Film Festival.
In a TV directing career spanning 30 years, workplace dramas include Mr Selfridge, The Mill and BAFTA-nominated Dockers; historical epics include Daniel Craig in Sword of Honour and Alex Kingston in Boudica; detective dramas include the pilot of Lewis, Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories, and writing and directing Royal Television Society-nominated Guardians.
In stark contrast to his work on Spooks and Dr Who, in 2019 Abrams Press published Bill’s first work of prose The Idle Beekeeper, a book about empathy (and raising bees). The title of a recent directing project coincidentally chimes
with his ethos of non-interventionist beekeeping – Silent Witness – a BBC drama which required Bill to assassinate the UK Health Minister.
Former board member and Vice Chair of Directors UK for 6 years, Bill is currently Chair of FERA.