Chapter One...
The first Glasgow Telly Festival ran from 29 May to 1 June 2025, and it proved the concept works.
Over four days, 55 original One Minute Pilots from emerging, mid-career and established Scottish filmmakers came together to show the world the screen stories they were missing out on.
The pilots played out across Glasgow venues and online, deliberately at home in informal, accessible spaces such as pubs, ather than behind closed industry doors.
The response was real and measurable. More than 1,000 pieces of public feedback came in, giving us one of the first large-scale datasets on how audiences actually respond to early-stage Scottish scripted ideas.
Three headline events sold out across the weekend, and gained national and local media coverage.
The 2025 festival showed that open submissions, structured peer review and live audience testing can work at scale, and that there's real public appetite for locally rooted, original drama and comedy. Early-stage development can be visible, data-driven and commercially relevant, all at the same time.
That first festival laid the foundation. Glasgow Tellyfest is now a permanent story development system, built to run year after year.
Founder Claire is an author, screenwriter and producer who once worked in an oil refinery in Ohio. She worked in casting and production in London, Vancouver and in Stockholm, where she directed two hit web series and her pilot Sant är Livet was commissioned by Swedish television. Her original audio series The Stranger was read by Joanne Froggatt. The completed trilogy ran in 17 countries on Storytel and the TV adaptation is currently in development.
Thanks to accidentally writing a crime thriller blog, Claire became the author of the bestselling Dark of Night series which was featured in Bloody Scotland’s Crime in the Spotlight, the Stockholm Murders series, the Shadow City series and the Chances Are series. She was selected for The Writers Lab 2022, a lab for female screenwriters over 40 supported by Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman, with her pilot that was described as The Sopranos meets The Steamie.
After getting trapped in her native Glasgow by lockdown, she produced The End, a collaborative drama out of boredom. The talent she discovered made her realise she needed to create the opportunities it deserved, and The Glasgow Telly Festival was born.
Email: info@glasgowtellyfest.com