Neil Hardwick

Who is Neil Hardwick?

Robert Neil Hardwick is a British-born Finnish theatre and TV director and writer. He was raised in Teversal, near Nottingham. His father was a teacher, and Neil Hardwick has described himself as "a second generation non-miner".

At age 11, Hardwick was admitted to boarding school with a scholarship. Already in his school years, Neil wrote, directed and often starred in many of his own plays. At age 18, he was drafted to work in the UK nuclear energy commission. Additional studies at King's College, Cambridge led to a change in profession. There he found philosophy and the world of theatre at a new level.

After graduating from the University of Cambridge, Hardwick moved to Finland in 1969. He started his career as the voice of the English language school tapes of Finnish primary and high schools in the middle 1970s, and to the children of the 1960s and 1970s he became famous as the policeman of the children's language program Hello Hello Hello. Hardwick's reputation as a Finnish director and keen-eyed depictor of the Finnish lifestyle stems from the YLE TV2 comedy series Tankki täyteen and Reinikainen. In Reinikainen, the protagonist is an elderly single policeman from the countryside, who is transferred to a city, where his verbal skill, cunning and nonchalant attitude often defuses dramatic situations and saves the day. His most artistically ambitious work is the TV series Pakanamaan kartta, dealing with total short term memory loss and ecoterrorism.