broadcast live from the streets of Manchester—a "straight" adaptation would be produced for broadcast in 2008. Fincham wanted it to be the "centrepiece" of BBC One's Easter 2008 schedule and hoped that it would have the same impact as Jesus of Nazareth did in the 1970s. Nigel Stafford-Clark, the producer of BBC One's successful 2005 adaptation of Bleak House, was brought on as producer, and a contract was tendered for a writer. Frank Deasy was announced as having won the contract in July 2006. Stafford-Clark chose him because he believed that Deasy understood the scale of the project. The production was budgeted at £4 million. Both Deasy and Stafford-Clark looked to emulate the style of The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964) over The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson, 2004). Deasy had walked out of The Passion of the Christ after 20 minutes because it "drained the spirituality of Jesus". Jesus of Nazareth had opposite effect on him, in that he believed Franco Zeffirelli's version was too spiritual. In his version, Deasy wanted to "draw Jesus down into the world more as a human character who is frustrated, angry, fearful and doubtful, and who doesn't have what is almost a mask of humanity, but is truly human." Deasy and Stafford-Clark formed a development team, bringing on religion scholar Dr Mark Goodacre and the BBC's head of religion and ethics, Michael Wakelin. Together, they prepared a research manual containing as much information as they could find about Jerusalem, first-century lifestyles, and the gospels. Following his appointment as writer, Deasy spent the next year researching the gospels in Israel and consulting Goodacre. His first draft was submitted in the autumn of 2006. Drawing on what he had learned from Jesus of Nazareth, Deasy chose to portray Jesus as the "human character" in Matthew and Mark, rather than the god-like figure in John. He also incorporated Jesus's relationship with women as written in Luke. For the opening scene of Episode 1, he was influenced by the opening scene of Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004): In it, a peasant coming to Passover in Jerusalem is frightened when he comes across the disciples, because they've been in the desert or in Galilee for two years. They've been sleeping out and they appear slightly intimidating to him. It attempts to introduce a world in which Christianity didn't yet exist and these precepts and