EXCLUSIVE: The BBC and A24 are set to roll cameras soon on their adaption of Kaliane Bradley‘s hit novel The Ministry of Time.
The show has gone quiet after being announced two years ago but BBC drama boss Lindsay Salt just confirmed to Deadline it is moving forwards and the team is “gearing up to shoot later this year.”
Casting is not yet set, Salt said, but fans of the novel will be eagerly awaiting who will take on the lead roles of the unnamed protagonist and Commander Graham Gore. Emmy-winning Normal People writer Alice Birch is penning The Ministry of Time for TV.
The bestselling sci-fi romance novel is about a newly established government department, which gathers ‘expats’ from across history in an experiment to test the viability of time-travel. Gore, an officer on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 Arctic expedition, is one such figure rescued from certain death – alongside an army captain from the fields of the Somme, a plague victim from the 1600s, a widow from revolutionary France, and a soldier from the seventeenth century.
The Ministry of Time was unveiled on a big slate of shows in 2024. Salt told us she had been “front footed” on getting the rights, nabbing them before it was published.
“When I read the book I was like, ‘I have to have this book’,” she said. “It felt like a way of doing state of the nation in a way that was fresh, vibrant and has a lot to say.”
A24 is producing and distributing the adaptation. Birch and Jo McClellan are exec producing.