Seona Robertson, TV producer
Seona Robertson graduated with a MA Honours degree in Mediaeval History in 1972. After post-graduate research in Florence and creating a film archive, Robertson has devoted her career to television in the UK and internationally.
After living in Cyprus, Egypt, Aden, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Hong Kong, Seona Robertson recalls loving windswept St Andrews. She thoroughly enjoyed her history course, lived in Andrew Melville Hall in its inaugural year, attended rock shows in Edinburgh and Dundee, and was part of the Socialist Alliance. After graduating in 1972, Seona remained close friends with her classmate Elspeth King, who became a noted museum curator.
Seona studied English, Philosophy, and Modern history in sub-honours and then specialised in Mediaeval European history while in Honours. She particularly liked the opportunities to study social, economic, and women’s history within the mediaeval history department. Ann Kettle, lecturer in the Department of Mediaeval History, who taught women’s history, was a wonderful mentor for Seona.
The summer before her fourth year she won a Carnegie Vacation Scholarship sponsored by Professor Lionel Butler to study Italian Renaissance society in Rome, Venice, Florence – which she immediately felt an affinity for. She later studied the lives of Renaissance women through their letters in Florence, stayed for four years and continues to return to Florence twice a year.
Seona explains that she found academic research rather solitary, so she wanted a career change. She was fortunate to land a job in a history research unit in Manchester in 1977. Though she moved on from academia, Seona’s career in large part remained centered on a love of social history forged at St Andrews.
This first job was focused on finding and preserving at-risk archive film and using oral history interviews to research the local film and cinema industry. Seona loved this challenging, more collaborative, public facing work learning a new range of technical and creative skills. The project grew from a desk and 3 cans of film into the North West Film Archive, which now contains more than 60,000 items of film and video from the 1890s to today, and is housed at Manchester Metropolitan University.[i] In exchange for funding for the project, Seona went on live weekly broadcasts with the ITV Granada Television station to report her findings and appeal for more film and memories.
Through people she met at Granada, Seona was subsequently offered a job as a specialist archive film researcher on the major international series on the history of film, Camera (1980), working on 3 films – two about British film and one on French film from 1895 to 1914. She recalls the excitement and fulfillment of making the programmes, leading her to redirect her career toward television production. She explains that she was motivated by a desire to popularise the history of ordinary people and share it with a wider audience.
Jeremy Isaacs, founding Chief Executive of Channel 4, approached Seona about independently producing a television series about the stories she was unearthing. She founded Reality Productions in Manchester with film maker Dee Dee Glass and Britain’s first camerawoman Diane Tammes, and produced the first ever documentary series broadcast on Channel 4, Pleasure Palaces. The series, which aired in November 1982, showcased rare archive film and ordinary people who remembered the heyday of the cinema industry in the early twentieth century.
Seona produced numerous projects for Channel 4 through Reality including Innocent as Hell (1985) and Glasgow By The Way (1988) and then moved back to Scotland to work at Scottish Television where she teamed up with director Les Wilson. Their biggest project was Scotland’s War (1989-1994), thirty programmes that aired across five years. The popular award-winning series interviewed more than 500 men and women about their experiences during the Second World War. The interviews are now preserved at the Imperial War Museum in London, and Wilson and Robertson also published a book by the same title in 1995.[ii]
At Scottish Television, Seona also produced Runrig (1990), a multi-film camera rock concert which won a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) “Scotland Best Arts Film” award and Celtic Media Festival “Spirit of the Festival” award.
In 1992, Wilson and Robertson founded the independent, Glasgow–based, TV production company Caledonia TV. Now Managing Director, Seona has, with Wilson and a young team, produced hundreds of hours of television for all the UK channels—BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Channel 5 and many international channels, streamers and digital platforms. The company has worked in a range of genres—history, documentary, arts, factual entertainment, current affairs, and children’s series.
The project Seona found the most fascinating to produce (after Scotland’s War!), was Chosen People (2000). The series for BBC2’s millennium strand focused on ten families around the world photographed by the famous Magnum agency in 1947 for the Ladies Home Journal magazine showing what ordinary people had in common in the wake of war.[iii] Seona recalls travelling around the world to find and film these families, from China, to Italy, Egypt, Mexico, the US, the UK, France, Japan, Germany and even entering a warzone to find the family in Sudan.
Caledonia TV has filmed extensively internationally (on five continents) but maintains a focus on their indigenous Scottish identity, with Seona noting that:
“Scotland is our home and we believe strongly that new quality Scottish content, enjoyed by Scottish audiences, should also be screened on the UK network and internationally.”[iv]
Caledonia TV produces many programmes for BBC Alba, the Scottish Gaelic television channel, most recently the award-winning series Hebridean Baker: Nordic Isles. Seona explains that Caledonia has never relied on winning business in Scotland and the UK and has co-produced internationally—from Ireland to Australia. In 2023, the company won a major award from the BFI UK Global Screen Fund to expand its co-productions abroad. Seona is now developing a science co-production between China, Germany, France and the US.
This story was written by Sophia Kazan, MA Modern History (2026), who interviewed Seona Robertson in May 2026.
[i] https://www.mmu.ac.uk/north-west-film-archive
[ii] Seona Robertson and Leslie Wilson, Scotland’s War (Edinburgh, 1995).
[iii] http://www.caledonia.tv/chosen-people/
[iv] Seona Robertson, ’Public Interest Test on the Proposed New BBC Television Channel for Scotland – Response on Behalf of Caledonian TV’, BBC (2017), https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/howwework/accountability/consultations/caledonia_tv_seona_robertson.pdf [accessed 27 April 2026].