Peter Jukes
Early life[edit]
Jukes was born in Swindon, Wiltshire, England, and attended Queens' College, Cambridge. His mother was an Armenian and the daughter of a man fleeing the Armenian genocide; she was later adopted by his grandfather.[3]
Television[edit]
Jukes' television writing has mainly been in the genre of prime time thrillers or TV detective fiction, with 90-minute or two-hour long stories being broadcast by the BBC.
Jukes devised and wrote most of the three seasons of the BBC One prime time undercover thriller In Deep starring Nick Berry and Stephen Tompkinson;[4][5] two 90-minute film length episodes of the BBC One series The Inspector Lynley Mysteries;.[6][7] Burn Out, the two-hour first episode of the first season of the Emmy Award winning cold case series Waking the Dead;[8] achieved 8.4m viewers and a 38% share.[9] He and Ed Whitmore wrote the second series of the paranormal/science thriller Sea of Souls[10] which won the 2005 BAFTA Scotland Award[11] for Best Drama. Jukes' opening episode of the third season of Holby City[12] was described by The Guardian as the "televisual equivalent of Crack Cocaine."[13]
In October 2009, Jukes wrote a critical piece for Prospect magazine, contrasting the standards of UK television drama negatively with the standard of television dramas in America.[14] In the essay Why Can't Britain Do the Wire he argued that high-quality drama in the UK had suffered from a concentration of commissioning power, the dominance of soaps (such as the twelfth series of Holby City), and the lack of show runners or writer producers that characterise US TV drama production.[15]
Theatre[edit]
Jukes's early theatre work debuted at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre: Abel Barebone and the Humble Company (1987) and Shadowing the Conqueror (1988).[35] Shadowing the Conqueror, which transferred to Washington, D.C., was described in The Washington Post as "a depiction of the travels of Alexander the Great (Grimmette) and a contemporary photographer named Mary Ellis (Laura Giannarelli) – based very loosely on the relationship between Alexander and Pyrrho of Elis, a painter who accompanied the warrior on his expedition to the Orient – is most of all a lofty debate between two intensely committed, opposing forces."[36] Jukes wrote the book of the London stage musical Matador,[37] with lyrics by Edward Seago and music by Mike Leander, starring John Barrowman and Stefanie Powers, which premiered at the Queen's Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue in April 1991.
Journalism and politics[edit]
Jukes has been a book reviewer[38] and feature writer[39] for both The Independent and the New Statesman[40] on themes including nationalism, art in the computer age,[41] and apocalyptic religion.[42][43]
During the 1980s and 90s, Jukes was an active member of the Labour Party and was involved in the investigations around the cash for questions scandal.[44] Jukes became an active Barack Obama supporter during the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries in the US, writing for Daily Kos and then MyDD when it became a pro-Hillary Clinton site. Later, he recorded his online experiences of the Primary 'Flame Wars' for Prospect.[45] Following the primaries, he was one of 25 regular bloggers who began writing for a new political blog, The Motley Moose.[46][47]
During the News International phone hacking scandal trial of Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and others, Jukes used the crowdfunding tool Indiegogo to raise donations to allow him to livetweet the trial from start to finish.[48]
In May 2016, Jukes presented and co-produced with Deeivya Meier a 20-part podcast about the Murder of Daniel Morgan, Untold: The Daniel Morgan Murder, which topped the UK iTunes podcast chart.[49] The following year, Jukes co-wrote a book with Alastair Morgan titled Untold: the Daniel Morgan Murder Exposed, which featured new revelations about the case.[50]
According to Eliott Higgins, founder of the open source investigative site Bellingcat, Jukes came up with the name of the new organisation in 2014, inspired by the medieval folk tale of Belling the Cat.[51]
In 2018, Jukes and Stephen Colegrave founded Byline Times.[52]