Nicola Shindler (born 8 October 1968) is a British television producer and executive, and founder of the independent television drama production company Quay Street Productions, having founded and run Red Production Company from 1998 to 2020. She has won eleven BAFTA TV Awards.
Early life and education
Shindler was born in Rochdale, England, the daughter of school teacher Gaye Shindler (née Kenton) and solicitor Geoffrey Shindler. She grew up in the Whitefield area of Greater Manchester.
Shindler attended Bury Grammar School from 1979 to 1987. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in history from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
Career
Shindler first started out working as a sales manager in the sales department at Royal Court Theatre, which she chose because it was the home of new writing. She eventually started working as a script reader there but realised after a couple of years that she was more interested in the process of writing and working with writers in television versus theatre.
Shindler then got a job at the BBC as a trainee script editor. Part of the responsibilities of that job in the early days was reading scripts that had been accumulating in the basement of the BBC for over 10 years. Shindler says that it was educational and she got a reputation as a hard worker from clearing this huge backlog.
Shindler worked at Granada Television, for whom she first came to prominence as a script editor on the drama series Cracker (1993). She then went on to work as assistant producer on the BBC's Our Friends in the North (1996) and producer on Hillsborough, a dramatised account of the 1989 football stadium disaster. All three starred actor Christopher Eccleston, who subsequently featured in several dramas for Shindler's Red Production Company.
In 1998, Shindler formed Red Production Company – named after the nickname of Shindler's favourite football team, Manchester United – in Manchester. Its first project, with Shindler producing, was writer Russell T Davies' gay drama serial Queer as Folk. Queer as Folk gave Red a reputation as producers of noteworthy drama, and they followed this up with subsequent series for Channel 4 such as Love in the 21st Century (1999) and Queer as Folk 2 (2000).
Red has since produced dramas for BBC One, BBC Two, and ITV including Clocking Off (2000–03), Flesh and Blood (2002), Bob and Rose (2001) and The Second Coming (2003).
In addition to the ITV series, Scott & Bailey, Shindler produced the award-winning Happy Valley, which is set in the Calder Valley and environs and stars Sarah Lancashire. Sally Wainwright credits Shindler with bringing Last Tango in Halifax to BBC TV. In December 2013, it was announced that Shindler had sold a majority stake Red Production Company to the French media company StudioCanal.
Other productions produced by Shindler at Red are 2016's The Five and 2017's Trust Me, alongside 2018's Come Home and Harlan Coben’s Safe, 2019's Years and Years from Russell T. Davies, and Traces, a second series of which is due in 2021, and Harlan Coben’s The Stranger (2020)
Further new dramas produced by executive produced by Shindler due in 2021 include Finding Alice, It’s a Sin, Ridley Road, No Return, Traces Series 2 and Stay Close.
In 2021, Shindler launched new scripted production company Quay Street Productions. Sited within ITV Studios, the label is based in Central Manchester and focuses on producing premium drama for the UK and international market.
Personal life
Shindler lives and works in Manchester, England. Shindler is married to writer Matt Greenhalgh, they have two daughters and a son.
Honours
2003: The Guardian – Media top 100
2009: Manchester Metropolitan University, Honorary Doctorate of Arts
2013: BBC Radio 4, Woman's Hour – Power List 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom 2015: The Hollywood Reporter – 25 Most Powerful Women in Global TV 2016: Peabody Award for Happy Valley 2017: Women in Film and Television International – Women in Film and Television Award 2019: Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to broadcasting