TVGrouting

Interesting 2007

I've been stirred into activity, several weeks after realising I don't have very much to say about television any more, partly because I'm supposed to be speaking at this Interesting 2007 conference, (neatly ironic since this blog is supposed to be about boring stuff) and partly by someone else doing what I'm doing, but much more effectively.

I'll be rehashing some of what I said here about "How TV Shows Get made", which was part of a general gripe about not being able to sell programme ideas to broadcasters . In the last couple of months, however, I've had a bit more success, and do you know? it seems to have altered my opinion about the process. I'm now shamefacedly looking at the failure = cynicism and  cynicism ="blogging about it" equations.

Having foolishly registered a blog with my name in the address, I prevented myself from writing one of those bitchy, sniping and often quite funny blogs which get rapidly circulated around the business and get loads of hits and notoriety and people asking "I wonder who it is?"

Being a bit boring, I thought it was too risky to grumble overtly, and even under a pseudonym the chances of being rumbled are pretty high and I don't fancing changing my job just yet. Also it seemed to be more of a challenge to try and describe what it's really like in tv without slagging people off - although my running out of things to say after 20 posts suggests it was probably too much of a challenge.

So it's interesting to look at the latest hot blog in the tv business thetvcontroller and wonder what is driving the author, because the attention to detail and the undercurrent of vitriol is remarkably strong.
There's clearly a lot of talent in whoever has written it - it's possible that they have been frustrated by certain people targetted in the blog, although if the author's the person I think it is, they have had plenty of stuff commissioned in the last few years.

Maybe they just have a burning desire to expose what is going on inside tv at the highest level and, fair play to them, it  has hoodwinked quite a few people into thinking it's real. There is such a clear identification of individuals and such strong claims are made about them that I wouldn't be surprised if the law became involved quite soon.

So if you want to get an insider's view of what you think it might really be like in tv, you should take a look. If you don't like cyber-bullying, maybe it's not for you.

The Curse of the Specialist

TV channel commissioners keep going back to producers who can deliver a certain type of show. The people who made Wife Swap will always be asked to  make different shows in the same vein, just as my company will always be near the front of the queue if a funny-blokes-sitting-in-chairs show is required. The difficult thing is breaking out of your area of specialism into another genre of programme. I can see that my great new idea for a classical music-based show is going to have to overcome a few hurdles; one being that I know nothing about classical music. But you have to keep pushing the edges to avoid being pigeon-holed; a lesson I think this tradesman could learn:

I haven't cheated this - there isn't a sign on the other side saying, "We also do Scotch Eggs and Gala Pies", he really is dedicated to Escalopes. His name is The King Escalope. I admire the fellow's dedication but I worry about his long-term future.

Things you can count on part 2

This item, spotted only a few hundred yards from the lost glove, is not an example of someone obeying an unwritten law. I'm not sure there is an official protocol about what to do if you find a tiny Christmas jumper in the street, but for me it's almost as uplifting as the glove story.  There must be a limit to the number of things you can put on a railing spike - a chop, the head of a traitor..that's all I've got.

Things You Can Count On

BBC3 are about to appoint a new controller. This is great news for whoever gets the job, but bad news for a lot of independent programme makers waiting for green lights on various projects, because there’s an unwritten law in television that new controllers never commission shows from pilots that their predecessors ordered. There are a few more unwritten laws in tv, e.g. that whoever you give a break to on the career ladder will, at some point, advise you not to give a break to another person. And another – the new host of any show will turn out to be just as much of a monster as the person they replaced.

Most unwritten laws in television tend to be bad, but that doesn’t apply to the laws of Life. For instance, yesterday I lost a glove. It fell out of my coat pocket at some point as I was cycling to work up Queens Gate towards Hyde Park. I didn’t discover it till much later and by then I was already late. At the end of the day, I decided to go back the way I came, in the hope I might spot this missing glove. It’s not the most fantastic glove ever but I have had the pair for 12 years and I am a bit sentimental about them.

Queens Gate is a huge long road and full of parked cars so there is no way you can scour the kerbside. But then I remembered the Unwritten Law – if you find an odd glove you stick it on a railing spike.

And there it was. It’s comforting to think that someone spotted my lone glove and, almost without thinking, positioned it in the accepted fashion, fingers pointing upwards, palm out, on a decently high railing. Faith in human nature restored; more joy in heaven over one repentant sinner; he that was lost is now found etc. A rather appropriate sentiment for Easter weekend. If I was a priest this would make a cracking sermon.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

I've realised that talking about good ideas for tv shows and awards do's and stuff is not quite in keeping with the remit of this blog, so here's something really boring - the Aspect Ratio.

When a tv show is finished, ie edited, it has to be turned into some kind of hard copy from which it can be played out to tv sets – either a tape or a dvd which gets sent to a broadcaster – the really boring bit is sorting out the correct aspect ratio in this crucial transfer process, so that the picture doesn't appear distorted or heavily cropped when it hits the screen.

These ratios 4:3, 14x9, 16x9, super wide etc etc, offer a number of different ways you can view moving pictures incorrectly. This is an infuriating but unfortunately necessary bit of techno rubbish, brought in by the advent of widescreen tv; widescreen - which is only good for watching films and maybe football, although even Sky Sports don't bother shooting football in widescreen, so do we bother with any of it?

Technology is moving the wrong way for the medium. Apart from films and wildlife programmes – what is the point of High Definition tv? Sharper and sharper pictures of property shows and ice-dancing? Anyone who works in tv will vouch for the fact that production budgets are only going one way and that's down. So the production values of conventional television are hardly likely to improve much.  And given that the growing demand in moving images is for the UGC stuff you might watch on a window on your laptop or on a tiny mobile screen, HD seems the very worst way to absorb it.

We recently piloted a show which, in part, scoops up funny/shocking internet stuff for people who can't be bothered to find it themselves. Even in an edit suite on a small monitor, the internet stuff looks terrible. But imagine watching this stuff on HD.

There's only one solution - Sony and LG and Hitachi and the rest are going to have to introduce retro technology, maybe an analogue replicator box or have a fuzzy button on the HD telly to be able to enjoy low quality vt properly. And maybe this is Alan Sugar's chance to get back into to the market by re-introducing his classically shoddy tv-cum-video-cum-dishwasher unit for £29.99.

Fiction Man

Life on Mars was back on this week after an FA Cup-enforced absence. I get quite excited about this, because apart from American-made stuff like the Sopranos and The West Wing (which I don't watch even though it appears to be obligatory), there is not a lot of drama on tv for men to watch. This may seem a bit of a provocative thing to say but I think it's true: most tv drama is made for women - classic serials; gritty Northern dramas like Playing the Field, Clocking Off; all soaps; anything on ITV on a Sunday night. There's a lot of clothes and scenery and shouting and snogging but not many car chases or guns or fighting. Obviously this is not really down to a lack of imagination on the part of the programme-makes but on the part of men.

Most men, when they get past 30, seem to stop liking stuff that is made up. I don't know any 30 plus man who reads novels. Older men will read popular science, conspiracy stuff, Jeremy Clarkson, Does Any Wasp Eat Shit list-type books, biography - anything but cleverly woven star-crossed wartime romances; tales of kite flying in Afghanistan; deprived  childhoods in London-based immigrant communities or Jane Austen. Book clubs don't appear to have men in them and Richard and Judy's selections appear to be aimed purely at people who want something else to do while topping up a tan.

Why is this? The other night I asked some mates why men don't read fiction and one of them quoted a stand-up comic, whose name I forget: "I don't read novels because the acting in my head is shit."
Funny but not really representative. Another said: "It's an emotional investment, 300 pages in the company of strangers." So is the cliche about men being incapable of emotional equipment true? I think it may well be quite the reverse. Most men when they approach forty tend to be in some kind of  permanent relationship. This must be true, as single women of the same age are always complaining about it.  So what is happening is the potential for emotional commitment in these men is being soaked up by a real-life relationship, so they don't have the time for getting know new people in real life, never mind characters in a novel. This is evidenced by the fact that most men in this age group don't go out much; are very poor at making new friends and if they do have hobbies or interests, they are ones which don't involve talking to anyone else.

So to lure men back into fiction, people who make stuff up should remember the short-story format, which, like the really good tv ad, is both rewarding and not too long so that you forget what happens. Maupassant, Somerset-Maughn, Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, Patricia Highsmith, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett - these are all pretty good, and would make good tv adaptations, too. Some of them even have guns and car-chases in them.

Werther's Original

We all know this toffee. It is a byword for old, sentimental and a bit boring. I have been called Werther's Original by young people on occasions. The toffee itself isn't great, it's not the definition of a toffee for me; I prefer Thorntons or the round one in Quality Street. What gives Werther's the right to call itself original? It's not even the oldest Werther's, as you can find out here.

So if you can't have trust in the world of toffee, what hope is there for t.v.? Well actually, in tv, originality is not a particularly revered attribute. In certain genres, two networks may well be working on exactly the same idea - no one at network A will be that bothered if network B's show gets on air first, in fact they will usually be praying for it to be a hit - their own show is more likely to find an audience who will know what they're getting, because the bottom line is, the audience aren't that bothered about originality either. I mean if they were, Werther's wouldn't have been able to laugh off the "Original" scandal, would they?

I was having this sort of conversation with a very funny tv producer called Jo Bunting, who you can occasionally see on ITV's Loose Women (I watch a lot of daytime tv) who gave me a great tv tip which has applications in life generally. We were watching Car Boot Challenge in the office, which is one of the many identical daytime shows about going around Britain's car boot sales and selling your old junk. They are all the spawn of Bargain Hunt, which in its early days was a terrific programme, up there with Watercolour Challenge , until David Dickinson jumped the shark.

What all these shows do, to give us a "feel" of Trowbridge, or wherever they happen to be rifling through bric-a-brac this week, is play in a vt package featuring sites of local interest, cut to some inappropriately funky music. But as the the director and cameraman spend a lot of the time gossiping and having a smoke, they don't have long to get all the GVs (General Views, apparently) in the can. So Jo Bunting's tip, if you ever find yourself in this situation, is go to the nearest gift shop and buy a tea-towel. It will have all the sites of local interest lovingly depicted from the most photogenic angle. If it's a good tea-towel it will have a map on it, so you know how to get there. Brilliant.

I thought I'd test this by having a look at some tea towels on the internet and do you know? It's true. Look.

I particularly like this one for Norwich - nice black and white illustrations. I actually didn't know the palette of tea towels was so rich. I'm not talking about the Rules of Cricket, or Rudyard Kipling's 'If', but a whole colourful reference library of fascinating stuff. By definition, anyone who puts information on a tea-towel will have a lot of unusual information going around in their head, so it's a guaranteed gold-mine of trivia.

A Confederate Ghost Air Force!? Who knew? as they say. So, after a decade of having to leave the "hobbies and interests" box empty on registration forms, I have something to throw myself into. There might even be a blog in it. I wonder if it's been done already?

Awards Season

Awards Season. Like London Fashion Week a very annoying media shorthand for "pictures of people in dresses". Its only value as a news story is that it keeps death off the front pages. ( I think Plato spotted what was wrong with all this before any of it happened). And Helen Mirren got an Oscar for playing a real person, as did the Forrest Whitaker man?! Why don't they make stuff up in films anymore?

Anyway it's the BAFTAs soon, and like everyone in television I profess to hate awards do's. Many reasons are given - the juries are all biased, they go on too long, most people don't show up, the clips are too short. But the main reason is, for me at least, jealousy. I'm jealous jealous jealous because I want to go up to that podium to loud applause and I'm not going to; someone else is because those bastards who work in the same business as I do have no respect for me personally. I'm sure that's actually going through the mind of everyone else who doesn't win.

The makers of the British Comedy Awards in 1990 spotted that the fake humility and gushing acceptance speeches were beginning to bore people and have cleverly exploited the jealousy and bitchiness of the tv industry by making Jonathan Ross's script as barbed as possible about the people sitting in front of him. Awards winners gloat over their success and others' failure and the audience boo along. It's probably gone too far - in America now the critics slag off the host of the Oscars for failing to offend anyone.

For a breath of fresh air I heartily endorse the TRIC Awards - the Televison and Radio Industries Club. These are the people who make and sell televisions. People with jobs.The actual 'do' is never televised which is probably why it's so good. The tables are laid out pretty much like any awards do, but the nominees (including producers and on-screen people) are mixed in with the ladies and gentlemen from Samsung and Curry's.

There is also a brilliant bit at the beginning where Alan Dedicoat - the Lottery's 'Voice of the Balls' turns a spotlight on various celebrities and reveals where they are sitting. "On table 16 it's globetrotting funnyman Michael Palin etc." This is so everyone knows where to go afterwards to get his autograph.

Perhaps because of this and the mainstream tastes of the jury, some of our more edgy alternative performers are not invited or refuse to come - you are unlikely to find Ricky  or Matt or David or  Jimmy at the TRIC awards.  You may well bump into Ian Lavender from Dad's Army or Hannah Gordon. There doesn't appear to be any agenda and the nominations and the awards will probably be given out to the best programmes. The TRIC awards are on next week - I wonder if there will be many pictures in the papers of June Whitfield in a striking outfit.

What Colour Is News?

I was in a set-design meeting the other day where we had to discuss how we are going to stage a  news-based comedy show. I tend to switch off in these meetings because I don't really know what I'm talking about; couldn't tell a good set from a bad one and am confused by terms like psyke, flats and gobos, and that's probably not even how you spell them. I did perk up at one point, though, when somebody asked "What colour is the news?" Now by this she didn't mean "What colour is the news in your head?" - boring old black and white for me -  but "What colour is the news on television?" A much more difficult question to answer because it depends on where you're watching it and in what decade. Here are the current news-spectrum settings.

The BBC have gone for a reddy colour.

ITV have blue and white

Channel 4 have this sort of purply-turquoise. 

Sky have blue.

Unless they're trying to scare you.

Channel 5's mish-mash of wood and purple is unsurprisingly the least serious.

And More 4 have gone for a kind of "The news is bad? I'm cool with that" Green.

It's difficult to conclude much from this pretty wide-ranging colour scheme, apart from: the news is definitely not orange.

But if the point of all this is to make the news less threatening and more like an entertainment show (you will often hear newsreaders say "Welcome to the programme") why not go all the way? I am waiting for the day we see news with a studio audience, so reports on paedophiles arriving at court under a blanket can be accompanied by booing and there can be cheers at the sports bits and tutting at the weather.

I'm afraid we are never likely to see again the sort of news bulletin an old man called Peter Woods used to do on BBC2(!) at about 8pm in the seventies and eighties, when the appropriate colour for news was brown.

Who Is This For?

There's a show on ITV2 called "Wags' Boutique". (I don't know if I've got the apostrophe right, or even if they bother with one at all, and frankly, Lynn Truss has put me off caring about it any more).
Anyway, it's very loud and brash and of the moment, or if you work in TV "noisy, impactful and zeitgeisty". It's about some footballers wives and girlfriends who are forced to work in a clothes shop, presumably to give them a glimpse of what the world would be like for them without football. Like all reality shows it's totally unreal and heavily produced, with some very unappealing people being allowed to display their ignorance in public. But you have to admire the way it's been tailor-made for a specific audience - heat reading young women, obsessed with minor celebrity and clothes; high-spending, fashion-conscious, aspirational young women. Exactly the kind of people ITV2 would like as a key part of their audience.
Broadcasters and programme makers are constantly being told by their marketing people to rethink the way they create and schedule programming - the audience is changing, how and when and what they are watching is changing and what constitutes a successful programme, certainly in commercial terms, is changing. Beware, or be aware of the Long Tail. Create stuff for smaller, more specifically-targeted audiences.

Ok, I buy the theory, and top marks to ITV2 for putting it into practice. But watching WAGs Boutique (maybe that's how they do it without an apostrophe?) on a conventional television in real time with ad breaks, I became confused.
The first three ads in the break were cures for Diarrhoea, Thrush and Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Now either there's something I've got wrong about heat readers, or I've underestimated the strike rate for these medical conditions, or the airtime salesmen of ITV2 have been knocking on the wrong doors, or the manufacturers of Cool Stuff For Twenty Five Year Old Women don't think it's worth spending money on niche programming on a digital channel OR the only people watching ITV2 on a Wednesday night are , in fact, semi-pensioners like me, and the advertisers know it.

I may have failed to understand anything about tv or advertising; as I say, much of the business is very boring, but I do wonder how much of this youth-skewed content is totally wasted and inappropriate. The editorial boffins at ITV2 must surely be appalled at the idea that the audience for one of their most heavily-promoted shows ever is pre-occupied with "trouble downstairs".

This isn't just confined to tv. Look at the Telegraph magazine on a Saturday. It's full of cutting-edge articles about Hollywood's hottest new starlet, cool Interior features on the new vogue for Onyx kitchens and interviews with Banksy. But look in the back pages, where most of the ads are and you'll find stretch trousers, shoe-lifts, compost bins and comfy slippers.

So who is reading all that sub-ID stuff? I don't think the Telegraph magazine editor would like the idea of my mum representing a significant part of his readership.

I suppose what I'm driving at is that creating content which targets a discrete audience in a bold original way shouldn't be an activity which excludes the 'mature' consumer. Old people will be watching television and reading magazines for a long time yet and I personally am longing for the first really cool campaign for Grecian 2000.