In an inspiring and thought-provoking presentation entitled "The Me in Media", Anthony Lilley, an Old Boy of Bolton School, predicted more and more new media jobs were on their way to the area as the BBC moves into new offices in Salford.  Anthony Lilley is Chief Creative Officer and CEO of Magic Lantern Productions, one of the UK's foremost interactive media production companies.  He was talking to Sixth Form students and their parents, as well as governors, staff and friends of Bolton School at this year's annual Tillotson Lecture.  Mr Lilley told the audience that personnel in his own business came from a wide range of academic backgrounds and that there was potential to earn serious money whilst doing something that most of them would happily do as a hobby.  He felt certain jobs of this calibre would become more prevalent in the area in the near future.  A recent survey had shown that 7% of the UK’s GDP came from creative industries and that this was the second fastest growing business sector, after the financial services industry.  Given the turmoil of the banking world, he believes that new media must now be the fastest growth industry in the UK. 

Mr Lilley said the driving force for much of his life had been to ask the question “Why not?”.  He commented that “Bolton School has had an enormous impact on my life,” and had helped him learn the importance of believing in yourself and perseverance.  After leaving the School in 1988, he went to the University of Oxford where he trained as a lawyer but then surprised everyone, including himself, in building a career in new media.  Describing himself as “half luvvie, half geek”, he explained how his company, Magic Lantern, emerged from a group of friends who got together to do new media projects to supplement the meagre wages they were earning in the theatre.     

Mr Lilley felt that being 38 years of age in his field was seen as “getting on” and that the future of his industry lies with young people.  During a recent spell as Visiting Professor at Oxford University he said the most demanding questions had come from the undergraduates not the dons and that he had recently had some highly illuminating discussions with seven year olds about websites!  He found young people to be much more familiar with new technology and much happier to ask questions about it and demand that it should do more.

However, despite the plethora of technology that is widely available to us, he still felt that traditional media like television, cinema and books would still be around for a long time to come and made the point that more books had been printed in the last 10 years than they have ever been!  He stressed that technology is merely a medium through which we should interact with one another and we must never forget that “stories and people matter more than technology.”

Anthony Lilley has an established track record of working on big media projects from Doctor Who to Top Gear, Teletubbies to The Guardian’s website and has won numerous industry awards, including a BAFTA for his work on FourDocs for C4.  He is the youngest ever member of the Content Board of OfCOM, the media regulator, gave the prestigious, televised Huw Wheldon Memorial Lecture for the Royal Television Society in 2007 and has just completed a stint as News International Visiting Professor of Broadcast Media at the University of Oxford.  He was awarded the OBE for services to media in the Queen’s Birthday honours list earlier this summer aged 38.

Bolton School’s Tillotson Lecture has attracted a long list of eminent speakers, including in the last few years old boys Sir Ian McKellen, Professor Nigel Slater and Professor Chris Higson.