TVGrouting

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.