Hilary Bevan Jones


Hilary Susan Bevan Jones is a British television producer, who has worked on several acclaimed drama programmes, including the multi-award-winning State of Play. She entered the television industry in 1979, when she gained a job as an assistant floor manager at BBC Television Centre. Previously, she had worked as a teacher in Essex, after having failed in several attempts to gain work in the theatre.
During the 1980s she worked predominantly on comedy programmes such as Not the Nine O'Clock News and Blackadder, becoming a producer in 1988, working in that capacity on Red Dwarf. In the 1990s she switched to working on drama programming and also left the BBC. She produced Cracker for Granada Television, upon which she first worked with the writer Paul Abbott, who went on to write State of Play, which she produced in 2003.
State of Play was co-produced by Endor Productions, a company Bevan Jones had co-founded in 1994, but after working on the series with Abbott the pair of them established their own new production company, Tightrope Pictures. Tightrope has produced several dramas for the BBC, including the Richard Curtis piece The Girl in the Café, which Bevan Jones produced herself.
She served as Chairman of BAFTA 2006–2008, and was the first woman to hold this position.
Her grandfather was the World War I author E. H. Jones.
She also serves as patron for Watersprite: The Cambridge International Student Film Festival.