TVGrouting

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.

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?