Hot Shots 2024: Lottie Haigh

Netflx’s upcoming Amanda Holden-fronted entertainment show Cheaters: Unfinished Business [working title] is a huge win for 12 Yard and co-producer Lifted Entertainment.

Having co-devised the idea, developed it and pitched it, Lottie Haigh spent 16 months of paid development honing the format and is now searching for on-screen talent and devising tasks and challenges on location.

“Lottie is the development producer you dream of working with,” says development exec John Lomax. “She has an incisive, unique, problem-solving mind but is always creatively generous. She comes up with big, original ideas and has the creative energy, rigour and enthusiasm to see them through. It’s a thing of wonder to watch her pitch.”

For Lomax, it’s the way that Haigh “interrogates ideas to make them better” that singles her out. From a working-class upbringing in Yorkshire, she joined 12 Yard as a graduate development trainee and swiftly rose to researcher/AP and now producer.

She created and tested games for an ITV1 live gameshow pilot, and helped steer The Cabins, ITV2’s “younger, stripped and noisier” adaptation of Dutch format Let Love Rule. She now has several entertainment, factual entertainment and reality ideas in with the BBC, ITV and C4.

12 Yard managing director Michael Mannes describes Haigh as a “creative force”. “Her dedication to an idea is second to none and her ability to look at the detail early on is impressive.”

Creative director Liz Gaskell concludes that Haigh is “confident but not the least bit arrogant, and will fi ght for her ideas but equally be willing to start from scratch to make them better”.