Mal Young
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Mal Young (born in Liverpool, England, on January 26 1957) is a British television producer and executive . His initial career was in the Graphic Design industry, and it was not until the age of 27 that he began working in television, on the acclaimed Channel 4 soap opera Brookside.
Working on the show for nearly a decade, he worked his way up to become its producer in the early 1990s, although his tenure was criticised by some for taking the show away from its social realist roots towards a more sensationalist, ratings-chasing format. He moved on to become Head of Drama at the independent production company Pearson Television, where he oversaw work on ITV police drama The Bill and another soap opera, Channel 5's Family Affairs.
In 1997, he moved to the BBC to become the Controller of Continuing Drama Series for the Corporation's in-house production arm, a position he still held until 2004. In this role, he was responsible for overseeing all of the organisation's in-house continuing episodic drama series (as opposed to short-run multi-episode-storyline serials, which are handled by the Head of Serials). Programmes he oversaw for the BBC included the soap opera EastEnders; medical dramas Doctors, Casualty and the latter's spin-off series Holby City; police dramas Dalziel & Pascoe, Waking the Dead and Merseybeat; anthology shows The Afternoon Play and Murder in Mind; legal drama Judge John Deed; rural-set Down to Earth; 1950s-set period piece Born and Bred and science-fiction series Doctor Who.
He is engaged to the singer Mari Wilson, whom he met at a charity function in 2001. In July 2004, in a poll of industry experts conducted by Radio Times magazine, he was voted the 9th Most Powerful Person in Television Drama.
At the end of 2004, Young left the staff of the BBC to take up a new, highly-paid position as Head of Drama at independent production company 19TV, developing new drama formats for the UK and U.S. markets.