Getting started..

So I’m sitting at my desk at the tv company I run, and have a brief pause inbetween management issues, accounts, pitch meetings, admin issues and the ten minutes that leaves for ‘creativity’.

And the phone rings, it’s a mate of mine who I used to work with in tv but left for the much fatter salaries of the evil PR industry. He’s a good lad though, kind enough to dress up like Jesus in a show I made for fifty squids an episode. His fee AND the budget for the remainder of the show. It was for Sky in 1993, what can I say?

(Good job no-one watched that show, imagine the press coverage as a pretend Jesus beats some twelve year-old at a video game then starts talking about how he owes it to his father and the poor defeated kid must be in love with Satan…)

Anyhow, he’s got a favour to ask. I sigh. I know what it is. His nephew wants-

“-wants to work in telly and can I have a word?”, I say.

He’s surprised I’ve twigged but it happens all the time. The fact is that of the fifty or so of my peers I started working in tv with I’m the only one left. Everyone else has gone off and got a proper job somewhere else.

They get good hours, career structures, security, pensions, benefits and so on, important as they get older and gain mortgages, wives-husbands-partners, kids, pet, bellies and ear hair. But do they get to ask someone to pretend to be Our Lord and Saviour and wear a manky wig on the telly, I ask you? No. So there.

The whole point of this anecdote, if there is one, is that I’ve been in tv for fifteen years now and I do actually know quite a lot about how it works. That fact came to me as I reeled off the do’s, don’ts and fuck-no’s of working in the industry to my mate’s rather dim- sounding nephew.

(Although it turns out the nephew is tall, good-looking, posh and went to university with a BBC bigwig’s daughter. I’m sure he’ll do just fine.)

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Hence this blog. Over the next however-many-weeks I'm going to impart secrets, gossip and random jottings about the world of television. As I still want a career in this business I won't be putting my name on this. That would be madness.

If you want a job in telly - and far too many people do - then maybe I can be of help. Or maybe not. Hey, I haven't got much of a clue, apart from some randomly jotted down secrets and a store of anecdotes from my can't-remember-where-I-left-my-phone-but-can-remember-that-outrageous-party-in-1994 memory.

So, coming next time...

(Do people do trails and tasters on blogs? Not on the ones I've read... but, hey, selling is everything in tv, as you'll see later...)

...the first tv secret. The one that explains all the others.