TVGrouting: 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.