Secrets of Great British Castles

Secrets of Great British Castles is a British history documentary series that grew from the success of Irish TV series Tales of Irish Castles. The idea - initially created and written by Billy McGrath - was rejected by state broadcaster RTE. It was subsequently pitched to Ben Frow - the director of programming for Ireland's 1st ever commercial channel TV3 - and it proved a ratings success. When he returned to London to head up Channel 5 Ben asked Billy (then partner in Sideline Productions) to expand on a new idea based on UK castles. The result was the much more ambitious Secrets of Great British Castles produced by Dublin based Sideline in 12 parts. It was first broadcast between 3 April 2015 and 9 December 2016 (6 parts per season). Historian Dan Jones^[1] came on board as host and writer to explore the history behind Great Britain's most famous castles and is currently broadcast on Netflix around the globe. International sales for SoGBC were secured by screen content distributors DCD Rights and sold to 160 countries world-wide. The deal with DCD was negotiated by ICM Partners London (now CAA).

Secrets of Great British Castles
Genre	Documentary
Starring	Dan Jones Billy McGrath (writer)
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Original language	English
No. of series	2
No. of episodes	12
Production
Production location	UK
Running time	60 minutes
Production companies	Sideline Productions and Motion Content Group
Original release
Network	Channel 5
Release	3 April 2015 (2015-04-03) – 9 December 2016 (2016-12-09)
Related
Britain's Bloodiest Dynasty Henry VIII and His Six Wives

Episode list

Season	Castle	Place	Broadcast
1	Dover Castle	England	3 April 2015
	Tower of London	England	10 April 2015
	Warwick Castle	England	17 April 2015
	Caernarfon Castle	Wales	24 April 2015
	Stirling Castle	Scotland	1 May 2015
	Carrickfergus Castle	Northern Ireland	8 May 2015
2	Edinburgh Castle	Scotland	28 October 2016
	Cardiff Castle	Wales	4 November 2016
	York Castle	England	18 November 2016
	Leeds Castle	England	25 November 2016
	Lancaster Castle	England	2 December 2016
	Arundel Castle	England	9 December 2016