WATCH: A busy career in TV with hits including After Life

Over the years freelance production designer Richard has worked on shows and designed sets that have taken him all over the world as well as every major TV and film studio the UK has to offer. He’s also put sets into most of London’s West End theatres.

With a CV close to 200 shows, Richard decided it was time to look back on it all – a career which has included work on a large number of Comic Relief shows plus Intelligence, The Witchfinder, This Time With Alan Partridge and After Life, a show that has been viewed by more than 120 million people worldwide.

It all started back in 1985 when Richard was a teenage student at West Sussex College Of Design (now Northbrook), where he studied TV and theatre design at BTEC level. The building, long gone, was barely 200 metres from Worthing Museum.

Now living in Worthing again, he offers what he calls “a retrospective without me being dead!” The exhibition is a look at the creative process, how a few lines on a script can take months of planning and how an idea hatched on a piece of paper in his kitchen can end up on TVs around the world.

“I am at a stage in my career where I am 35 years into it and there are probably more years behind me now than there are in front of me, but I'm still hugely enjoying it. But I'm actually thinking about what I might do next. I've been doing a little bit of work with students and I went to the museum. I had the idea for this exhibition and asked if they would be interested and they said yes. I've decided to cover my career with eight large boards. There is one that focuses on Worthing and one that focuses on the BBC and one that focuses on when I finished with the BBC and then one looking back at the first big design that I did in the late 90s and then there are like case studies of the various shows I've done since.”

Inevitably each job is different: “I have done a lot of the Comic Relief shows and you would get on board seven or eight weeks in advance working out what they need. And then there was a show that I did with Sky a couple years ago called Intelligence. I got involved very early on that one in the development stage. I knew the production company and they asked me to go away and come up with some ideas and cost it all up. We ended up designing a 360-degree office in a studio with like glass walls because the story is set in GCHQ in Cheltenham and they certainly wouldn’t allow filming in there!”

Richard’s next project is the next series of McDonald and Dodds, the crime series: “We don't start until the middle of June but we then go through to the middle of September. It's going to be a 14-week shoot.”

But a particular highlight so far has been working on After Life with Ricky Gervais.

“Tony is the character that Ricky plays and we were working on Tony's house which is a set and Ricky was talking about It's A Wonderful Life being one of his favourite films and he said he wanted to have the feeling of that. But obviously It's A Wonderful Life is in black and white and is a period piece set in the past but I found online a lot of colour stills from the film and I based the house on the colour palette that was used for the house in the film.

" So there is that reference there but it is a little bit subverted.”