TVGrouting

Is This News?

It's snowing in London; it sometimes does this. But for the main news networks this is a big story. So big that they have sent dozens of reporters and camera crews out to film snow and to warn people not to go out unless it's absolutely necessary, which in itself was not absolutely necessary, so they should have stayed at home and done some proper reporting. They have also recruited thousands of 'stringers' from the general public to send in pictures taken on their mobiles of snow where they live. This makes me disproportionately angry. I have been fulminating at the television for most of the morning. I took a crap photo on my mobile and made a ham-fisted attempt to stick it in this post. This is where it belongs. It does not belong on a national news network which employs trained and expensive professionals to filter and analyse the news for us.

This sort of thing is going to be a big problem for all industries dealing in moving pictures, now that any klutz has the technology to capture and distribute vt. Occasionally a genius will emerge but more often than not we'll be looking at the 21st century equivalent of the music 'demo' tape. Most great bands from the late 70s until the last couple of years were discovered through their tapes, but for most A&R men it was like sifting through sewage for a gold watch.

John Shuttleworth's tape on "How To Make Demos" is a brilliant demonstration of this, and definitely worth seeking out (inspired by this, I am also thinking of putting on the web somewhere demo tapes from the 80s and 90s made by people I know who are now dads, under the imaginative title of Dadrock).

Anyway, User Generated Content is just like this - any quick scan of YouTube will tell you that - but it has such cachet among tv people that it's become a faddy gadget, like those Syndrums that appeared in the 80s - Sky's version of Toccata and Fugue being a particularly silly example, and Sky's drummer Tristan Fry being a particularly silly example of a drummer (that's him on the left). It took a long time for people in the music business to get bored of Syndrums and even really talented, credible people like Roddy Frame from Aztec Camera started using them.

So please, if anyone has ever taken a picture of snow, remember the Syndrum and  don't send it to anyone else, not Mark Austen, Kay Burleigh, Kirsty Young or Matthew Amroliwala.

Trying Out

This is what tv people who don't work in scripted comedy or drama  call an Audition. We have an idea for a show - it's usually a formatted thing like a panel game, and we ask comedians and 'personalities' to try out for the finished thing. Some try-outees will be successful already, but you still have to ask them because one of the other people you have lined up, who you really want but don't tell anyone else that, might not like them. The 'chemistry' might not be right. Some comedians just won't wear this but instead of simply refusing to audition, they get their agents to say it'll cost you 1500 quid to get my boy xx to turn up for a rehearsal in a half-empty church hall. Fair enough. There are many ways a talented person can be embarrassed by television. One way, which has often spectacular results, is when you put your faith in a performer with every reason to expect everyone else will agree with you, and then someone more important than you doesn't. You can find yourself in a situation where a performer calls you up asking if he can add some names to the gust-list to watch the recording of a show he thinks he's been booked for, and you have to tell him that he will be one of them, because unfortunately, he isn't going to be appearing in it.

Fantasy Families

This blog is supposed to be about the boring bits in between making/pitching tv shows, but I've been given an idea by an assistant producer here (his name is Mark) which I think is great and if anyone happens to read this, maybe they will contribute to the idea with some suggestions.

There's been a lot of stuff in the British papers today about The Family. The Archbishop of Canterbury has been stressing the importance of the archetypal family, the kind of 1950's model rubbished by the  swinging middle-classes - his argument is that it's the ideal situation for well-adjusted kids to grow up in without having to worry that, at any time, one of their parents, or  boyfriend/girlfriend, might just  bugger off. I agree with him totally.

However, a lot of people find themselves trapped in secure, conventional families that
they wish could escape from occasionally. If they could have any family, made up from anyone living or dead (but preferably famous, so we know who they are talking about) who would be in it?
That's the basis of the programme - you can choose your friends but not your family...but what if you could?

If anybody happens upon this blog and is interested enough to give it some thought, please send me you suggestions for your Fantasy Family. To kick off - here's mine.

Dad: Brian Blessed (Augustus in I, Claudius; King of the Hawkmen in Flash Gordon)

Mum: Linda Barron (Nurse Gladys Emmanuel from Open All Hours)

Sister:  Charlotte Church

Brother:  Cicero

Aunt: Helen Mirren

Roguish Uncle: Frank Sinatra

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More Maybes

Well as it turned out I, didn't have to make any projections on income. In fact, I was asked what did I need to spend to make my job easier? A pleasant surprise. But then during the next few hours of thinking about it, it emerged that a major customer of our ideas, ie a major broadcaster had 'run out of money' for new programmes until 2008. And I thought my financial planning was bad. So maybe an enforced sabbatical is on the cards....

Sharing

TV and the internet don't seem to me to be natural partners. The internet is based on the principle of sharing information and ideas and making everything cheaper.
TV is about owning and jealously guarding ideas and extracting as much money as possible from them - this is why the whole tv-on-demand, downloaded 360 degree multi-whatnot-convergence has been so painful and will be so costly for the tv business. Who owns what and how much do they get for it? is the overriding question.
TV is also about credit. TV people more than anyone else, except maybe film people, love to be appreciated and noticed, hence the huge list of er, credits that appear on the end of certain shows. I once counted about 8 people on the credits of Frazier, who had 'producer' in the title.
The tv business and people who write about it love to apportion credit as well as blame to individuals, even if they had nothing actually to do with the show at any point.
Michael Grade left the BBC as Chairman just before Christmas 2006, and in several newspaper profiles he was named as "the man behind the successful relaunch of Dr. Who." Not only did he have nothing to do with it, he had actually scrapped Dr. Who when he was controller of BBC1. Often when a journalist refers to a tv person as "the man behind" a show, it's probably fairer to say "The man who stood next to the show when someone else was making it."
So as someone who works in tv, I am reluctant to share some of my more creative thoughts on here, despite the fact that anyone who did see them might have something constructive to say about them eg forget it.
Therefore, I have often marvelled at top blogger Russell Davies' willingness to share his thinking, and occasionally good ideas for books, with any number of people who might be prepared to nick them. I suppose there's some security in knowing that each post has a date and time on it (better than sending something to yourself by mail and hoping the postmark is legible) and that, given tv's natural antipathy to the internet, no-one in the business will think of looking here.

Yes, no and maybe

There's a forward planning meeting this week at the production company where I work. This is all to do with trying to forecast the income we might pull in over the next year. This is a bewildering prospect for me on two levels. One is that although I have worked in tv for ten years, I still don't know how a production company makes its money. We get an amount to make a series and if we come under budget we keep the rest - fairly obvious, but I can't see how any company with permanent staff can make enough profit to grow. I know if I had my own company - which, if any would-be investor were to read this, is highly unlikely - I'd be scared of hiring any permanent staff: they'd bleed me dry on a daily basis. 
Anyway, the other reason 'forward planning' spooks me is that I can't assume that any of the shows I'll be pitching to broadcasters will get made. I've said elsewhere that good ideas are no guarantee of success - after recording a very good pilot on one occasion, I tried to encourage the creator with: "Well at least we know it's a good idea and it works", to which he replied "Oh come on, it must have something going for it."
So I can lay out half a dozen good ideas to my superiors, which may all look great on paper, but my lack of Derren Brown-type powers to influence, or even know what's going on inside the mind of commissioners means I might just as well lead the family cow into the meeting and announce my plan to swap it for some magic beans. 
Broadcasters receive ideas into three mental compartments -
Definitely No (suprisingly small - they are adept at not letting you down face to face)
Definitely Yes (small enough to make Rachel from S-Club 7 feel uncomfortable)
and Maybe - which is massive; a hundred-foot high teetering pile of indecision.
There's a cliche among programme pitchers that a quick 'no' is their second-favourite answer. There's also a cliche among programme commissioners that programme pitchers always say that but don't mean it. Hence we have this big mound of ideas, all of which might be quite good, which no-one quite knows the destiny of, and most of which the commissioner hopes will quietly be forgotten about and just go away - a bit like when a child divides a portion of spinach into several smaller pieces and tries to pretend they've finished eating.
Well, like the child with spinach, I can't really get angry about it- it's kind of a fact of life.
The problem is it's not helping me complete my income forecasts very accurately. Someone needs to invent a Maybe currency. Is this what 'futures' are?

Dear Diary...

It's nearly the end of the day and I'm trying to write at least one post a day on this thing. Which makes the whole process feel a bit like keeping a diary. Hmm...maybe that's why blogs were invented? Must check.

Anyway, this blog/diary thing got me thinking. How does a blog compare to a diary in terms of revealing what the author is thinking/doing at the time? There is a fantastic compilation of diary entries from various people throughout history, called The Assassin's Cloak. (If only I could get the hang of the link thing ...it's probably on Amazon). The aim of the book is to give you a snapshot of a year or a century through some revealing diary entry of a contemporary person. A lot of these diaries were not intended for publication and are therefore assumed to be very revealing. But a blog is available for public consumption...how truthful/accurate will it be? Is it like Hansard, the Parliamentary record, which MPs are allowed to 'preview' before publication so that they can edit their grammar and stuff, but not change the sense of. Or is it like the kind of 'at home' photo opportunity that politicians use to make us think their domestic life is totally harmonious?

Someone where I work is developing a programme idea using the diaries of famous people when they were younger and re-enacting various formative passages from their lives in a kind of 'Everybody Loves Chris' style. It might get picked up, but because I work in television and have an in-built jealousy of other people's possible success, I am thinking about a better idea comparing the blog and the diary as a window into a person's life and times. Some people will have kept a diary as a teenager and then a blog as an adult - which is more revealing? Many people today still write diaries, but do their accounts reflect contemporary events better than somebody else keeping a blog throughout the same period?

I reckon this idea has a better chance of success because it has a computer/internet-y word in it - 'blog' and 'the web' and User Generated Content are like catnip to broadcasters now, so all I need is about 30 bloggers who also kept a diary to read this and get in touch. Oh and I probably need to make it sound interesting

How TV Shows Get Made

It's frustrating to discover, as most people do after a few years in television, that a good idea is no guarantee of success when it comes to pitching shows to tv networks.

Maybe this is self-evident to most  people who watch tv and wonder where the good ideas are, but anyway, there are loads of reasons a network can give you for saying 'no thanks' to what you might think was a dead cert. "We don't like the people who are in it, we don't like the writing, we don't like you, we don't have the slots, we don't have the money, we do like it but someone else is already doing it, it's too similar to another successful show, it's too different from another successful show" and so on.

Peter Fincham, who's now controller of BBC1, best described the playing conditions of this particular game when he said 'it has to be the right idea at the right time from the right people'. E.g. it's unlikely that the people behind Judge John Deed (the maverick sword-fighting judge with a love of fine wine, fine food and middle-aged women) would be successful in pitching a fly-on-the-wall documentary about what it's like to be a real High court Judge. And it's equally unlikely that the makers of a topical news quiz would be first in line to make a new property show for that coveted 'Relocation to Jamie's Property Kitchen Ladder' slot.

Which is disappointing for me, as I have a humdinger of a property idea and maybe the timing is right. If only I was the right person.

It's called Property Snake and it looks at the flipside of the usual "my dream home" property show. We all know the format - someone has a dream to buy/build/renovate a property exactly how they've always wanted it - we see the 'before' shots of peeling paint and crumbling plaster, the arguments over floorings, the tragedy when the RSJ is found to be of too low-grade a steel by the building control officer (I've watched a lot of this stuff) - and finally the completion and the magical 'after' shot with soft focus and semi-pornographic close-ups of a suede-covered refrigerator. The dream is fulfilled....
Ah yes, but then there are the mortgage repayments. The mortgage repayments that tie you to your job for the next 25 years - and all those genuine dreams about writing a novel, making toys out of wood, or telling your boss to piss off, arseface have vanished.

The truth about property is, unless you're fantastically rich or live in a gypsy caravan, it ties you down. I could make this blog a bit more interesting by telling loads of true stories about the outrageous things that all the mad people who appear on television do, but then I'd have to resign and wouldn't make any money out of it anyway and have to sell the bloody house and move somewhere else.

I can't be the only one in this position. There must be an audience out there for this show. People could narrate their stories about the brilliant website they were going to set up that never came to be, the play they didn't have time to finish, the third child they would have had who would have found a cure for cancer, but they re-mortgaged and dug out their basement instead. While these people who have slithered down the property snake tell their stories, we see soft-focus shots of their beautifully decorated houses and alongside the monetary value of their handiwork we see graphic representations of unfulfilled dreams eg. newly-installed wet room - cost £15000 = "abandoned plans for balloon safari."

Now if I could just think of an uplifting ending....

Monday is Ideas Day

My kids didn't want to go to school this morning and like maybe billions of others, I didn't want to go to work either. The only way to get over the Monday morning hump is to try and hit the ground running and have some ideas.

I should be having ideas for tv shows but the only one I could get excited about this morning was "i-weather". I have to say it's genius but I'm going to have to wait about fifty years for the technology to catch up with it.

I’m assuming that someone pretty clever, probably an American or a Japanese fellow, will eventually come up with a machine that can turn carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon and Shazam! It’s the end of global warming. A little optimistic, I'll admit, but I'm also banking on the fact that, by then, everyone will have grown accustomed to being warm and sun-drenched and will be longing for a bit of variety in their weather. Someone at Apple will then come up with a device – the weatherpod maybe - that you plug yourself into while it creates your own personal weather system.

So if you want to walk into work in bright, fresh, slightly chilly sunshine; go home in a stiff breeze; close your front door just as a storm brews up and wake up the next day to a light dusting of snow, you can. You can build i-weather playlists for certain occasions - overcast and slightly misty for funerals etc - and if you put it on 'shuffle' you can recreate the British weather wherever you are in the world. I'm willing to let Steve Jobs have this idea in return for a Gothic mansion on the Yorkshire Moors.

Anyway, this set me wondering what sort of weather people would choose if they could programme it themselves, and if indeed there might be an incredibly contrived tv show with fancy CGI graphics about The Nation’s Favourite Weather. You could get Sian Lloyd to present it; after Lembit Opik dumped her for a Cheeky Girl she could do with a lift.

This is the sort of idea that lots of people in television have but daren’t tell anyone about it in case, by some freak, it gets commissioned . Often the last thing you want to do with an idea is realise it. Zefrank's Brain Crack piece www.zefrank.com/thewiki/the_show:_07-11-06 sums up this dilemma brilliantly.

What is Grouting?

Obviously, if you've ever done any DIY, grouting is the cement-like stuff you squeeze into the gaps between tiles to stop them breaking or falling off. But for me it's come to mean the boring unglamorous stuff you have to do, in between doing something interesting.

I used to produce the BBC comedy news quiz Have I Got News For You (I'm now the Executive Producer, which in the UK means doing nothing except maybe standing next to some people who do the work and taking quite a lot of the credit). When Angus Deayton hosted the show, he was very particular about, well a lot of things, actually, but one of them was getting as many jokes into the show as possible, even where you wouldn't normally expect or want one. Like in the scores at the end of the show - "This week's smackheads are Ian's team with 6 points, while this week's eggheads are Paul's team with 12".

This stuff was rarely hilarious (although "Congratulations to our winners, the rest of Cliff Richard's records to our losers" is not bad) but Angus insisted on squeezing them in and they became a kind of trademark for him and the show. The writers who supplied the gags for Angus's script used to call these jokes 'grouting'. Before they could write any of the funny, enjoyable stuff in the script, at the beginning of every week they would have to grind out stuff like "At the end of round one, the scores are rather like Baghdad city centre - completely level at four points each." (More Grouting, by the way, can be seen in the Have I Got News For You book which you can get on Amazon for less than a tenner and I get a cut of that so what are you waiting for?)

Making television is often glamorous and exciting and some very funny, interesting people knock about in it, but an awful lot of time is spent doing 'proper job' stuff to do with desks and phones and computers and going to meetings and getting people to do what you want and being enthusiastic and persuading people that they should buy stuff from you, none of which I'm very good at. I like to think my ideas are great and surely anyone can see this and why don't they give me loads of money to go off and make them without having to convince them that anyone will watch.

So this blog is going to be about the day to day workings of television that might be interesting to other people. And to others it will be as boring as actually grounting tiles, which ironically I am quite good at.