Our Story
The first Glasgow Telly Festival took place from 29 May to 1 June 2025 and marked the public launch of Glasgow Tellyfest’s audience-led development model.
Delivered by a skeleton team with no core funding, the inaugural festival brought together 55 original One Minute Pilots from emerging, mid-career and established Scottish filmmakers. These short, standalone story concepts featured some of Scotland’s most recognisable screen talent alongside new voices and student work.
The pilots were showcased across Glasgow venues and online, with a strong emphasis on informal, accessible spaces such as pubs.
Over the course of the festival, more than 1,000 pieces of public feedback were gathered, creating one of the first large-scale datasets on early-stage audience response to Scottish scripted ideas.
Three headline events sold out across the weekend, supported by national and local media coverage. These included curated “Pick of the Pilots” sessions and special showcase events involving leading Scottish performers and creatives.
The 2025 festival proved that open submissions, structured peer review, and live audience testing could operate at scale. It demonstrated clear public appetite for locally rooted, original drama and comedy, and showed that early-stage development could be made visible, data-driven, and commercially relevant.
This first festival established the foundation for Glasgow Tellyfest as a permanent story development system rather than a one-off event.
Founder - Claire Duffy
Claire Duffy is an author, screenwriter, and producer with an international career spanning London, Vancouver, and Stockholm. Her work includes directing hit web series in Sweden, a commissioned TV pilot, and the audio drama The Stranger, read by Joanne Froggatt and distributed internationally by Storytel. She is also the bestselling author of the Dark of Night trilogy and a graduate of The Writers Lab, supported by Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman. During lockdown in Glasgow, she produced the collaborative digital drama The End, which led directly to the creation of Glasgow Tellyfest. Through Glasgow Tellyfest, Claire is building a transparent, audience-led development system that turns grassroots Scottish stories into industry-ready projects.