People

Paul Sowerbutts

Managing Director, Diverse Production Ltd.

Vice President, Zodiak West

Paul Sowerbutts is VP West for Zodiak Entertainment, the recently formed entertainment arm of De Agostini: the Italian conglomerate with international interests in publishing, gaming, finance and media communication.  Zodiak Entertainment has a direct presence in more than 20 territories through production companies and distribution. He is also Managing Director of Diverse Productions, a successful top 20 independent production company in the UK and is tasked with growing the UK and USA business.

He joined Diverse as Managing Director in September 2004 in order to spearhead Diverse's expansion strategy and to strengthen the company's commercial business experience. He moved from a post as Managing Director of 4 Rights, the rights exploitation arm of UK broadcaster, Channel 4 where he also oversaw a development and co-production division.  

Sowerbutts moved to Channel 4 in January 2001, taking on the position of Managing Director at Channel 4 International. He became Managing Director of 4 Rights in April 2002 where he was responsible for all exploitation of programme rights for 4 Ventures.

Prior to working at Channel 4, Sowerbutts held an 11-year tenure at ITEL, a joint venture vehicle between part of ITV and HBO in the USA. He rose through the ranks to become Deputy Director. Prior to ITEL, he worked in radio, training as a Producer and Studio Manager at the BBC. Mr. Sowerbutts also worked as an Account Director at BissLancaster/WCRS (advertising and PR) and started his career as an accountant for Touche Ross in London in 1980.

ALAN BROWN

Creative Director for Diverse Group

As one of Britain's leading television executive producers, Alan has over ten years experience.  He has originated and produced an extraordinary wide range of hit shows from factual entertainment formats, comedy entertainment panel shows and documentary series.

After several years as producer director at BBC and Granada, Alan got his first executive producer gig at the BBC in Manchester under Wayne Garvie. There Alan created a string of new shows including the massive nostalgia brand I 70s/80s for BBC2. The format sold worldwide and became the #1 show for VH1 in the USA.  Alongside his own originations, Alan went onto to executive produce on high profile factual series such as ‘Great Britons'and ‘Reputations'. In 2003, Alan became a BBC Senior Commissioning Executive for Entertainment ordering the first British series of business formats, ‘The Apprentice' and ‘Dragons Den'. After two years, Peter Fincham and Daisy Goodwin took him to Talkback Thames as a key creative, running all the factual/comedy entertainment shows. This included the second, audience breakthrough series of ‘The Apprentice', he extended the brand with the spin off show ‘You're Fired' with Adrian Chiles. In comedy entertainment he oversaw the revival of comedy entertainment brand ‘Never Mind The Buzzcocks'.

Returning to BBC production in 2007, Alan created and produced the fifteen part reality show ‘The Restaurant' featuring chef Raymond Blanc, now commissioned for its third series on BBC2. It's success led to an offer to rejoin Daisy Goodwin, this time at Silver River as Creative Director in 2008, Alan made one of the biggest features hit shows of the year ‘Grow Your Own Drugs' with new talent James Wong for BBC2 and launched the very successful ‘Oops TV' with Justin Lee-Collins for SkyOne.  Both shows have won re-commissions.

The quality and originality of his work have won him recognition and awards from The Royal Television Society, BAFTA, Grierson and the Rose d'Or.

MATT PAICE

Executive Producer, Entertainment

Matt Paice heads Diverse's entertainment effort, focusing on gameshows and light entertainment formats.  At Diverse his credits include two series of the huge studio gameshow Beat The Star for ITV1, the kids' reality series Election for BBC One, history quiz Codex for Channel 4, business format Badger Or Bust for Sky1, sync/archive series Greatest Ever Movies for Five and documentary format Brits Behind Bars for Bravo.

Before joining Diverse in 2005, Matt was a commissioning editor at Sky One, where he commissioned Brainiac Science Abuse and numerous other gameshows and reality series.  Before that, he was controller of men's channel Bravo, where he commissioned blokey TV hits such as Sin Cities, Travel Sick, World's Deadliest Gangs and World Of Pain.