Australian prodco Beyond hires long-time collaborator Paul Clarke as exec producer

Australian prodco Beyond is adding long-term creative collaborator Paul Clarke to its team on a full-time basis from 2025 as a writer, director and executive producer.

Paul Clarke

The move comes after a stellar run in production successes for both Clarke and Beyond as coproduction partners on multi-award-winning documentary’s John Farnham: Finding The Voice and Midnight Oil: The Hardest Line, which opened the 2024 Sydney Film Festival and has been acquired by Australia’s ABC.

Beyond managing director Mikael Borglund said: “Over the course of his career, Paul has produced Australia’s literal anthology of music and popular culture entertainment for screen. We have partnered on many of those titles, and I look forward to continuing that collaboration in the years to come.”

Clarke is a leading Australian music entertainment producer and has been the force behind iconic music programming since the 1990s, including ABC series Recovery, Spicks and Specks, Long Way To The Top, and the annual Mardi Gras and Eurovision coverage across various networks in addition to a raft of documentaries covering cultural, political and social issues for over three decades.

“Beyond has created first class stories about Australian music and our cultural place in time. I truly respect that and the people who work there. I’m really excited to become part of such a great company,” said the exec.

Clarke’s first project for Beyond will be managing the 20-camera event coverage of Cold Chisel – The Big 5-0: 50th Anniversary Concert for the Seven Network.

In January, Borglund, one of the original founders of Beyond bought back his company from Banijay to re-launch it in Australia and the US as a television and film production house. Under the buy-back deal Beyond International and Banijay Rights have also concluded a five-year first-look distribution deal pertaining to Beyond group’s future productions.