Random jottings from a TV insider

Executives

2010-04-20T15:34:00.003+01:00

Long time since the last time I spleened my vent on telly and apologies, oh several of you interbloggeteers.

I heard that thanks to the volcanic ash "chaos" telly giant RDF had to hire a fishing boat to retrieve twenty executives from the Mipcom TV festival in Cannes. I immediately pitched the format "How Sunk Is My Boat?" to every broadcaster, a reality format where the rabid execs are denied basic rights like Blackberry access and the repeated use of the word 'I', waiting to see which goes mad first and jumps overboard. Will it be Head of International Formats, or Head of Formats (International)?!?!? A must-miss series!!!

Err.. where was I?

Oh yes, well family was visiting and they had a look around the office where my company is currently housed. Best quote from sister-in-law: "God it's all so complicated - watching your shows... I just thought it'd be simple". My lightning sharp retort: "No, it's not the shows that are simple, it's me!". Much hilarity then ensued.

One of the things they asked is about 'the executives', the mysterious people in the clouds who decide on whether we've done Proper Good or Pooey Bad. It's a common question - my role is usually as an exec producer, as I hire Proper Good people to make the show and they tell me to bugger off when I'm being Pooey Bad. As the MD of the company I obviously spend a lot of time doing the money side, contracts, thinking up ideas, trying to win commissions, managing the day-to-day stuff and that, so the current production is usually something I try and add to when I can and leave well alone when running nicely.

It's interesting that in UK tv we tend to go up to exec producer and then kinda stop. OK, there are heads of this department and that one in big hundreds-strong indies, and the BBC has a byzantine structure all of its own, but the biggest credit you ever see on a show is exec producer. It's the top of the tree.

And what is up there, in the clouds above the mere series, senior, associate, assistant and line producers down below...?

In some bigger indies, in the olden days, the execs basically were charged to a show a few days a week for three reasons. Firstly, they'd helped think it up. Secondly, they were big mates - or business associates - with the onscreen talent. Or thirdly, they had a big fat wage and had to be paid somehow.

Sometimes they'd do some work on the show, sometimes they hardly ever even watched it - all entirely random to most observers but dependent on their personality, workload or basic brass neck in doing bugger all and being paid £150K per annum for it. Don't get me wrong, some were stunningly bright and could solve what seemed like an impossible problem with a seemingly off-the-cuff remark. Others were better off confined to quarters as they either had no social skills and scared the shite out of the staff, or were the total opposite and would sit and chat away all day to everyone and nothing would get done at all.

(One fearsome exec once barked to a Very Famous Bloke Out of EastEnders who'd come in randomly to see me with a programme idea: "You auditioned for (INSERT NAME OF BIGGEST SHOW WE MADE HERE), didn't you? You were the shittest presenter we've ever tried. And that's fuckin' saying something. HA!" and wandered off chuckling. Mr EastEnders sat open-mouthed. Luckily my co-producer - a very posh, well-spoken lady - said "what a c*nt" under her breath and we all howled)

In smaller indies, people were put down as execs because they owned a bit of the company. What a combination - completely lacking in any creative skills (apart from cooking the books) and yet being present and throwing ideas in all the time. One genuinely suggested that we replaced the person playing the giant God-like head that appeared in our successful show with Stephen Hawking. That is, a dismembered head of a talking, emoting person was replaced by a man who can't move any of his features on his face. The only thing on screen was a non-moving face. I said we could cut out a photo and use that and got frowned at.

In US companies people down on our credits as execs are all SVPs - senior vice presidents. Senior and vice must cancel each other out, surely? But if you just said president people would think you were Obama, I s'pose. That's why the big bosses are CEOs.

Anyway, my own interpretation of being an exec is to try and make the people who work on the show feel happy. A bit royal visity sometimes ("what you doing today then, hmm?") but it jollies things along. And, let's be honest, there are much worse jobs in the world than jollying things along.

Development hell part ii

2010-03-16T11:45:00.002Z

OK, so thinking more about development stuff, as I posted yesterday, here are my completely-random-but-I'll-find-some-logic-in-'em list of how to think up a tv show. And I'll try to do one as a go - but a puposely rubbish one so you, dear reader, can't run off and make it.

1 TITLE, TITLE, TITLE
As Location (x3) proves, title is crucial. [An aside: notice how it's just Relocation, Relocation not x3. Hmm. Discuss] A catchy title is everything or - more importantly nowadays - one that does as it says on the tin. The Boy With Two Heads, for example. Was Hitler Gay? (Answer: no, but it took 52 minutes to get there).

So let's think up a title. How Big Is My Pan? Now the pan could be a toilet or a cooking implement, the show about kitchen inspectors, or eating too much, or giant speed-eating competitions or something. We don't care at this stage.

2 WHERE & WHEN
No use thinking of a great factual series called The World's Dirtiest Perversions if the channel is looking for a 7pm slot. Or, equally, Sell My Shit From The Loft For Some Spurious Reason wouldn't work at 8pm - it's more a daytime show (which already exists, obviously)

Channel is important too - Oops, My Fake Boobs Have Exploded! isn't really a BBC One show (although until recently BBC Three might've been the place). Equally ITV1 won't commission A History Of Bathmats, unless it was presented by Sir David Jason.

I think How Big Is My Pan? (or HBIMP in tellyterms) is a crossover show, daytime or early peak, 3pm/7pm BBC Two / morning BBC One, daytime ITV 1, not C4, 8pm C5, any time on all the various satellite channels.

3 WHO
Presenters are key to any show - although interestingly in daytime they're more interchangeable. Look at the various people who've presented Bargain Hunt, or the 152 property shows. Or, indeed, This Morning [another aside: they're spreading This Morning to seven days a week, with hour-long shows at noon on Sat and Sun... er, a show called This MORNING (clue) on in the afternoon: well done ITV!!!!)

Finding a new factual presenter is the holy grail to a show like HBIMP? There was some bloke in the Guardian at the weekend who presents a series on eating loads of food in the States. We'll get him, or 'a British equivalent' (ie we'll go round the eating competitions - they do exist - and find someone who can be vaguely articulate as they stuff twelve Big Macs down their neck) But we'll need a non-speed eater too, a pair of presenters. Let's say Steve Jones. He's pretty and competent, looks nice, can read an autocue, has worked live, has lovely teeth, appeals to mums and teen girls, blokes and that, nice hair... note how appearance matters here, specially if the other guy is fat and/or lardy.

4 WHAT IS THE BUDGET?
Until we know what we've got to spend, we can't decide on the format. No use having HBIMP? in a huge studio like The X Factor if we're on £25K an episode daytime money.

5 WHAT'S IN THE SHOW?
Finally, format - content - the actual show. You need a structure, building to a climax at the end. If the show is an hour, the lots of recaps, as viewers apparently forget what they're watching and enjoy the same 'highlight' being show 4 times before we get to it at the end. Ahem.

HBIMP? is a studio-based gameshow where people compete to cook vast amounts of food for the ENTIRE studio audience, so it shows the difference between making catering quantity portions to normal dinners. Why anyone would care about that, I have no clue, a format issue you could rightly point out... er... well, the audience are entirely owners of restaurants so they'd want to know. And us as viewers all go to restaurants, yeah?

Hmm. Either that's actually a good format (and God knows, we need another foodie format on telly ahem) or it's even shitter than I originally envisaged.

--
Obviously I've done this order to illustrate just why shows on telly might not have the best thought-out format. Some people - good ones - work out a format first then make it fit the first 4 points above. It might involve some shoehorning in, but if you've a strong format idea in the first place it's a help.

Not to point any fingers but some formats are just shite on a stick. I mean, did no-one at the BBC ever really acknowledge that Bargain Hunt has the slight format flaw that people are buying at retail prices and selling at wholesale ones? Hence them hardly ever making money. You could argue it destroys the format - I wouldn't, as it just destroys the PRETEND climax. Like those people on Cash In The Attic, they don't need the money for that long-awaited holiday, they really don't, we know it. Or Time Team - "we've three days to excavate an entire site"... why is it just three days? If it's proper interesting real history, they should be able to get longer. Or turn up earlier.

If you can write a show with a REAL climax, then you're better than most, I have to say. Even Grand Designs fails when the house isn't finished at the end - after all that we don't see the final result. It's like a porn movie where they are at it for 53 minutes then stop and have a chat about how incredible their climaxes would've been if they'd kept going.

Now, where's Steve Jones' number? I can see the HBIMP? logo now, a giant pan.... obviously...

Thinking up ideas for the television

2010-03-09T13:34:00.002Z

Working in development is either the bestest telly job in the world or the worstest - and I should know, as at various points of my career I've thought both.

My first few months as a 'development producer' were some of the best of my telly career. I got to watch telly as research. Then I had time to write up almost anything that came into my head. And I went to meetings with my three bosses where we talked about what each channel or com.ed. wanted, and I designed ideas around them. Or we went to pitch ideas and the com.ed. would steer us in a different direction, and I got to do that.

I think the main reason I liked it was that I found it much easier than actually producing a real show. Everything was fictional, from the big-name presenter we assigned (probably not available), the set (it'd be tiny in real life) or location (nah, in a studio mate, on that budget), the contestants involved if it was a gameshow (pretend, usually named after my mates for ease of remembering who was who) to the staff who'd make it (allegedly).

There was also the fact I'd got twenty-nine years of watching telly under my belt, and an entire three years of making it, and therefore I was full to bursting of new, original, unique ideas.

Well, that's what I thought.

Fast-forward a year, through coming up with hundreds of ideas across almost every genre. And a few commissions here and there - pilots, one-offs, even short series, so not a total flop. I got a dab hand at writing a treatment, organising the information in a way that caught the eye of a com.ed. and told them all they needed to know in as few words as possible

And I cut out pictures from magazines to make the docs look pretty (before the interweb you see). Nice fonts. Careful layout. Glossy copying.

I enjoyed the pitch meetings more than I'd ever expect, realising the com.eds were mere mortals like me - and, for the first time, thinking I could work for a broadcaster too.

Being in with proper writers to talk about a drama. Or meeting legendary figures from TV like William G Stewart, to plan one of the first reality gameshows. Making a pilot with Leslie Ash and a sheep giving birth. Writing a sitcom script.

It was a lot of fun.

But it was also... well, I feel silly complaining, but it was relentless. When you're writing yet another daytime gameshow, or reformatting a factual entertainment show around two of the trendiest presenters of the moment, or trying to work out what new spin to put on pets (I had to do that five times - I believe one segment was called Pet Shop Toys... sigh)

Eventually anyone simply runs out of steam, a mixture of "nah, that isn't original, I wrote something like that a month ago", or overloading with too much research TV and accidentally copying something, or one too many times sitting saying "this is a new spin on the dating show" to be told "oh, we've just commissioned a dating show" - it gets incredibly wearing.

And anything and everything can be a TV show - well it seems that way, from an article in the Daily Mail to a throwaway title idea on a scrap of paper.

I think I reached my nadir when I was writing a show about shopping for someone. It had been specifically requested anyway. I wrote a thing called Shopping Central, a vacuous bland show in a different shopping mall each week, with a 'compare 3p a tin Lidl baked beans to £5 a tin Harrods ones' and... urgh, the rest has faded from my memory.

I was pasting John Leslie's head over a magazine pic of a man standing in front of a shopping mall, as - yes - he was our chosen big name presenter (ahem) when it occurred to me that sitting with a stick of Pritt, scalpel and John Leslie's dismembered head wasn't quite what I expected when being promoted to 'Head of Development' for a reasonably sized indie.

That's when I applied for the job on the mad cable station where all the ideas had to be twisted and weirdo, not proper and normal, got it and just about saved my sanity.

Nowadays I concentrate on other areas of telly but I still can turn out a shiny-floor Saturday night game show in a couple of hours, or a daytime relationship thing in an afternoon. I even quite enjoy it now, as it's not the be-all and end-all of my life.

As for the quality of the ideas on telly, well.. they somehow seem more derivative than ever. How many ripoffs of Come Dine With Me is it possible to produce? Harry Hill has fun with the four or five he's covered so far (most of them on ITV channels). We're in dire need of a revolution in ideas, that hopefully the death of the property show will unleash. I think the last new set of interesting formats sprang from Faking It and Wife Swap (Secret Millionaire being the latest here, or Undercover Boss in the US).

Me, I'm happy with Antiques Roadshow, The Soup, Glee and Archer. More on the latter soon...

Worst pitch meetings ever

2010-02-12T18:02:00.002Z

OK, just a quick post after laughingly talking through The Past with an old mate... I've been to some terrible pitch meetings, through no fault of my own usually (but not always). Here's the worst.

This meeting was for interweb cartoons, raising money for a new business angle making cartoons online. And it was way back in 1999, the height of the first internet bubble. Some background: we'd done what seemed like hundreds of these meetings and were very bored with them, as everyone talked a good game but no money or commitment ever came out of the hours of presenting (and Powerpoint, and spreadsheets and forecasts and business plans etc etc)

All these people wanted were stupid huge growth forecasts but always, ALWAYS in different areas we simply had no way of getting into. And almsot everyone we pitched to was a twunt - in Shoreditch, in lofts, stupid haircuts and silly shoes.

So this meeting was the third of the day, at some Swedish 'incubator' company who started off new businesses. We'd had a few pints and decided to play a game to relieve the boredom, of trying to insert phrases into our various (well polished) speeches. I had to say 'owning the growth staircase'. My mate had to say 'sit dot com'. Our business blokey had to say 'brussel sprout'. And the senior guy who was helping us do all this had to say something even odder, like 'Heberekie's Puppoon' (a Japanese game on the PC Engine, Obscure Word Fans)

Needless to say we were quite drunk. The winner got his drinks bought all night afterwards.

We went into this triple height warehouse thing, and met three very nice Scandinavian men and sat in a semi-glazed cube in the centre of an open plan office. On two of the walls, the ceiling and the floor, there was bright green astroturf. We sat around the amusingly sixties-retro table and one of the nice men said, in his lilting Swedish accent, "you can see we're an incubator?". We went 'huh?'. He said "look, our walls are covered in grass, they're green, we're incubating you, yes?".

This was apparently a joke.

We went "huh?" again.

My mate simply yelled "BRUSSEL SPROUT".

They looked confused.

A couple of our team started to argue it wasn't fair just to shout out the words, they had to be integrated.

The Swedes looked on.

I said to stop talking now, we need to get onto the business of owning the growth staircase in internet animation. Or cyboons, as we'd called them, CYBer cartOONS.

They liked CYBOONS. But all these idiots did, so that wasn't a surprise.

They then said the internet wasn't what they were focused on right now.

We said 'huh?' again. My senior guy said "why are we here then?"

And then the smallest little Swede said they wanted to know our mobile phone strategy.

We said nothing.

Remember, it's 1999. Phones had little monochrome screens. That one out of the Matrix was just out, which had that nasty WAP internet slow access stuff, but it was pathetic and useless. Even now, cartoons on mobiles aren't exactly mainstream, but back then it was plain odd to think about it.

I started to waffle about, well, technology has to develop a little, that once colour screens came in we'd look at it, and-

Then I simply gave up. Our senior guy said we didn't have a mobile strategy really, we wanted money to make cartoons for the internet, and if they weren't interested we could go to our next meeting at Hebereckie's Puppoon dot com.

And off we went to the pub. I seem to remember buying the booze all night.

Comedy schmomedy

2010-02-08T15:11:00.002Z

So this weekend I had a quiet time and watched the telly a lot. Had a busy week and just fancied chilling out.

So, in no order apart from how it plops into my brain:-

DAYTIME DIGITAL DOOLALLY
Why do they show two eps of Top Gear at 9am ... then the SAME two eps at 2pm? Why not four different ones? What with Dave ja vu I seemed to be getting Anne Robinson driving the Reasonably Priced Car all Sunday. (PS: they all looked fifteen years' younger in those eps, even though it was only five years ago. Hammond looked like his kid son or something)

Living has a +2 channel now, so I could watch the same (not that good) Xmas Will and Grace three times in three hours. Parapa-pa-pom.

Oh, and it was v rainy and the dish was giving up, with picture pixellising, sound going and things freezing. All this is par for the course - apart from the fact ladies in bikinis were sort-of visible as the picture froze and broke up, as if a naughty porno show was breaking in, pirate TV stylee. Very odd. By the nighttime I'd lost 50% of the channels - and all the major/good ones - so I think our block dish is boogered.
--

BOXSET-TASTIC
On Sky+ I watched 6 eps of 30 Rock and loved every minute of it. Made me think again about how dense a US sitcom is compared to a UK one. Well, it didn't, I was too busy laughing, I thought about it after trying to describe what happened in the ep to someone else and it taking around a third of the actual running time of the show. Try it with a British sitcom and it normally can be efficiently done in 2 mins.

Anyway, each ep had some priceless moments. In one we saw the world as Tracey, Jack and Kenneth see it. Tracey saw everyone as him. Jack saw pricetags on everything (including $7 on Kenneth). And Kenneth say everyone else as a proper actual muppet, mainly singing songs. Bestest visual gag ever.

Liz realised her gorgeous doctor BF (the one off of Mad Men) was "living in a bubble" as he was so gorgeous he never had to try to do anything properly. Just perfect all the way through.

Jack and Liz saying it was the fiftieth episode, what a great time they'd had over the past three years, all the funny things that happened... then pausing... still waiting... thinking... and then the scene continued. Not funny written down but it was so obviously a lead-in for a montage of clips ... and then they didn't show any clips.

This exchange from Liz and Jack, after Jack throws everyone out from his 50th birthday party as he realises he'll never be happy enough to vomit again (not explaining that, see the ep)

LIZ
(awkwardly, approaching Jack)
Oh, sorry Jack, do you want... er.. to hug or something?

JACK
(draining whiskey)
God no Lemon, this isn't the Italian Parliament.

Liz acting in a 1980s ad for a chatline, all shoulderpads, too much lipstick (on her teeth too) and making 'sexy' faces. So funny it makes Jack vomit a bit...

Comedy. GENIUS. Gold.
--

DAVID DIMBLEBY ON A ROPE
I channel-hopped and there was the esteemed QT presenter hanging on a rope in front of an old picture. Surely there's no need for that? Isn't he 85 or something?
--

HARRY HILL'S 'THE K FACTOR'
Surreal, wonderful, warm and stupid all at once, perfect British telly. As Paul Daniels - who came out of a plastic sheep's stomach of course - said incredulously, "You ARE watching ITV1"... no-one would've guessed from this show, I guarantee it.

Toodlepip

Video games on telly

2010-02-02T17:46:00.004Z

[RE-EDIT as posted a bit incomplete]

So as you know I've made about a gabillion shows about video games, all for 10p an episode...

[ACTUAL FACTUAL MOMENT: researcher: 67 eps over 2 games series; producer 58 eps, 3 series - total 125 eps... not including developing an entire channel full of shows about games, some of which even existed]

... and I met up with a guy I used to work with back in 1994, on one of these series...

[ACT FACT: he was a researcher and played a newsreader in the show, and got genuine lessons in reading the news off of Crimewatch's Sue Cook. Didn't help him any as I made him not wear trousers for the series, the "hilarious" moment always being when he stood up from a desk and we saw his hairy knees]

... and he said why isn't there a good TV show about video games on now. It's something I've talked about before on here but not for a bit. And I've pondered it a little and here are my thoughts.

TV Bigwigs say that video games are best played not talked about, that it's not a subject for telly, more for the interweb... that the TV audience in general isn't interested in 'em.

Twunty bollocks.

If Top Gear can work about an even more obscure subject, why can't we have a telly show about video games on at, say, 8pm on a weeknight on BBC Three/Two/C4?

[ACTUAL FACTUAL: I have pitched and sold several shows about games for this kind of slot, and know of many more that were piloted and never hit air - like mine]

The answer is suprisingly simple. Top Gear has Clarkson and his producer Willman, and their alliance and passion made the show what it is now. A great TV show - if not quite as unmissable as it once was, in my humble view.

Video games has never had someone like Clarkson. [PAUSE WHILST THERE'S A KERFUFFLE AMONGST SOME READERS] No, I mean it. Dominik Diamond was great on Gamesmaster, but blatantly not a games head in the way Clarkson is a petrol head. Dave Perry or Alex Verrey off of Games World, Aleks (now Dr) Krotoski off of Bits (and her nice if not particularly informative series on the interweb just started this week), Violet Berlin... none of them were really quite the unique talent that Clarkson is. And love him or hate him, he is great on camera.

[ACTUAL FACTUAL: There are many top producers who worked in video games TV back then like Andy Willman off of Top Gear, most of which have left telly now. I wouldn't dare put myself forward as being as good as him, oh no, but ... er ... well ... yes]

Now there is someone. Charlie Brooker. His Gameswipe show was fantastic, and he's superb on camera. And he bloody well knows about games. Imagine a Top Gear-style show presented by him and a couple of others, it'd be champion.

[ACTUAL FACTUAL - is this annoying yet? - series 1 of Top Gear had that used car bloke on it, not James May. Watch repeats of early series and it was even more Clarkson's vehicle - hoho - and the other two weren't that good or important. They've grown, just as any half-decent presenters would on a great well-produced format]

Maybe we revive the idea of a Gamesmaster-type figure - how about gadget guru and all-round techno fan Lord Stephen of Fry as a cartoon 3D head? Maybe not...

It could be popular - Star in a Reasonably-Priced Car becomes Star Playing A Really Old Game (or something)... group tests of similar games... classics... news... I've even got some proper original ideas to cover games differently and make it look as vibrant and exciting as Top Gear but still not just be a 'Top Games'-style spinoff.

Sadly, it probably ain't gonna happen. TV still thinks games = nerds / sad / interactive not sit-and-watch / ratings death. Mr Brooker has his own special bit of Endemol and (I think) is exclusive to them so they'd have to make the show, not me. Hence not posting the Brilliant Ideas here.

[ACTUAL FACTUAL - bollocks, will write it up anyway. Wish me luck]

Olden but golden

2010-01-18T13:10:00.004Z

Happy New Year - sorry it's been a looooong time since I posted, but... er... um... well... no excuse really. I'd like to say I've been Bookfacing or Teetering but I haven't really.

Anyhow, I was watching the Magic channel on Sky - by Magic, I don't mean a channel full of David Blaine suspended by his eyelashes above a pit of ravenous leopards, I mean Magic FM: The Easy Listening Radio Station: The TV Version of Aforementioned Thing*

I know this makes me officially An Old Man but as I was off with a bad back, was grumpy, cold and dying for a cup of tea, then it does make me an old man.

So Magic:TELRS:TTVOA was on and inbetween Curtis Stigers and Living in a Box there was 'One of Us is Lying', an Abba 'choon from the era where every song was about the various couples' marital angsts. And it took me back to a tv show I once worked on (yes, we're finally at the tv bit)

It was when I was a development producer, if not quite the head honcho supremo I eventually came. The guy who ran development came up with the idea, and a jolly fine one it was too, original and quirky. And it also had the benefit of selling to C4 instantly, who commissioned some pilot filming and a script. They even stumped up to shoot the pilot on film not tape, which in those pre-digital days meant a lot of money. I went to the shoot and there were dolly grips, camera cranes, best boys and lots of other things that my five years in telly had never exposed me to before.

The show was called 'One of Us is Lying', of course, and it built on a couple of other series my company had made. One was a teen problem page re-enactment series for the BBC, which did OK ratings-wise but wasn't that popular inside the Beeb for being a bit downmarket. They'd show teen issues (mainly sex) then have a discussion with Proper Adults after. The re-enactments were filmed on the cheap so it wasn't exactly dripping with production values. This show itself had come from a show from the dawn of C4 where stories were re-enacted with the simple question: True or False, which started off as a segment of ground-breaking Network 7 and was then spun off to a full series. I believe CBBC runs/ran a show called False or True which was very similar. Hey ho.

Anyhow, this show told an adult personal dilemma from three different points of view. So, say, Charlie and his girlfriend Magenta are having problems as Magenta has been having an affair with Sebastian but Charlie doesn't know until he walks in on them. You'd see it from Charlie's shocked, offended point-of-view. Then you'd see Magenta's opinion - Charlie's been neglecting her, nasty to her, Sebastian came on to her etc. And finally Sebastian's point of view - Charlie's told him he wants to dump Magenta but is worried she'll go off the deep end, Sebastian has always fancied her etc**

And only one of the stories is true, you have to work out which one. Like a whodunnit but without a dead body or a wise old lady asking pertinent questions.

So there it is, all shot on lovely film by a director who is now a Very Big Movie Person... well, I think, the filming day I went to was ferociously hot and I had been roped in to play an extra in the background so I was more concerned about not sweating in the wrong way or standing on the wires. So I didn't chat to the director at all as he was on the crane thing.

The pilot was just one of the stories as C4 had stumped up for a third of an ep. The other points of view were done as a voiceover on top of some stills, dulcet tones provided by Mr Development Head in his posh-but-camp teasing style.

C4 loved it and said let's get some storylines and budget a series. Yays all round.

Except...

Well, there were a few issues. Issue number one was that Mr Development Head left the company literally days after the pilot was delivered. It was a very acrimonious split involving legal disputes over %ages of shows that had been developed during his tenure and lots of other things I overheard in the corridors but wasn't officially supposed to know.

I was then made New Development Head, which I was delighted at... until issue two came along. I realised I'd get no more money (so was therefore a third of the price of my predecessor) and that the company's last commission was ending soon and boy did we need another one ASAP. Oh, and that our major client (not C4) was mightily pissed off as the boss had refused to make another series of the only hit show we produced as the money "was shit".

My first task was to rewrite 'Lying' to remove any story or wording done by Previous Development Head, something I was ethically unhappy with but was told in no uncertain terms I had to do.

Then I had to write some episodes.

Which is where issue three bit me on the arse. It's actually almost impossible to write a threeway story that can appear to be true from three different angles, yet isn't... well, try it. The one with Charlie, Magenta and Sebastian doesn't really work.

I took a week of working almost all hours to come up with a few stories but they weren't that good, so I went to see my boss and said I simply couldn't do it, feeling like a flop on my first assignment. She was uncharacteristically cheerful. "Ha!", she shouted, and sprinted out of her office down to the other side of the open-plan floor, to where her partner sat. It was always an odd sight, this six-foot high woman in heels and weirdo meeeeja clothes loping along like a cartoon character.

They returned slowly, her partner being more, er, ample and short. I often thought they looked like the number 10 when walking together.

They came in, shut the door and said they'd spent months trying to think up some stories themselves and failed, and they thought the only reason Mr Development Head had quit was because he'd sold an unmakeable show. Whether that was the case or not, I subsequently found out that the omens were hideous - C4 had backed away from a series when legal action was threatened by Mr Development Head, the director had quit before the final edit in a strop over something, the bills came in and the pilot was over budget by a factor of two... it was hideous.

But, luckily, a stupid idea for a prime time show I'd written six months before had just been green-lit by the BBC, so none of this seemed to matter. It was huge and ambitious and fantastic, and as it was my idea they didn't have to pay me a %age or go to court so they jumped with joy.

I was delighted too - I'd writ a show for the mainstream telly like! - slightly less delighted at their revelling in me not getting any money or 'owt.

I then spent six long months piloting various parts of the show, watching all the good ideas drift away, the slot change, the format alter beyond all recognition.

The show debuted in a shitty slot with a good-if-inappropriate presenter, seemingly tiny budget and did OK-ish. I watched that from afar as I left before it hit air.

So the moral is... um... er... mmm... well, don't write a show you can't actually make. It's suprisingly easy - I almost did a few times but just about pulled it off in the end.

--

* Just thought, it's hard to refer to TV channels of radio stations... do people think you've been staring at a DAB box if you say 'I was watching Magic'. An actual MAGIC channel would probably do quite well. From Paul Daniels to Derren Brown via Ali Bongo. Izzy whizzy let's get busy!

** The names of the characters in this pretend story are related to one of the tv shows mentioned within this blog. Can you guess which one? Ooh look, I'm being all interactive. Press your red button now!

Comedy Capers

2009-12-05T14:43:00.000Z

OK, so the perceived wisdom is that the sitcom is kaput. Finished. Dying. Dead...

Too costly to make, little chance of success, big risk when reality shit rates better and is much cheaper.

Yeah?

Er, well... no, not really. Let's ignore that new sitcom on BBC One about a circus. What do you mean, you haven't heard of it? It's in that prestigious comedy slot, um... ah... 7:30pm on Wednesday. Up against Corrie or the Eurofooty, so plenty of viewers around wanting a nice, wholesome comedy show about clowns and that.

Anyhoo, back to my thesis, the one not totally disproved by the paragraph above. There are some great sitcoms on the telly, some of them even British-made.

Modern Family, screened here on Sky 1, is my favourite of the lot. Get episode one downloadifying or streamerized to your fridge, or wherever people watch tv nowadays (anywhere but on a telly). I'm sure the ABC1 trendy readers of this blog have ways or means to see a show not currently on air. Although, bless Sky, they do repeat it on a loop so it'll be on at some point.

It's one of the best first eps of any sitcom I've ever seen, seamlessly introducing every (well-drawn) character and actually having a surprise at the end. Try and see this before watching the others. Acting is superb, really superb performances throughout, and a great, proper funny script - it's superb. And it gets better - as sitcoms do, as you get to know the characters. The gay couple are the funniest twosome for a long time on telly.

OK, so it's done psuedo-documentary style and there's no laugh track, but - hey, sue me - it's still funny ha-ha not funny cringe-no-don't-do-that-oh-that's-so-embarrassing.

Its on ABC in the States and they've got a couple of other new sitcoms that are apparently really good (and a crap one with Her With The Squarest Head Off of Friends called Cougar Town about old ladies shagging young blokes - shudder). And on NBC, there's...

30 Rock. Do I need to rave more about this? It can be patchy to be frank, but it never fails to amuse, even if it is just Fat Baldwin mugging away, or Campy Kenneth, or Liz Lemon's rubbishness. The great Elaine Stritch as Jack's mother was utterly superb. And it's about the telly, so how can it fail?

Looking forward to seeing Community, the new sitcom with Joel McHale Off Of The Soup in it - the clips I've seen look very funny. And apparently Parks & Recreation, which started last year and almost got cancelled for shitness, has reinvented itself and is actually really funny. Thursday night on NBC in the US is back to their old slogan of must see tv, with Community, Parks & Recreation, 30 Rock and The Office in a row.

(Small note - I'm the only person who works in tv who doesn't say how great the original Office series was. I'm sure a lot of other people, like me, didn't laugh, or got bored with the concept, but no-one admits it now. I just can't do cringey comedy - oddly I can do US stuff like that... I like the US version of The Office a lot. Oh well. End of note)

And when it comes to UK comedy, there's Misfits, which everyone is raving about, even non-teens. That probably annoys E4 - if anyone over 25 likes it, they've failed or something. I will comment further when I've actually seen more than one ep. I quite liked it but sense it could build a bit, the high concept stuff normally takes a bit of time to get going.

They're making more IT Crowd, aren't they, and that's even got a laugh track on it. Joy. The blank patch is actually the Beeb at the minute. Name their funny sitcoms. That one with Boycey in it, off of Only Fools? Er, no. My Family? Not my bag. That one on BBC Two about the thirtysomething woman going back to live with her parents? Um, didn't manage to see it - sounded a bit saddo to me. Gavin & Stacey? Passed me by, I'm afraid, I thought it was nice and pleasant and smiley and that, but didn't actually laugh once. And this was on a plane with shedloads of booze. I howled at some dreadful film with Him Off Of The American Office in it, the spy remakey one I can't even remember 'cos was that merry and happy. And then Gavin & Stacey came on, all working class and stuff, and I smiled at 32% or so of the level needed to produce a guffaw.

Oh, and there was some sketch show on Beeb Three that was one of the oddest things I've ever seen. Several ugly middle-class middle-aged men running a council or something. They sang a song with the studio audience at the end, with a bouncing ball on the lyrics so we could sing along at home. As they say on t'internet WTF?!?!???!?!!1!!!!

(Look at how lazy I am, not even putting a link in. Tsch. Sure it's on their website or sommit.)

So with new eps of Family Guy and South Park on my iPhone (watch the one about The Smurfs, where Cartman becomes a right-wing school announcer/DJ, it's got one of the funniest topicalist punchlines ever), stacks of comedies on my Sky+, The Sitcom Is Back: It's Official.

Doctor Who

2009-11-17T14:41:00.000Z

Ok, so I'm two days later than everyone else with any interest in Dr Who, but in my defence I've been... er, well... my schedule is... um... ah, oh, arsebiscuits - here's my view on the latest Who:-

PLUSES
High definition looking mighty fine - apart from the odd 'that looks pasted on' bit in some of the wider CG shots. Not helped by colour choices of, for example, the escape shuttle thing. From a distance it looked like it had a black outline, like the one off of Futurama.

Still, the colours - often the thing I notice first between standard and high def - were stunning and (SADDO ALERT!) Mr Tennant's Hair was looking good down to the very last be-product-laden strand.

Music - top notch, less syrupy and obvious than it has been.

Performances - not a duff one in the lot, even The Aussie One With The Baggy Eyes What Was In Neighbours. Lindsay Duncan was superb as the control freak captain, and the others were somewhat more rounded than the usual cast; compare them to the cast in that bus in the desert one. Enough said. Baftas all round. Mr Tennant's Hair should, obviously, be nominated for an Oscar. The way it drooped in the snow at the end was as moving a performance as I've ever seen. I wept. "Oh the humanity", I cried, "get the man some Su-Su-Studio Line Rock Fix Gel immediately!"

(Sorry)

Humour - not as funny as some but some good lines. Bowie Base - brilliant. "Folding Bikes" - yes! The comedy robot (by the way - "gadgetgadget"... doesn't that sound a little like "bideebidee", the robot off of Buck Rogers In the 25th Century"?) "Name, Rank, Intention"... "Doctor... Doctor... er, fun?". Lovely lovely.

Monsters - good ones, again much better than the last special. Nice prosthetics too.

Now, he says clearing his throat...

MINUSES
Plot. I don't expect Mr T Davies's's's stories to be watertight (oh punnity pun), even more so after reading how last minute he finishes them. But this one was a bit weak. Er, why surrender to "gagdetgadget" when a quick zzzap with the sonic would surely disable it? When he found out who everyone was and that he couldn't change things - why not save them all and put them on a distant planet somewhere they'd never be found? He mentioned that he's been in the "knowing this has to happen" situation before (Pompeii) but this one really moved him - why? The sudden change to Timelord Victorious - er, somewhat clumsy clunking of gears there, only made at all logical by Mr Tennant's superb performance.

The bit with the Dalek sparing the young Captain - didn't work at all for me. Why would the Daleks want Earthlings to explore the galaxies? Surely that would peeve them somewhat? I suppose Russell T was slightly handicapped with what stories he could've used from the recent back catalogue to illustrate why Ickle Baby Captain was special, but still...

Oh, and the end. Why didn't Old Lady Captain just run away, kill her two comrades then herself, so history wasn't altered - she seemed to think it mattered more than old Timelord Victorious about that but didn't try that hard. The change in the web pages was a bit weak too.

OK, enough. It motored along and was fun and exciting and interesting, but - to be frank - it needed a further writing pass to tighten up and fill these holes. And add a bit more as...

Pacing - it was slow. If it'd been standard length it probably would've been OK. The bit where Mr Tennant was stood at the door watching people run around with protein boxes - that seemed to last fifteen minutes alone. There was quite a lot of fat in it. Unlike Mr Tennant, looking even more rake-thin than usual.

--

OK, I'll stop now. As far as a televisual experience goes, Dr Who still wipes the floor with every other British made drama currently on... or, indeed, on in the last ten years. And as a setup for the Christmas ep, it was marvellous. The Doctor going mad, knowing he's going to die, the Timelord Victorious stuff - that's all new and interesting. Trailing Bernard Cribbins... Catherine Tait... The Master as a Homeless: oh, joy!

I just hope the end of the Christmas one is (temporarily) nice so I won't sit on Xmas Day being a bit frowny and worried.

As for the final ep, I'm expecting everyone to come back, from Sarah Jane, K9, and Mickey to Rose, Martha, Cap'n Jack and all.

--

(One footnote: not to be snide before the event, but I can't imagine The New Doctor Mr Smith giving a performance like Mr Tennant did in this ep. I suggest he needs EXTRAORDINARY hair to distract from the fact he's around nineteen and looks like he's been slapped in the face with a pan)

2009-11-11T17:09:00.002Z

July 17th was the last time I posted on here. Eek. Well, I have had the excuse of employing 30 new staff on a big new project. New offices. New equipment. New bosses. New everything.

Apart from me.

Can't say I can promise to keep this updated any more, but here are x number of random telly notes:-

1 FLASHFORWARD
Am sort of loving it. Really enjoyable series, great premise, good actors, nicely paced, great effects. But. Butbutbutbutbutbut.

Er, it's all going to go to shit, isn't it? Lost did, and so will this. A matter of time. It's already quite inconsistent - the end of ep 4 revealed The Blond Dead One Out of Lost and The Tall Deep Voiced One Out Of This Life 'caused' the flashforward. GASP! Then ep 5 didn't mention it and sent everyone to Washington DC. I thought I'd accidentally flashedforward a week and missed an ep out.

(OK, I didn't, I thought I'd picked the next ep on my Sky+)

And The One Who's Ralph Fiennes Brother - has he had loads of Botox around his mouth or something? He talks clenching his jaw throughout, even when being nice to his ickle baby child. It's irritating.

I'll keep with it but I know, am just dreadfully certain, that it's going to have a hokey conclusion that will make me spit with fury at spending 22 hours of my life with pouty Joseph Fiennes and his mates.

2 ITV NEWS
So you all know how much I like the news, or more specifically the titles of the news. And ITV News has redone theirs. I was slightly excited - mainly as ITV News is about as important to me as Supreme Master TV (Sky 835, or suprememastertv.com - and, no, it's not a spoof)

It's OK, in a low-budget out-of-the-Nineties virtual-reality way. The titles do start and stop three or four times for some reason. And they could've got An Famous to do the voiceover, like they did for CBS News in the States when legendary anchor Walter Kronkite did the v/o announcing (shock, horror - a lady!) "This is the CBS News, with Katie Couric"). They got some PR for that.

Why didn't they ask Sir Trevor MacDonald? Generic Voice Over Man may be more convenient and cheaper, I suppose, and that summarises TV generally nowadays, and ITV specifically.

3 X FACTAH
I think Simon Cowell's saving of Jedward (God, I've typed that word, I want to kill myself.. quick, calm down, it's in the interests of TV, it's OK.. pant) will be the Jump The Shark moment for X Factor. I'm glad they've got rid of the voting to Sundays as I can watch the remaining monkeys sing on a Saturday, in what is a wonderfully produced and artfully contrived big variety show, without giving any consideration to all da kidz texting in. Of course I'm watching Antiques Roadshow in high def when the results thing is on. It'll just make me angry anyway.

Tsk tsk Simon, you've really pissed on your chips there.

4 HIGH DEF
Speaking of posh telly pictures, now I've got used to it, it's a bit meh. I notice more when things I like aren't high def (like Flashforward - come on Five, pull yer finger out!) than I do when they are.

5 GARROW'S LAW (I think it's called that)
That new oldene dayes thing about the original defence lawyer, that's high def. And it's the only show that I've ever managed to sit through where people wear hats and bonnets and wigs and other odd headgear - see blogs ad infinitum. Any hatular activity (unless it's sci-fi) sends me diving for the channel change button before the first 'good morrow me lady' is said.

But it kinda works for me here, as it's primarily a courtroom drama, and they always have wigs. Even Crown Court had wigs. ... ...

I loved Crown Court, ITV's fairly rubbish daytime drama out of the seventies. Dirt cheap to churn out, crap acting, wooden sets, but as I only ever saw it when I was off school ill, so it was a 'treat'. Like pancakes for lunch (mmm sugary) and Lucozade.

Back to 2009 - Garrow's Law started off as wooden as the New Forest but got me hooked halfway through the first ep.

THE SOUP
Please watch it. It's on E! a hundred times a week and is consistently the funniest thing on telly. Joel McHale is superb, and is now starring in a sitcom so the show comes from NY not LA. My only problem is that the standards division censors everything a little too much, from blanking out the voice of the sponsor of a segment, through blurring title captions and logos, to pixellating the running gag when Joel shoots the little hairy bloke dead most weeks. And blanking out the gunshot. That's just silly.

Rightyho, there's some random telly guff spewed in your general direction. Hopefully the next vomitous episode will arrive quicker than 4 months' time. Probably next week - it's NEW DOCTOR WHO this weekend. So excited!!!!1!!

Oops

2009-07-17T10:21:00.002+01:00

Hello. S'been a while. I've been on hols and stupidly busy. And here I am on a Friday and, gulp, I haven't even switched my telly on since Sunday.

Maybe I'm regressing to being one of them interweb teens who think tv is boring and pointless, and only watch 30 second videos of dogs falling off swings on Youtube?

Alternatively, it's because I've been hugely busy and out/working late every night.

There's been plenty of stuff I want to see - that Charlie Brooker quiz (although apparently the 'slebs get in the way of Mr Brooker's patented diatribe. Who Do You Think You Are? is always good value. That drama about the financial crisis.

The good news is my Sky+ HD is finally working now, and it's a very nice capable thing. It works fine, the HD picture can be superb (and can be oddly pixelly in the background sometimes), the updated software is functional and quick, and it makes watching and recording anything a doddle.

Note my lack of passion there. As I've said before, it's all very well done but there's no spark, passion or cleverness. Unlike, say, Sky's incredibly slick sports coverage, the presentation is good but not special. I s'pose that's what a monopoly does - although I shouldn't complain, for the price it's truly excellent and the box also looks lovely.

Maybe I'm missing the little dancing TiVo logo man more than I care to admit... sniff...

More telly news as and when I actually watch some telly.

Limited ambitions

2009-06-23T14:22:00.002+01:00

As I'm STILL without any telly at home, here's something from the past.

Cue the twanging harps and wibbly dissolve...

Picture the scene, Britain, mid-nineties, a typical indie tv production office (cheap furniture and staff in the open plan bits, expensive fittings and execs in the surrounding offices).

I was producing my first show, and we were due to shoot a one-off pilot episode to test the concept. It was a mix of factual items and comedy nonsense, all around a reasonably strong formatted idea, and had a tried-and-tested set of people appearing in it. Well, apart from me, moonlighting as a games reviewer. I was (a) free; (b) had seen the games so could comment; (c) free, and (d) looked stupid in the wig they made me wear so gave everyone else a cheap laugh.

Speaking of cheap, the show had a TINY budget. Weeny. Infinitesimally small (sp?). We filmed it in a disused old benefits office in Poplar, opposite Kwiksave (now it's an Aldi - is that up or down market?) and a canal full of sludge and broken Kwiksave trollies. The only pub nearby (you can tell I haven't changed much) said that we had to sit in the 'saloon bar' as we had a lady with us. Er, she was a lesbian and more macho than anyone else - but I wasn't going to argue with the man-with-three-teeth behind the bar.

Anyhow, the set looked ok and we'd come up with the monitor-point-of-view shot idea that made it just about filmable on the money we had. (Basically, we'd see a wide of a room and the characters enter - we'd then cut to a fixed camera 'within' the big tv in the corner, with a curvy-not-flatscreen-in-them-days effect on it, and use that for the rest of the scene, saving on relighting and moving camera. Most scenes ended with the main character pressing a button on the tv, cutting to footage so it was surprisingly effective)

Anyhow (ii) I'd spent three months honing the show, making sure the comedy stuff was easy to film and not too visual, as we couldn't afford props and redressing the set was a no-no. (Although we did a Dickens Xmas past/present/future thing, and the set looked jolly fine covered in Kwiksave Bargain Tinfoil as the future. The characters remarked on how the future looked quite like the present, just covered in tinfoil. Postmodern an' everything, eh?)

Anyhow (iii), the exec producer liked the scripts, the actors were happy, the content was good, I was cooking on gas, as we'd say in them days.

Until...

The boss came in. "I've written the pilot episode", she announced to everyone, "It's much better than your silly scripts". And with that she hurled a script at me.

Er... um... this was wrong on SO many levels. The boss had no sense of humour - she admitted as much. She hated the secondary character, the only really good actor and comedian. The Carry On-style innuendo and postmodernism made her cringe. She could write, and write well, but drama not comedy.

Her script was incredible. It had a robot supermodel in it, loads of outside scenes and a variety of perplexing remarks I think the boss thought were jokes. But weren't.

I went in to see her and said we couldn't film it, it cost too much. She said she'd pay herself for the extra time.

Sigh.

So we did it, as written. Every last scene. The robot supermodel, Candy LaBelle - I can and will never forget the character name - was an American actress hired at huuuuge expense for 3 days (£300!). I say actress, but, bless, she couldn't act. She had lots of complex techie lines to say and it took 30+ takes to get anything useable.The final denouement had her blowing up. We used a blow-up doll for that. Somehow.

Ooof it was awful. I mean really unfunny, illogical and slow. I cut it together, crying into my Sky-issue plastic coffee. I took it to the boss, gave her the VHS and walked out of the room to hide in the disable toilet. Pretending the Sky coffee had given me the shits.

She called me in half an hour later, stony-faced and ashen. I started to try and say that I thought it was a bit wooden, and too long, and-

She stopped me.

She told me it was awful. Shit. Dreadful. To cut it to pieces to rescue it, somehow, as we couldn't reshoot it and had to use it. But drop in new bits, filmed later. Some jokes perhaps. She'd leave us alone from now on, she knew comedy wasn't her thing but she now realised that you can't be overly ambitious on 10p an episode. That our brand of silly jokes, cheap jibes and implausible campery sort of worked, for no logical reason.

I left feeling ten thousand feet high. We made the eps we'd written and they were funny. Damn funny. The show rated really well, everyone in the office thought it was incredible, I was the toast of indie producerville. EP 4 went out - Candy LaBelle - hacked to bits but still not too good. We'd just about rescued it (even if some bits made no sense)

And the boss left me alone, for 12 whole episodes, a record in that office. She promoted me to a new show on a big channel, and most of my team came with me. She then had a hissy fit saying we'd ruined the show for the team taking over, that we'd all got the new show on our minds and forgotten the old one (which was wrong as the episodes that she was watching go out had been made long before we'd been promoted, and were the funniest of the lot)

I end this anecdote brutally as I've a train to catch. I think we've all learnt something there. I don't know what it is, apart from "leave me be please lady", but there you go.

Catastrophe!

2009-06-16T15:05:00.001+01:00

Pluses to Sky + HD: stunning picture on both SD and HD, quick channel changes, one box instead of two, one BLACK box matching my Blu-Ray player.

Minuses: it only worked for a day, and is broken, saying "no signal". The installers are checking the dish but as everyone else in the block is fine, it's not that, is it? 48 hours without telly... oh, the humanity.

Bye bye old friend

2009-06-13T15:13:00.003+01:00

Well as I type this a Sky man (as in an engineer from the satellite tv company, not as in someone who with a jetpac or cape) is installing Sky + HD, so my dear old Tivo has been flung into a cupboard.

I did sigh slightly as I went to switch it off for the last time, the wee Tivo logo - a little man, improbably, made of those four letters, swaying slightly in the corner of the screen as the cloudy sky background did the familiar-but-still-swishy animated loop it always does.

I put the Sky box in last night (without the '+' capabilities of recording and that) and have to say HD is very good indeed. I sat through some right shite just to see it in HD, just like everyone does when there's something new on offer. When Sky first started, I had a dish and proudly showed off the four channels to gawping onlookers. Oddly enough my mates mainly came over after 10pm perusing the German and Italian channels for the legendary gameshows-with-ladies-of-little-clothes. There were a few of them - chin,chin! one of the theme tunes went, as busty presentresses opened their carefully-hinged bras and revealed prize logos stuck to one of their chests.

Anyway...

I got a stereo telly just before then, a posh Sony with speakers on ears. It was reet fancy, a fully flat screen in 1995 and everything. Hearing music like off of a CD was quite a gimmick... for about five minutes.

Before that I can remember when C4 started, a long hot summer holiday as a kid, little to do except watch their endless preview broadcasts, six minutes on the hour, every hour, on the portable TV in my bedroom. I can't remember the change from B&W to colour, not really.

Watching Jonathan Ross in HD was... well, the same really, colours brighter, sharper image obviously (boy do most people look older and/or more heavily made-up, including Mr Ross). I did notice how limited the HD range is - I expected more channels really. BBC HD, for example, didn't show the trooping of the colour this morning - surely it's filmed in HD? Not that I approve of such programmes, obviously...

Putting on boring old standard def Sky News made me realise just how nice HD is. But then the new Sky box seems to give a much better picture on standard stuff too, so hey ho.

The Skyman is finishing up, must catch him before he jets off up into the stratosphere. I have to say Sky's EPG and box are nicely put together, well designed and simple to use, if slightly more functional and basic than the lovely design and intuitive nature of TiVo. But when I press channel up or down, the channel goes up or down INSTANTLY. For us TiVoites, that's astonishing, as it takes around 5 seconds to change anywhere. A cable linked to the Skybox and send '1' then '0' then '1' and then a pause... and then channel would change. Believe me it made channel hopping a nightmare...

Comparing Sky+ and TiVo is like comparing a PC - universal, popular, functional - to a Mac - fancy, well-designed but a bit too all-knowing. I say this typing on my week-old MacBook with my iPhone next to me, a dramatic switch to the dark side after 20 years of PCness.

Skyman is now on the roof, checking the second feed for the recording thingie. I've even read the instruction book. The bit about how you can only record TWO programmes at once whilst watching another nearly made me fall over. With TiVo it was like early video recorders, you could only record what you were watching.

Sadly, I can now watch and record more TV than ever, at high-definition resolution and with brilliant digital sound - just as the tv industry cuts production of anything and everything to save money in a recession-hit world. Oh well.

Hey hey USA

2009-05-29T16:09:00.004+01:00

So I've been in the States for a bit, and here's a unordered list of What I've Noticed About Yank TV:-

1 EVEN SHORTER ATTENTION SPANS
The evening entertainment magazine shows, from veteran Entertainment Tonight (ET) to new guy TMZ (Tee-Em-Zee of course) by way of Inside Edition and countless others, are now so jump-cutty and frenzied they're impossible to watch.

Mary Hart on ET, bless, has been presenting the show forever.. well, since 1989, when Sky Movies started to show it here. She sat alongside John Tesh, a man with a face that looked like it had been hit with a pan - and with a nifty sideline in Richard Clayderman-stylee naff piano music. The two of them read out links and the show was nice to everyone.

Not now. John is long gone, some shouting man with no appreciable personality is there. Mary doesn't look any older than she did two decades ago, just tighter and... er, bigger. As in the Botox and surgery to her face, US-TV-Enormo-Hair and fixed grin makes her head look massive.

But now each shot lasts a second of two, even when a presenter is talking, the camera constantly cutting and zooming. The reports are even worse - the word 'soundbite' being too long for most clips. They did a 'summer movie preview' and I swear there wasn't a single entire line of dialogue in the whole thing. How are you supposed to judge a film if they cut so fast between clips you've no idea what it looks like?

(The answer, oh Blogateers, is - of course - da yung'uns like it, and you look things like that up on the web nowadays. But I don't care. It's like watching bits of broken crockery in a blender - bouncy and noisy and pointless)

TMZ has the novelty of (a) being based on a website; and (b) pretending to be a documentary, with 'journos' pitching ideas to the 'editor', then clips popping up. Very odd. But everything is still in. Tiny. Lit. Tle. Bits. 'n'. Pieces.

2 EVEN MORE ADS
If you thought it wasn't possible to cram in more ads on the already saturated American airwaves, you'd be wrong. Branded segments of programs (that's how the US'ers spell it, without the extra 'me', spelling nerds) like a minty chewing gum sponsoring a bit of the somehow-better-when-in-the-US Soup featuring sweary bits of dialogue from reality shows, telling them to clean their dirty mouths... to even more blatant product placement (an ep of some useless drama thing set entirely in a Subway sarnie shop), it's all there.

3 EVEN MORE REPEATS
Most new shows are on twice a week, an 'encore' showing in primetime some other day, usually low-rated weekends, to boost numbers and save money.

4 EVEN LONGER SHOWS
NBC's The Biggest Loser is two hours long now. The American Idol results show, which is basically 5 minutes of 'you've won! you haven't!' is an hour long, sometimes 90 minutes, in addition to the two hour main show. The 'season finale' of Celebrity Apprentice (Joan Rivers AND her daughter!) lasted THREE WHOLE HOURS.

Jesus.

5 EVEN MORE IRRITATING TRAILERS
Especially, but not exclusively, on cable stations, a box will pop up with clips, animations, teasers, graphics and captions in the corner of the screen after each break, trailing the next show, or the next episode of this show, or some other show altogether. Countdown clocks to new episodes or series also dominate the screen, especially on TLC which seems to specialise in shows about people who have lots of kids. Sextuplets, 14 kids in total, whatever - just screaming children and shouting parents.

6 EVEN ODDER ADS
The recession means the ads for Viagra, Cialis and other medication seem to dominate even more, with their comedy list of side effects. A pill to 'reduce gas' has a huge list of problems it could cause including 'anal leakage'. So you don't fart but you shit yourself. Champion.

Founding a tv company

2009-05-11T12:00:00.002+01:00

So with all the bad news swirling about, I was talking to a friend who said how lucky I was to run my own company, and have the 'stability' of doing so for years. This is lucky year 13 for my company (sort of) so he might have had a point.

But then I thought back to how it all started, and the night it nearly didn't happen.

I had cosied up to a senior exec at a big independent producer. It wasn't her job to add to the portfolio of mainly youthy, mainly entertainment shows this company made - and made very well - but she said she could help.

I'd got in via a guy who worked for me, who'd gone for a job interview in a period of unemployment, turned up a bit worse for wear but made an impression anyway. So the two of us went to see her, were kept waiting for ages - and we'd been to the pub so were a bit, er, the worse for wear. My mate wanted to walk out, I wanted to wait and see... well, anyway, she turned up, met us, chatted, introduced us to the bosses and we came to a deal to set up a joint venture company.

So I meet their head of new business, and we get on well. He works out a deal, we agree terms, and all that needs to happen is that this guy meets my other mate, who I'll be forming the business with.

Now this friend was easily my best mate in London, and it's fair to say we got on incredibly well despite being very different characters. We'd worked together well in the last job, despite the inevitable ups and downs of working with friends. And he was as enthused as me at the idea of setting up our own thing.

I decide it'd be good to meet in a pub, and off to Victoria Park me and my mate went as it was next to New Business Guy's (NBG for briefness) house. It turns out NBG was a drinker. Oh yes. A VERY big, VERY fast drinker, the sort who drinks half a pint in a sip. I'm quite a drinker, but pints of beer I find hard to drink quickly. My mate, however, is a legend when it comes to boozing, someone who could drink solidly for 36 hours and seem just slightly tired at the end of it. He could drink ANYONE under the table, under the ground or under anything ever.

The two of them are getting on OK, but the drinking is accelerating, and it's obvious my mate isn't exactly enamoured by NBG. "Twat" was his one-word judgement when NBG went off for a piss. "Quite an, um, character" was NBG's judgement as my mate went off to pee, rolling his eyes. I don't think tall, posh, clever NBG had ever met a tattooed, long-haired, leather-jacketed, burly bearded biker guy before. He seemed to view my mate - someone crucial to the business we were setting up - as some sort of amusement that would shock the oh-so-trendy types populating the parent company.

Things got worse. I tried to keep up and felt very ill. The subject of private lives was brought up, my mate fiercely protective of his... NBG seeminlgly yearning for more danger and edge than his lovely nice safe wife-kid-house-big job life was offering.

I was getting sicker and sicker as the two of them got drunker and drunker. They even arm wrestled at one point. I have no idea who won as I went off to vomit copiously. I got back to the table and they were both mute, arms folded, drinking shorts. I said I must've had something bad to eat and would have to go home. Goaded by NBG, my mate stayed and had more shorts. I watched from outside, having managed to grab a life-giving cup of tea from the jellied eel shop next to the pub (hey it was 1997, they still existed in Victoria Park Village)

My mate stumbled out on his own as I watched NBG asleep on the pub table. We wandered off, deciding to walk to Stratford where he lived. We walked through what is now the 2012 Olympic site but was then just wasteland with warehouses, barking dogs and skanky drug addicts slumped in corners. Now this I'd have considered scary except (a) my mate could more than handle himself, even when a bit pished; and (b) I was more concerned with him saying over and over again he couldn't work for that... well, insert every rude word ever here.

I pleaded and cajoled, seeing my dream slip away of a company I owned a stake in, guaranteed funding for a bit, the excitement of working with one of the biggest and most prestigious indies. But to no avail. We got to his place, ordered pizzas, drank booze and decided that was that.

I stumbled into a cab home at 2am, depressed and confused and drunk and ill, the worst night of my career so far.

Next morning I had a 10am meeting with NBG and boy did I feel rough. I was expecting exactly the same negative reaction from him, and on my way in I planned a speech saying how I'd decided to stay where I was after all.

NBG greeted me with "well, what a night!" and then said how wonderful he thought my mate was, how great things were going to be, and how he was looking forward to another "session" on the booze.

Gulp.

In my weakened state I nodded feebly, filled in the forms and went off to Stratford.

I knocked on my mate's door not sure what to do or say. He greeted me cheerily as he ate a slice of cold pizza. "What a shitty night!", he said, laughing.

Er...

So I started on my spiel of how NBG seemed fine with everything (a raised eyebrow there) but I know my mate wasn't keen to work with him and I understand that and I-

My mate stopped me in my tracks. "As long as I never have to deal with the twat I'm fine. The bastard we work for now is worse."

And with that he signed the documents and our company was born. Six months later, my mate - still without ever having dealt with NBG at all - met a lovely American lady, decided to get hitched and emigrate, and we went our separate ways business-wise.

My old mate now runs his successful own company Stateside. NBG left the parent company at some point, has surfaced in many different forms in telly and the interweb, and still likes a pint or several drunk at lightning speed.

And I don't do lager any more.

Fish News!

2009-05-07T14:42:00.000+01:00

Let's ignore all the bad news about telly right now, and here's one of my Anecdotages from The Far Far Distant Past, a world where big companies spent lots of money on channels no-one watches.

(Like the channel amusingly called Watch today, hoho)

Here's when I was in charge of news for a day.

So it was the silly cable channel I was Head of Stupid Ideas for. I was in really early, for impress-the-boss-early-on-in-your-contract sort of reasons. I mean, 8am in tellyland, it might as well have been midnight.

Boss wanders in, flapping and yacking to Head of Programmes/Programming about random tabloidy things.

He sidles up to me and says he's fackin' bored with the noos (always made me smile, how a newspaper man couldn't pronounce news), go on, think up somethin' stooopid to make the nooos more interestin'.

I have to say here the news was three minutes of a person reading the news from a foot-pedal operated autocue, rarely with any clips (they cost money) just the occasional still (paid for by the newspaper group wot owned the channel). It was Dullsville Street, Boringtown, Bland County.

I can't remember how or why - this was quite a while ago - but I suggested how about the news presented by a goldfish, with thought bubbles popping up with short, snappy captioned comments. I'd like to think this flash of genius (ahem) was spontaneous or off-the-cuff, but it probably wasn't. I remember having a big book of ideas and being a swotty teacher's pet-type, writing things up I thought might work.

(Long since ditched that, btw)

Anyway, boss said "Bingo. Gerrit on air in an hour", news reader man sitting one desk away from me scowled at me with venom - he was about to be replaced by a 10p pet - and the head of programming/programmes chortled to himself, no doubt thinking about the headlines in the papers the next day.

I then got a cab to the local pet shop (not easy to find in the pre-Google days), bought a fish, a bowl, a little shiny arch for the bowl, some gravel and some food (hey, I know how to prepare), and I was back in the office 30 mins later.

We didn't hit the hour deadline - we had to type in news for bubbles to pop up, and find a nice bubbly watery sound track, it took time. News reader was pleased to be typing the stuff up; less so when the boss came over and stuck a sticky label to his jacket saying "Executive Producer, Pet Division (Small Fish Dept)"

Anyway, 2 hours later, Britain's Wettest News went live for a trial bulletin. It wasn't actually broadcast, something I've just remembered, slightly making this anecdote pointless, but it's a blog typed up LIVE AND DIRECT (insert Sky News whoosh here) so these things happen.

And, you know, it was funny. BLUB-BLUB-BLUB - POP! - thought bubble… PING! BLUB-BLUB-BLUB - POP! - another one. The fish behaved itself, the tabloid execs all chortled, and "we're on our way to h'another television triumph" the boss announced, patting me on the back.

I went to grab a sandwich, returning as they set up for the bulletin. The boss was even more thrilled when I said we could just film the fish for five minutes and then use the same footage every day, meaning he could flog the camera.

Only one small item. Our newsreading star, under the harsh tv lights, had… er, kicked the watery bucket literally minutes before air. Someone - surely Executive Producer, Pet Division (Small Fish Dept) - had forgotten to move it.

The boss was mortified. "Get another one, an heir and an spare!", he commanded, and I went to my desk to pick up my pass and the ten poonds for the taxi. Just then head of programming/programmes came over. The cost of the computer stuff to do the captions worked out five times dearer than just filming a bloke on a desk. And the bloke on the desk was the nephew of someone High Up in the company, and somewhat unhappy at his new role. And being replaced by a small creature with a seven-second memory span.

The idea was quietly dropped. My boss was soon onto other things, like why we showed the same ads every commercial break (answer: no advertisers) and why the psychic woman always seemed to be talking to the same people every night on her live phone in (answer: only a few viewers, plus most of the calls were the poor staff working on the show, as otherwise it would fall off air).

Anyway, thought it might make a change from the current bad news flooding tellyland. (Insert gag about news and flooding here).

*Oh, yes, ITV cancels The South Bank Show - well, I saw the one about William Goldman, superb programme and great subject, and there were NO ads in it, just trailers for other ITV shows. It wasn't sponsored by anyone. When it finished and was followed by boxing highlights - way to segway between items, ITV! - there were 7 ads, including one for kebab-flavour Pot Noodle. Lord Melvyn of Bragg's flagship show, ABC1 audience, no ads during, Pot Noodle ad after - ITV SOOO wanted this show dead.

**Oh (ii), in Future TV News, the government replied to my email about product placement (see below). Love to say it was a specific, detailed response but alas not. A cut-n-paste jobbie with no ref to my lovely idea of using prod-place money to fund pub-serv progs. Oh well.

How to save public service broadcasting. Ish.

2009-04-27T12:54:00.002+01:00

OK, so I've had an idea. It's probably not that original, but it is workable and could help generate some extra dosh to help the areas of telly that need a bit more investment. Regional news, current affairs, children's telly - with the latter I, as usual, declare my self interest as someone who makes lovely programmes for the wee nippers.

It's not rocket science, but it could be implemented quickly, and it has the benefit that the commercial broadcasters have been pushing for it for a while - if not in the form I'm proposing.

It's a three step plan:-

1 ALLOW PRODUCT PLACEMENT ON BRITISH TELLY
Just say yes to allowing ITV, C4, Five, Sky and all to have companies pay them to use their brand of product on a show. Watch American Idol clips online - do the Coca-Cola cups and ads behind Ryan Seacrest's tiny head really make the show a disgrace? Just like The X Factor or Britain's Got Talent, this show exists simply to create a star that makes money for Simon Cowell and co., so it's just an exercise in product placement (ie the potential star in our minds) anyway.

2 USE THE SAME RULES AS SPONSORSHIP
No product placement on kids' TV, or current affairs, or where there's a conflict with editorial issues/impartiality etc: simple, sensible rules.

3 MAKE THE BROADCASTERS USE THAT MONEY FOR PSB PROGRAMMING
Ta-dah! That's it! Any money they raise they've got to spend IN ADDITION TO CURRENT FUNDING on regional stuff, current affairs or kids.

Would you care if Ken Barlow asked for a pint of Boddingtons instead of a jug of Newton & Ridley in the Rovers' Return? It would make Corrie seem more real to me. Well, slightly less surreal - let's face it, that soap has many good qualities, but realism ain't one of 'em.

And if a daytime makeover show said "this lovely Ikea kitchen", or "this bedroom suite from John Lewis", would the world collapse?

Of course not. And if it could pay for a few original UK-sourced childrens' programmes, some regional current affairs shows and/or news, surely that's a real Billy Bonus? Someone from ITV said (hey, I'm not that good a researcher, obvious innit?) that sponsorship didn't raise much initially but not it's £50m - that's a lot of Spotlight North-Easts I'd think.

Obviously there are wrinkles - why would the broadcasters bother to push for this funding if they couldn't use it for what they want? Well, put a limit on the money raised, and say anything under that goes on PSB stuff, anything over can be spent on 'owt: Ant'n'Dec's salaries, executive bathrooms or more episodes of Family Fortunes With Vernon Kay. I'm sure PACT, Save Kids' TV and other bodies can get together and help the government come up with a figure.

What if the public hates the fact, say, everyone on an ITV drama series drives a Ford? Limit it to three years, then review it. If the public hate it, scrap it.

We'd be like American TV - blantant plugs, nasty ads, yadda blah bleurgh. Hmmm.. really? 24 has every car being a Ford for example, Ford even sponsoring entire episodes without ads. Desperate Housewives is apparently packed full of product placement - I don't watch it so can't vouch for it, but a lot of people I know watch it ironically, and clumsy plugs for products would surely spoil that?

The only downside is the poor guy who has to pixellate the Coca-Cola cups on ITV2's repeats of American Idol would lose his job. Sad... but surely he's going a bit crazy after putting a circular blur on a cup frame-by-frame for hours and hours and hours. It'd be a kind thing to do really.

I've written to Culture Secretary Andy Burnham suggesting all this - hey, there's a productive morning! Now back to writing a show with Adair Bear in it.

Telly telly on the wall

2009-04-16T17:14:00.004+01:00

So, as per usual, I'm the last person in the world to post my opinion on New Who last weekend. Been snowed under with a billion things - here I am on a Thursday afternoon having already put in forty hours' work this week... and Monday was a Bank Hol...

Anyhow, my opinions on Who...

1 HIP HIP HAIR-RAY!
Yes, Mr Tennant's hair was as good as always, the desert sun didn't wilt it and it look magnificently coiff'd and gee'd and spike'd. Phew.

2 WHY WHY DUBAI?
Did you get any sense they were somewhere exotic or new? It was just some sand. They could've filmed it in a studio and CG'd on something much better. Waste of money.

3 RYAN'S DISASTER*
No ta Michelle Ryan, the least convincing 'Lady' since David Walliams put on a frock... worst acting since Ray Alan's Lord Charles** ... hated, hated, HATED her. Mind you, didn't like Billie Piper in the first few eps... really hated Catherine Tate in her first Xmas spesh... loved Freema from day one though. Hmmm.

4 EVERYTHING ELSE
The story was a bit poor, not quite as funny as Russell T's usual efforts. The SFX were patchy - sorry, but the flying bus looked awful, HD or no HD. Them fly monsters were proper Olde Skool Who creatures, just a mask and two moving prongs - I liked that in a retro stylee. Lee Evans - meh, doing his usual schtick, although the lines about naming units after himself was funny. Nasty Evil Unit Boss was a good actor I thought, and the bus lot were fine if hardly in it and barely sketched out.

BUT BUT BUT...

It was New Who! It flew past! Great Mission Impossible opening! Hints of what's to come in the future! Nice end scene telling Porsche Ladeeeh to fack orf! This is what telly is about for me, ideas and jokes and BRITISHNESS and that.

Right, back to making the telly instead of writing about it. Although it's all mobile, interweb and movies for me nowadays, with some telly stuff on the side. Weird, huh?

* Ryan's Daughter was a movie so it's sort of a pun on it
**Google 'em. Lord Charles was a wooden dummy. Point made.

Spring TV

2009-04-09T17:38:00.003+01:00

Sorry for not posting much recently - to be frank I've been a bit busy and, er, um, cough... haven't actually been watching much tv at all. There's a first.

Other random observations:-

NEW WHO - WOO-HOO!
Sooooo looking forward to NEW DOCTOR WHO!!!1!! over the weekend, how cool is that? Or, rather, how hot is that as it was filmed in Dubai.

Questions about it:-

With it not being in "the BBC sandpit" (all the Old Who fans are smiling), has it made a difference to the atmosphere of the ep?
A double-decker bus in the desert - is that wise?
And, most importantly, has the extreme heat of Dubai flattened Mr Tennant's lovely lovely hairdo? His hair is one of the modern wonders of the world. If he ever endorsed a hair gee surely any man would be a fool not to buy it? Or bald like me...

RECESSION-O-VISION
Notice how Antiques Roadshow has crept up the schedules from 5:45pm on Sun when I was a kid to a full-on primetime 8pm slot now? (WHISPERS) It's cheap and does well...

HIGH DEFINITION UPDATE
South Park is now high def, and it looks different. Whereas The Simpsons improved a bit, SP just looks, er, different. This is the anti-animation cartoon, where they purposely move the characters crudely and make them look like they're cut-outs when the series is actually made on whizzy fast powerful computers. Tidying it up is odd. Not bad, not good, just... different.

Right, off to the pub (obviously) - have got a Tivo full of things to watch, although admittedly mainly episodes of Mad Men. Not that I'm complaining on that score, still such a great series, but the sort of thing I can only watch one of at a time. Maybe it's the smoking. Or the occasional wearing-of-hats (and you all know my hat-o-phobia).

I have to clear the Tivo as at some point over the next couple of weeks... (GASP)... (PANT) we're having... (SIGH) Sky+ and... (GULP) Sky HD installed. Scream! It means my lovely six-foot-long Italian designer TV unit that I got off the interwebs will merely have a BluRay and a SkyHD+ box and nothing else. Compared to a DVD player, Tivo, Sky box and old VHS recorder that fitted in it perfectly. Tsk.

This is a dilemma for a man with a hatred of clutter and ornaments.

What to do?

Toodlepip.

New talent, old clips...

2009-03-16T08:55:00.002Z

I've just spent a few minutes watching some clips from a comedy show we made in 2001. The fact I watched it is thanks to three things:-

New technology - Youtube, interweb, broadband streaming...
Old technology - a dusty old VHS copy being found and digistised in...
Not much to do - both for me to sit and watch it, and for the show's producer who did all the digitising heheh.

A bit of background - this show was made after we pitched a topical cartoon sketch show to our late-night bosses at C4. We made interstitials for them for 2 years and were coming to the end of a run, and pitched this as a new idea: a midnight(ish) topical show that could be repeated several times over the 4 nights the 4Later strand ran, and made for buttons.

They took a risk and said yes, gave us precisely six buttons and off we went. We spent five buttons on writers, getting in political journos like Simon Hoggart to give us insider info on politicians (interesting, but totally unusable as we'd have been thrown in jail if it had been broadcast) and big grand writers' meetings in an odd Docklands pub we called The Eighties (as it was full of chrome, red piping and alarmingly bad music).

Up'n'coming comedians and writers like David Quantick and, er, some other quite famous ones did some bits, we wrote some others, and the C4 lawyers screamed at us for daring to suggest nuclear waste could be dangerous. We then spent one button animating the whole half-hour show.

The only issue we ever had with C4 themselves was the title - they hated every one we came up with, so the working title, Pen Monkeys, was used. This was our pet name for the animators, and we did a very literal translation for titles and stings, with monkeys flying around on plane-sized pens. Oh how inventive.

The viewing experience was mixed - I'd totally forgotten the sequence about national monuments starting a world war when (then brand-new) President George W Bush accidentally pressed the wrong button. It was quite funny, and I can see why we thought it was just what a cartoon could and should do - a bunch of actors in silly hats couldn't - but God it went on a bit.

My producer friend says that when we did this we revelled in the animation being a bit shit, and as the telly didn't have any crap animation on, we were new and shiny and bold. Unlike today, when the internet is crammed full of low-quality 'toons. Hmmm. Not too sure about that myself, I'd have loved the animation to have been better, but we had no time, no money and (frankly) not that much ability to make nice proper cartoonery back then.

A sketch about killing Mrs Thatcher was less successful, but included to please our com.eds. if I remember correctly (ie I'm not making it up on purpose but my brain does have a tendency to do that to me). We shouldn't have been making 'topical' comedy about a PM who'd left office a decade before...

The show did what it needed to do - C4 liked it, commissioned a second one targeted more at their audience (ie less politics, more celebs), and made us stick to one animation style (Pen Monkeys used anything and everything, from 2D, 3D, hand-drawn, B&W, stills, cut outs...)

That second show was well-received, but it mattered not as the late-night original-content risky-business era was ending. The money went elsewhere and our show wasn't commissioned. Shortly afterwards 2DTV hit the air - twenty times our budget, primetime yet looking rather similar - and that was that, the market for 'topical animated comedy' was taken.

Oh well.

Anyhow, the reason for saying all this (eventually, he gets to the point) is that there doesn't seem to be any opportunity to do something as frankly barking mad as ask some blokes in a corridor with no comedy track record to make a topical satirical half-hour tv cartoon sketch show for the price of a Ford Mondeo. You can get lots of money to make comedy if you've got that track record. Or, it seems today, if you're the fat one off of Gavin & Stacey. Ahem.

But the opportunities we were offered don't exist any more. "Oh yes they do", you cry, "on the internets!". Well, yes, ish. With no money instead of tiny amounts of money, so only loners-in-bedrooms, rich people or big established comedians/companies "experimenting" can afford to do anything. Hence the distinct lack of any original comedic material on the web, and huge amount of digitised clips off of the telly.

We didn't quite succeed with either of our two sketch shows, either visually or comedically, but it was great that Big Important Channel 4 gave it a shot. I think with comedy you need to take risks - not necessarily expensive risks but creative ones. "No shit Sherlock", you shout annoyingly, but my view is that it's better to make ten comedy pilots of small amounts of dosh than one episode of, say, Horne & Corden. I'm picking that show out not because it's bad (TURNS TO CAMERA TWO LIKE HARRY HILL DOES OCCASIONALLY, RAISES EYEBROW SARCASTICALLY, TURNS BACK TO CAMERA ONE) but because it costs a lot of buttons.

Oh, and here's a link to the thing we did. Glacially slow, the worst mouth animation in the history of television, but at least there's weirdness and humour there. Somewhere.

LINKY-CLICKY-COMEDY

Tellynotes

2009-03-04T09:24:00.004Z

So tv is in crisis - ITV laying off another 600 staff, Five getting rid of 20% or so of their workforce, the BBC... er, well, the licence fee isn't affected by THE DOWNTURN (as BBC News calls it, complete with naff sinking arrow on a red background)... C4 is being pressganged into merging with either Five, ITV and Five, BBC Worldwide or BT Vision - depending on which website you glance at...

It's even affecting some of the smaller digital channels. I note The Business Channel went bust on January 1st. Insert your own joke here about why watch their business advice shows when they didn't follow it themselves.

The reason I noticed was I was hungover on New Year's Day, hopping around tv trying to find something OK to watch. Literally no-one else did - it was a small news story in Broadcast magazine in late January. It comes to something when even broadcast professionals don't notice a channel closing.

I think the next digital trend will be getting rid of the smaller +1 channels that cost zilch to produce but must cost a bit to broadcast. The bigger channels now get a fairly reasonable slice of their ratings from +1s but I can't imagine Living 2 +1 does. (Great name there, from the people who brought you Dave, Watch and now Blighty)

Dave counts as a bigger channel, in this kerrrr-azy age, and I suppose their +1 channel is safe now it's called Dave Ja Vu. Ho, and indeed, ho.

The reason I mention all this turmoil is twofold. Firstly, you wouldn't particularly notice things being much worse on air. There are still good sitcoms (Free Agents, Moving Wallpaper), Saturday night shiny floor shows (Saturday Takeaway), comedy (Harry Hill), panel shows (QI), drama (one of C4's rare excursions, Red Riding, starts tomorrow), as well as plenty of great imports airing now (30 Rock with Carrie Fisher! Mad Men back again!). And, in a rare lapse of scheduling, there are hardly any big 'sleb reality vehicles on. I don't include Dancing on Ice because no-one on it is vaguely famous, and how they can pretend it is about skill at skating when dead Mark Fowler off of EastEnders could hardly stand up on the rink never mind skate I don't know...

Just the odd programme here or there seems a bit cheap. ITV1 running police chasey car crashy things at 9pm, where drama used to be. Primetime repeats of shows already broadcast in primetime the same week - I think Harry Hill is on three times a week on ITV1 now.

It's going to get worse. A lot worse. I'm no fan of Heartbeat and The Royal but that's lots of hours of drama just scrubbed from the schedule. To be replaced with Coronation Street's Most Hilarious Rovers Return Moments With Pip Scofield On A Stool On The Set And Twenty Nine Clips, Including Some In Black And White. Or other such quality items.

Small pockets of hope? Well, Sky 1 getting Stuart Murphy as boss might mean more original stuff on that channel. Original stuff not involving Shane Ritchie singing, or Noel Edmonds haranging councillors that is... I can only hope. And channels like Dave and Blighty slowly moving to originating content here and there - much as I adore QI and Top Gear there's only so many times anyone can watch the same episode, and their supplies of new material are small (15 or so eps of TG a year, 8-12 of QI considering both shows are on 600+ times a year)

Right, I'm off to download an episode of House to watch on my iPhone at the gym later. I'm thoroughly modern, me.

Television about television

2009-02-20T11:43:00.002Z

A slight theme to today's post, after the last ragbag of stuff.

I watched Tne Money Programme last night. Well, I did and and I didn't. I watched a show recorded by my Tivo at 10:30pm, made by The Money Programme team, presented by Max Flint who does most TMP duties, with the iconic theme tune and titles, in the 7:30pm slot where TMP usually goes. But it was called Tomorrow's TV in the schedules, hence my DVR wouldn't have recorded it as you can't set a season pass for a one-off show. The fact it did was because I'm sad enough to go through the TV bits of the papers on a Sunday hunting out good content, and set it manually.

Blinkin' BBC types, thinking that the phrase 'money' will put off people from watching. Really? Nowadays? When money and finance is so in the news? And the target audience, up against EastEnders, isn't exactly a big one? Like me, they DO want to watch sensible serious programmes. And their DVRs are probably set to record EVERY Money Programme, yet they'll have missed this one.

The Beeb did this a while back, then reverted to calling the show by it's actual title so those of us with Sky+ or other DVRs can record it

And why was it on a Thursday too? It's usually on Fridays? And-

OK, I'll stop there. Check it out on iPlayer or here

It was good telly about telly - well made, great talking heads - as in proper experts and big names in the tv world - and a good analysis of why telly is in such a state. Seeing the Macedonian version of Millionaire was funny too (it's even sold to Iraq, 109 countries or something now), and the fact that 53% of ALL tv formats worldwide are originated in the UK. That made my Union Jack waistcoated-chest swell with patriotic pride.

But we're all deep in the shit; as someone said, the model for funding telly is the same as it ever was, yet 25% of all ad money has switched to the internet, leaving a big hole. Even though people watch more telly than ever.

Grrrrr, boo, hiss, come on Ofcom / the Government / someone - sort it out!

And, on the theme of telly about telly, my fave sitcom is back on air. And it's on Five.

It's 30 Rock and it's proper good funny boom-boom sitcom fare. No laugh track but still way better than almost any other sitcom on tv. It's set in NBC's HQ - 30 Rockerfeller Plaza, hence the title - and stars Tina Fey as the producer of The Girlie Show (I kid you not), a sketch show that doesn't seem that girlie at all, to be frank.

But it's hardly about telly at all, it's a simple workplace comedy about nutnuts who work together. Alec Baldwin is superb as the mad boss, and the show specialises in digs at NBC and GE, General Electric, who own the network. The Baldwin character is head of East Coast programming, comedy and microwave ovens, for example, and gets huffed when the latter is taken off him.

One day Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) comes into his office and the GE logo just has an E. Jack (Baldwin) says he's sold off the G. The first episode of season 2 has Jack using new technology to digitally insert Jerry Seinfeld into every NBC show, using old footage from, er, Seinfeld. But Jerry isn't best pleased - hence his guest-starring role in the ep...

I'll stop blethering and just say please watch it. Good on Five for buying it - even it's up to season 4 in the US and they're just starting season 2 here - and it's repeated in blocks on FiveUSA too, so no excuse for missing it. A sitcom with actual jokes, funny characters, a real 'sit' and some great performances. Kenneth the page is hilarious, Tracey Jordan (a man), the 'star' of the show less so but still funny, and the rest of the team (sad writers, nice guy who fancies Liz but she'll not touch him, great cameos and guest stars) perfect.

Toodlepip!

Even more random jottings than normal

2009-02-16T16:48:00.002Z

Look I've even put in links for once. That's like journalism and everything.

New Simpsons Titles in HD
Yes, they're remade the classic title sequence for high-def. It's brilliant, as ever, with some of the long gone/dead/unused characters replaced by newer ones (Apu's kids!) as well as more visual references than you can shake a stick at... and all in super-duper Expensive-O-Mation more like the movie than the TV series.

But... well, twenty years of seeing the same titles (with different sofa bit, agreed) means it's a big change. The sofa gag on this one was a bit poo as well. Love the plasma screen falling off the wall at the end though. I suppose they could either do a frame-by-frame remake, a bit pointless, or try something new. Two-and-a-half cheers for the latter.

Note that the new HD titles were introduced only when US HD/digital tx was supposed to be compulsory, ie now, and analogue telly switched off. Obama has delayed that until the summer because of the recession. Britain plods along until 2012 with bits'n'pieces changing over. Sigh.

ITV in even more trouble
Not surprising in some ways, worrying in others. Talk of an 'emergency schedule' of soaps and repeats? Makes it sound like the three-day week in the seventies, or wartime, not as if they're just somewhat strapped for cash. I also can't help but thinking that if, as this article states, The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent really cost £1million an hour, that ITV is being charged an awful lot of money from Talkback Thames for what are, essentially, shiny floor shows. The former surely is cheaper than that overall, what with endless weeks of cheapo auditions?

Blue Peter sinking
100,000 viewers? Eeek, that's bad. The article mentions it was eight million way back when, but that was without any cabsat, C4 or Five...repeats on BBC2 and more kids on ITV. I produced a show for CiTV when Blue Peter moved to three nights a week, and between the two of us we had ten million viewers. Although the offical ratings were much smaller, as they were supposed to only look at 15 and unders.

Still, it looks like shuffling all the children's programmes forward to accomodate the stunning innovation of moving Weakest Link from Beeb 2 to 1 hasn't worked for the very fragile kids' audience. Won't grind my axe again here (too much), just say that hopefully something will be done to help CBBC/BBC One audiences, as well as lovely BRITISH telly producers making lovely BRITISH programmes for lovely BRITISH kiddiewinkies.

Thanking you.

Televisio Espagnol

2009-02-09T11:46:00.003Z

So I was in Barcelona for the weekend and watched some Spanish TV. Indigenous, local television, like AXN, Fox and, er, Sony Television Entertainment.

They show programmes in English then have Spanish ads and idents. Que? But in the trailers, all the shows are dubbed into Spanish. I was a bit confused then remembered the olden days before Digiboxes, when the lovely Amstrad satellite box had an audio button you pressed on each channel to get different languages (if available).

Sometimes on German channels you got undubbed versions of US or UK shows, at very low volume. Often with the American content this was before it was on UK tv, so somewhat useful for episodes of, er Murphy Brown or 21 Jump Street, two particular favourites of mine. Google the first one, it caused a presidential stir...

Anyhoo, so I assume Spanish TV is doing that same thing when supplying hotels like the one I was in. I got to watch a CSI, not something I've managed to sit through before - OK in a flashy way - and Brothers and Sisters, which was full of very good-looking people either shouting or having sex with each other. With the most awful effects between each scene, the picture sliding off with a comedy sound effect, like out of 1980s sitcoms like Parker Lewis Must Die. Again, Google is your friend if my ancient US references are too much for you. Think Ferris Bueller, but more like the movie than the dreadful TV series, and on Sky before digital happened.

But the oddest thing are the commercial breaks, sometimes twenty solid minutes of ads in a block, and then nothing for an hour. Why? After fifteen ads they all blur together. Even BBC World News did it - every channel at the same time shows a block of ads. I s'pose it means you can't channel hop but it was so tedious. The German MTV clone showed the same ringtone ad SEVEN WHOLE TIMES in one break.

Err, otherwise there wasn't much new - except as I was in Catalonia, there were two soaps going on different channels at the same time, one in Catalan and one in Spanish. The only reason I mention that is they both had a plot with a lady in a green deep-pore-cleanser-type facial mask, where the green wouldn't come off. Maybe they've two soaps with the same scripts but different locations and actors for no reason - apart from to employ extra people. The Catalan one, by the way, had ugly actors, dreadful sets and laughable music. The Spanish one was merely shit.

And that was my adventure in Spanish telly. I thank you.

Cartoon sitcoms

2009-01-28T14:28:00.002Z

I was lying on the sofa channel hopping at 11pm last night, as you do, when I found something odd. Family Guy was playing both on BBC Three and FX at the same time. They both had two episodes on in a row (although due to no ads, the BBC block was ten minutes' shorter than FX), both from around the same series.

(Nerdy Note: You can tell when it was made without Googling the episode title by the animation quality - worse on earlier ones, fantastic on newer ones with bits of 3D on vehicles, sets and the like... and also the occasional continuing story - ie Brian's girlfriend for a lot of eps later on. Also the newer eps tend to have the name of writer/producer Cherry Chevapravatdumrong at the front and you can't help but notice that one. She's just down as staff writer on old ones.)

Quite odd, scheduling the same show at the same time, although it came in quite handy for me as I'd watched one ep on Three and the next one I'd iTuned and iPodded a few days ago, so I could switch to FX and watch another one.

I'm not going to say Family is better than The Simpsons but I have to say it's certainly now up there as one of my favourite sitcoms. The Big Three - Family, Simpsons, Park - have now all made hundreds of episodes over decades of production, and despite the occasional lull (or in Family's case, cancellation and re-commission) they've all maintained a very high quality over this period.

How come? It's so hard to make anything funny, why have these three shows produced more laugh-out-loud comedy than almost every other sitcom on TV put together?

Here we go - making this up as I go along, in true blog style, so here are my x number of reasons. I won't even edit the 'x' out...

Firstly and massively hugely importantly - they're all run by the same people who invented the show in the first place. Groening, MacFarlane and Parker & Stone. Their original vision is still in place, from tiny insert into The Tracy Ullman Show from Mr Groening to rude crude web Xmas card from Matt'n'Trey.

(Nerdy Note: 50% of the creators are called Matt. Discuss)

These four people are, not to put to fine a point on it, geniuses. Groening because he managed to get Fox to leave him alone in the first place, then moved from a kidsy Bart-focused comedy to a Homer-centric 300 cast-list strong comedy epic. Parker & Stone because they revel in being crude and rude and un-PC, and in Eric Cartman they've created the ultimate anti-hero for television. And MacFarlane, lastly, because his show is simply funny.

Yes, Family Guy doesn't push as many boundaries as South Park, but it's much edgier than The Simpsons. OK, Matt'n'Trey did a fantastic spoof of Family in their show, focusing mainly on the habit of a character saying "I haven't been this impressed / depressed / shocked since..." and cutting to a flashback scene, and how it was written by giant sea creatures knocking balls around in a tank (season 10, Cartoon Wars p1 and II) - but you know what? That habit of Family Guy is damn funny. It makes it more into a sketch show than a sitcom.

Family Guy really pushes some gags until they break. And then some. An ep I watched the other night had Peter trying to scoop a dead toad up in a box as it lay against a wall. He failed for at least a minute, it kept flopping out. And, unlike my description, it was very, very funny. Like when Peter fought with a giant chicken for no reason, right in the middle of an episode, then went back to the plot after.

This went on for FIVE AND A HALF MINUTES. Watch it here: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=02rlGHsqLOQ

They do this kind of thing all the time - it's as if the freedom they have from (a) being successful; and (b) having a powerful man the network love as showrunner from the start means they ain't scared of anything.

In other reasons-why-it's-good, I'd have to cite the lovely animation (Youtube does it no favours above, but look at the 2D/3D mixes in the background), great voices and - so important here - fantastic score. I think in the latter it bests The Simpsons. Although the latter's musical spoofs are just incredible - watch the Sherry Bobbins one for a perfect pitch Disney pisstake.

Anyhow, raise a glass to the two Matts, Seth and Trey - here's to many more years of sitcom-making tomfoolery. The Matts have said they won't be making any more movies to concentrate on the show, as it's too hard to do both. I understand that, but South Park: The Movie and Team America are two of my favourite films (musicals in a way, hmm, I see a theme). I loved The Simpsons Movie as well, unlike most people who said it was just an extended episode. Well, it was in a way, in that it was longer therefore 'extended' over the telly. In other ways - the animation and plot being just two aspects - it was much more complicated.

The only bad thing I have to say about these three series is that they set the bar so high that the rest of us who work in telly and/or cartoons shy away from competing. There have been efforts but they've all been more niche-y, smaller concepts, piddling away round the edges.

And don't get me started on why we can't make something like these shows here.

Please.

"Your eyes are bigger than your belly"

2009-01-15T15:33:00.002Z

The title comes from something my Ma used to say to me when I'd ask for seconds of dinner then leave some of it on the plate. An old Geordie expression, no doubt, which I use in a more general sense when people's ambitions don't quite match their... er, um... I was going to say 'talent' but it's not quite the right word. When ambitions don't match reality perhaps?

I was thinking of this when reading about how Richard and Judy, morning titans and ratings' winners for many years on ITV, then successful in the afternoons on C4, are now watched by an average of 44,000 people on the stupidly-named channel 'Watch'.

(SLIGHT SIDEBAR - I mean, come on. Watch. Who thought of that? Bet he or she had a stupid name too, like Tarquil, Doodah or Ampersand. Whereas Dave is a good channel name, Watch is just idiotic. Probably repeating myself but Dave is similar to something in the US. Over there, yer Americans have two radio formats known as Jack and Jill, one more blokey, one more girly. You often hear "You're listening to KYFC, Jack 99.4 FM" or the like - it's well-known. So Dave was 'inspired' (ahem) from that. I should imagine. Don't sue me Mr UKTV bigwig. Anyway, Watch is still a rubbish channel name. Do they say "You're watching Watch" at any point? I don't suppose you, me or the 99.99% of the population who don't watch Watch would know. Rant over. Breathe.)

Back to R&J. So their eyes were bigger than their belly. They wanted primetime. They wanted, in effect, to lead a channel. More money was probably on offer too, and Paul O'Grady and Deal or no Deal were doing better for C4, so they maybe had little choice.

But their brand of television shouts daytime. Sofas, chat, small scale, no audience, etc. It was never really going to work at 8pm, was it? I suppose the high-ups at Watch thought the next afternoon repeats might do OK too, but I assume they're not. Slightly-warmed-up-last-night's-topical-telly wouldn't be top of my list of viewing.

So they were moved to 6pm but it hasn't helped the ratings. Expect them to leave amicably before their contract is up. A deal signed before the current downturn is probably cheaper to buy out than cruddy ratings day after day.

This happens all the time in tv. I worked with a really great presenter. He was clever and great on screen, popular with the audience of the show he presented, the people he worked with AND the channel the show was on (all three is very rare), and moving on up the food chain of the television world.

Series 1 of this show had been a minor hit, series 2 had done incredibly well, in the channel's top ten most weeks, rating much better than the low budget and pre-primetime slot should've got for them. So big cheers all round, here's to series 3!

Er, no. He refused to present it, as it was sponsored by a company he didn't like. He also wanted lots of other things too, feeling - quite rightly in some ways - he was a big part of the show's success and he'd been underpaid and overworked for two series, and that the show wouldn't work without him.

He was unceremoniously replaced. And you know what? The show didn't work as well without him, as the new presenter was an actor who knew nothing about the subject matter. I was a producer on this series, and spent aeons with this guy (a really lovely talented bloke who is now a big proper actor in primetime dramas) coaching him, scripting almost everything and preparing him, only for my boss to rip them all up the day before shooting and tell him to 'wing it'. Sigh.

Anyway, this show was a bit of a disaster. The content was better than ever, but the lack of the naughty humour of the previous presenter really showed. And it looked cheaper, a mixture of a crap location and hurried filming. The content was great though and the ratings held up OK until the format was revised yet again halfway through, into what became such a disaster lawsuits by people on the show were filed at the end.

Series 4, funnily enough, saw the return of the previous presenter. And it was great... but, it's funny, the time had somehow passed and it just seemed a bit 'been there, done that'. Ratings dipped, the content was weaker and the ladsy gags got grating, and the series slipped away almost unnoticed a few series later.

That's usually the way a show dies in telly but it's odd, that third series could've been a blockbuster, lifting the show into primetime, bigger budgets, greater ambitions and a much higher profile. But the presenter's eyes were bigger than his belly.

No-one ever seems to learn lesson one of appearing on telly - you're famous for Being On That Show On That Channel At That Time, not for being fabulous or funny or brilliant or beautiful. Be like Ken Barlow, stick around for ever and the public love you.

Don't go to a small channel from a big one, even if the money or hours are much better. Eamonn Holmes is watched by 10,000 people on Sky News in the morning, compared to a few million in his heyday on GMTV. It's a fact that 98% of the people staring at the ever-expanding Mr Holmes are in gyms panting on treadmills listening to their iPods, not his lilting Irish brogue.

And don't leave daytime telly - if you're good there, you can do it until you drop. Primetime is unforgiving, people get bored quicker; both the viewers and the commissioners.

The sad thing for Richard and Judy is they did all three.

Telly Twenty Oh Nine

2009-01-08T17:33:00.003Z

It's annoying being nine years into a decade that doesn't have a name. The 'Noughties' never took off. The next one is the same - someone suggested the Teens but that won't include 2010, 2011 or 2012.

Tsch.

Anyhow, television. It's always a bit quiet in Jan when it comes to tvland, but it's worse this year due to the entire crux of capitalist society collapsing. My little company is as badly affected as most, with commissions thin on the ground and what is there being cut back to the bone.

The one fact most people agree with is that tv viewing goes up in recessions. Makes sense - more people can't afford to go out so they slump on the sofa and watch the box. But it's not quite that simple - subscription tv does well too, as people are willing to pay more money if they're around at home and think it's good value.

The trouble is the advertisers have run away like a bunch of scaredy cats. On fire. In a war. On the Moon. So there's little money around, even less for C4, Five and smaller Sky-type channels, as with budgets plummetting, the remaining advertisers can get afford time on ITV1, which still delivers the best bang for your buck.

With the public service broadcasting review from Ofcom investigating the sorry state of serious telly in the UK adding to the confusion in the industry, it's not a nice time in tv. A senior broadcaster - a man who NEVER swears - said television "is in the shit".

It's not just the current problems, it's that no-one can see a sustainable business model for telly in the UK in five years' time. Sky should be OK (can I bet on Sky1 just showing The Simpsons every half hour by 2014?), the BBC probably fine-ish (less original programming, more repeats), ITV... well, totally buggered probably, more cheapo quizzes replacing expensive dramas, C4... er, maybe worse; wall-to-wall pop factual or reality, no comedy or drama, Five... um, part of Sky?

Not a nice thought. It must be hard to, say, be someone working for Five and knowing that if you showed 4 eps of CSi every night instead of the current 2, replacing original, home-grown programming with an import, you'd (a) save money; and (b) almost certainly increase ratings.

In the current economic climate, the cheapest option will win every time, as it has in other sectors. That's not The IT Crowd, Doctor Who or even I'm a Celebrity (£1m an ep apparently - I'm sure it's profitable but that's a HUGE cost) - cheapest = Masterchef, Mastermind and something else with master in the title. They're good shows but cheap as chips.

Xmas indigestion...

2008-12-28T15:21:00.003Z

So how was it for you? T'was lovely here ta, very nice and foody and drunky and friendy and that.

As for telly....

Er, well, wasn't Doctor Who a little disappointing? Having read Russell T's fantastic book on how he came up with it, I'm kinda sorta not surprised really. He had to rush it to film it at the end of the last series, through a horrible cold and nasty flu, genuinely finishing pages the morning they were about to be shot. Obviously the book didn't say much about the content but when you know that's the background, the general unspecialness of this special isn't unexpected.

The other doctor was boring - am I the only one not to rate David Morrissey at all, in anything he's been in? He was boring playing Gordon Brown in that thing about him and Blair (method acting?) and the worst actor in the otherwise sublime State of Play. He's just tall, blank, miserable and shouty. Mind you that didn't do Christopher Ecclescakes any hard (oooh, controversial!)

The story had a few hoho smiley bits in it, like the Tardis/balloon, but seemed like Who-by-numbers to me. Mrs M&S Dirty Voice was OK I s'pose, in the way that the bossy-evil-lady usually is in these eps (even when dressed as a giant spider in the two-Xmases-ago special), but again I've seen this before.

Don't get me wrong, I watched from start to finish and enjoyed it a lot, best drama on the box so far this festive season, but I'm very glad Mr T Davies is passing the baton on to someone else. Now write the Big Gay Thing you know want to, Russie, it's time for you to do something different.

Funnily enough I was with neighbours who'd never seen New Who - they don't watch telly at all... I know, it's a crime, but there you are - so I got the Titanic Xmas Special from last year for them. Second time around, I loved this more than the first time, and they were amazed at how good the SFX were, how funny the script was, Kylie being in it and the whole disaster movie schtick. A good intro to the series - they're off to rummage for it on the cheap in the End Of The World sales currently on at every shop ever.

As for everything else I've watched:-

Royle Family - Dave and Denise's Xmas dinner was somewhat over the top in their stupidity but it was sublime from start to finish (although I missed the last few mins as friggin' EastEnders overran by seven whole minutes. Grrr)

Harry Hill - superb and peerless

Charlie Brooker - my Tivo took a dislike to him and recorded a repeat of The Soup instead. It's on again soon and it's set proper this time.

Wallace and Gromit - nicely nice niceness. Supernice. Nicer than Nannette Newman. Not that funny, or that dramatic, but just the perfect 8:30pm Xmas Day thing. With my Animationiser hat on... well, I take it off and doff it to Aardman in an exaggerated stylee. Wonderful. A few CG things, I noticed, just adding sheen to the superb handmade oddness of the thing. A Brazilian friend Facebooked me about it, never seen it before - despite being in the UK for 18 years - and thought it was quite the strangest thing he'd ever seen. "Eet is for kids, no? Why does doggie not speak? And that man, that Wallarse, he is an eeeeediot. Why does Eeengland like him, huh?".

(Promise not to write any more comedy accents)

The IT Crowd - not the strongest of episodes to be frank. Moss not being in it, despite the "you didn't even notice I was on my holidays" gag, doesn't help as he's the best character in it. Didn't seem to have much of a story and then kinda fizzled out.

What else? Well lots of eps of Frasier and Will and Grace, as always when inside at Xmas, very good they were too. Have we ever had a sitcom as clever as the former, by the way? Erudite, clever, pompous (and revelling in it) but such great writing. The episode on today where old DJ Bulldog comes back, becomes Ros's babysitter and scares off her potential suitors, only to declare his love for her, was funny and yet intensely sad in the end.

Right, off now to run on a treadmill watching an ep of Family Guy. Having seen almost all of them in the last month or so, off of iTunes, the formula is obvious but it's still one of the most inventive and gag-packed things around. Makes the cross-trainer seem less of an instrument of torture and more a place of comedy and smileyness.

Happy oh-nine and that!

Festive Felicitations

2008-12-24T16:56:00.002Z

Here's a seasonal round-up of what I've watched so far...

GAVIN AND STACEY XMAS SPECIAL

Er, didn't watch it - I watched a few from series 1 which made me smile vaguely in a 'ah yes this is somewhat amusing' way and haven't bothered with it since.

BBC FOUR COMEDY SONG CLIPFEST

Proper good telly, in that it's well-researched, well-made and interviews the right people. To hear Spitting Image's 'I've Never Met A Nice South African' again was worth sitting through some of the less, er, comedy comedy songs. Stutter Rap anyone? I didn't think so...

Anyhow, BBC Four normally repeats the hell out of things, so it'll be on again. Mind you, some of the clip shows don't resurface very often, probably because all that music clearance costs money. Their good series on advertising had hardly any repeat screenings that weren't in prime time, for example, and I normally record things at 2.30am when the other channels have gone to bed and there aren't any recording clashes.

QI XMAS SPECIAL

QI on BBC One! It's like telly is dumbing up! Miracles do happen! And it stays on BBC One for the next series. Yay! And it was a fab show, as ever. Although - small carpy comment - it is a bit sad how it's all just middle-aged men. Far be it from me to be too PC but surely they can book one ladywoman out of four guests? It's not that hard to find funny females, is it?

PETER KAY'S POP'S GOT THE EXTRA FACTOR ON ICE STRICTLY etc. etc.

I saw the end with the Xmas song video. I did smile at the 'you'll be singing this over and over and over again' on a loop bit, and it's for charideeee, well done... but there's something creepy about a fat Northern man dressed up as a fat Northern Irish transexual/transgender/whatever singing slightly funny songs in a voice that's been in no way changed for being a lady.

Maybe they could get Geraldine on QI, to even up the sexes?

HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL

I accidentally caught some of this today - the first time I've seen Zac Effron actually speak as I've only seem papped shots of him on the interweb and never any of his, er, products. Boy this was lame. The Kids from Lame.

THE BBC ONE XMAS IDENTS

Ha hah! They've got Wallace and Gromit in them. And probably cost a trillion pounds. And look... um, well, boring really. Not very special at all. Lame direction and ideas and even the animation's somewhat workaday.

I'll still watch the Xmas special though. I'll be full of festive spirits by then so will no doubt think it's uproarious and/or tragically sad and sob all the way through. Depending on which variety of spirits I consume the most of. (Clue: whiskey - NO!)

COMING UP...

Well, Doctor Who obviously, that's got the lady off of the M&S ad voiceover dressed in red - "I'm not a comedy panto sci-fi villain, I'm an M&S top-of-the-range evil nasty lady with something hidden under my big red frock I reckon". The Royle Family, one of my fave sitcoms ever - hopefully no-one will die this time as last timedid have me (and the nation) bawling and sobbing like babies.

Shooting Stars is back for some reason, and I'll watch mainly because I used to adore Reeves and Mortimer, and the BBC have decided they're not funny any more and won't let them on telly much now. Boo hiss BBC! The Two Most Different Television Reviewer Cum Performers You Can Possibly Imagine - Harry Hill and Charlie Brooker - are in my To Watch list. Mr B had my eyes moistening with his wonderful tribute to Oliver Postgate. I disagree with some of his conclusions - the programmes haven't held up that well - but totally agree about Mr P's superb voice, pacing, sparse music (no doubt mainly because they couldn't afford it) and unique Britishnessnessness. The We Will Fix It song was perfect...

Oh, and the last IT Crowd of this series, loving it so much. I've got a feeling Mr Linehan isn't the world's best person at writing for lady performers (ooh look, the blog's got a lady theme now I've mentioned it three times, it's like it was planned and that). That Joker woman was a bit poor, and Jen isn't in it much despite being a fantastic performer, but you have to admit watching Moss pretend to be her husband was the bestest comedy treat for a while.

And, er, ummm, well, I'll end up watching EastEnders as it's on every hour over Xmas, and probably some crap fillums, and totally forget to watch something I really don't want to miss... and I have 3 eps of Survivors to catch up on too - I couldn't face them when ill with the flu, I even had swellings in my armpits just like the doomed victims in the show had...

So have a wonderful Winterval and all that. I'll more than likely post more telly ramblings over the inbetweeny period, such as why are there no decent end-of-the-year shows any more, just things with Nick Knowles or Jools Holland when we used to have Clive James (another person the Beeb just dropped for no reason) and Angus Deayton.

Byebye.

Writing for tv

2008-12-04T12:56:00.002Z

If you saw Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe t'other night, then you'll have seen a treat. If not, switch on BBC Four any time after 10, it's usually on. Or iPlayer, if you're technofancy. But sit on a proper comfy chair, zoom out to fullscreen and watch like you would a normal telly.

It was about tv writers - fairysnuff, Charlie is a one himself (confession: I didn't see his Dead Set thing as I was away and E4 ain't repeated it yet, but any show that zombifies Davina has gotta be good) but the thing that made this show stand out were the toppermost top names they had.

Russell T Davies. Them two wot writ Peep Show. Graham Linehan. Tony Jordan. Paul Abbot. All of them brilliant, brilliant writers, yet all so different. I can recommend (again) R.T.D's book on writing Doctor Who - ok, so it's geeky in the extreme about the series but it shows the labour and sheer bloody love that goes into every episode.

And it has Russell expounding on writing in a way that makes you want to sit down and write, something I've never encountered when reading about writing before. He's such a one-off, but full of funny advice.

Anyway, back to the writers with Mr Brooker. R.T.D. went on about how characters pop into his head fully-formed. Fascinating. Sam and Jesse off of Peep Show said they writ big detailed storylines for months. Tony Jordan said when he writes Spooks he loves to paint himself into a corner, with no idea why or how to get out of his plot. Then get out of it. Paul Abbott said how one ep of genius drama State of Play took three days to write, the next seven weeks.

They all said how they hated first drafts but by draft four it was easier, something I can't quite get to yet. Again, they all said it was good to learn the craft writing whatever, be it links or kids or sketches. That made me feel good, with 'many tens' of episodes of telly under my belt but none of them sitcom.

Here are some random bits of writerly advice that made me smile, laugh or nod sagely:-

Mr Linehan: "Writing is like doing a poo. You can't force it. You need to go away and read or surf the web or watch tv and think about the idea until you simply have to go"

Mr Davies: "Finish something. FUCKING finish it. Two pages is nothing. No-one is going to read it. Or love it. Or buy it. Or publish it. FINISH IT! You can't call yourself a writer until you do."

Mr Abbott: "I employ people to make me do the writing. I hate them. But I still pay them so it must work"

Mr Peep Show Duo: "We can't write unless we plan everything."

Mr Jordan: "I hate planning. I hate writing. I like it when it's done though."

Mr Brooker: "..."
(he didn't say much)

Mr Davies again: "90% of dialogue on telly is shit. Worst I heard, first line of a new drama series, a man said to a woman 'Happy Wedding Day, sis!'. I mean, what? No-one says that. No-one calls their sister 'sis'. Good dialogue are two monologues that occasionally cross. No-one actually listens"

Mr Brooker (in reply) "Yeahh. Sorry, wasn't listening. Was planning my next question..."
(hohoho)

Anyhoo, if you want to write for the telly, watch this show. Fascinating.

(And extra smiley-thumbs-uppies to Mr Linehan for last week's IT Crowd, sublime. The robbery stuff was superb.)

Christmas tv

2008-11-27T12:24:00.002Z

We're coming up to the time of year when the telly suddenly becomes important. Not, to be frank, because the content is super brilliant, but because you're too stuffed to move, drunk at 3pm and at least staring at the box beats talking to some relative you can't stand.

And there is the small point of this country TOTALLY SHUTTING DOWN for the festive period. You have to watch the telly as everything else is shut. In London's zany Docklands where I live, most pubs shut at 4pm on Christmas Eve and don't reopen for days and days and days. Some even stay shut 'til after New Year.

I see the tourists in the hotel near where I live wandering around puzzled on Christmas Day - you can imagine, "come to London for Christmas, the British do it better than everyone else!"... and then they spend Xmas Day wandering around empty streets and wondering why they can't get a drink or buy a pie.

Anyhoo. Pluses and minuses of seasonal telly:-

ONE-OFF SITCOM SPECIALS
This can tick both boxes - the My Family Xmas special (an hour of Zoe Thingy and Whojaflip Lindsay shouting in a 1970's sitcom stylee? No way) isn't circled in my festive Radio Times... on the other hand, The Royal Family coming back certainly is.

Usually the longer timeframe isn't a help for the sitcom - half an hour is perfect - but occasionally it works. The British public certainly thought so with Only Fools and Horses - my personal view was that it wasn't funny originally, had some bits that were quite funny in the middle, and then became too sentimental to be funny at the end.

'HOLIDAY' EPISODES
Yes oh beloved American telly, I'm looking at you. As they can't say Christmas without offending someone, they say 'holidays', personified in the bizarre Coca-Cola ads with the jingle 'the holidays are coming'. Coca-Cola, of course, invented the modern image of Santa Claus yet can't say Christmas. Tsk.

As US TV basically shuts down over Xmas - people watch a parade on Xmas Day then football then... er, more football, and then go shopping or to the movies over the holidays, totally ignoring the box - their festive telly is usually, to be frank, shite. Even peerless Will and Grace, and Simpsons had crap Xmas episodes. Although South Park did excel with Mr Hanky The Christmas Poo. High-dilly-ho, neighbours!

NO NEWS
It's not as if I want a festive Newsnight with Paxo dressed as Santa and the lady presenters as elves (now there's sexism for you) but the news disappears over Christmas, shunted around and cut in length. I don't like that. Although with things being so bleak it might be a plus point this year...

MOVIES
My sub-gnat attention span means I normally get twitchy after 20 minutes watching a movie, but at Xmas there's not much else to do, so I end up sitting through ENTIRE films without being drunk. I know people whine that because of DVD and Sky all the Xmas films are old, but I don't care. They're better than the new ones.

PANEL GAMES COVERED IN TINSEL
I've got a theory that repeats channel Dave must be shitting itself wirh excitement when Xmas approaches. They can go in the attic and get the boxes of tapes of Xmas episodes down for a few weeks, so the episodes of QI and Top Gear they show on a loop have only been on a few hundred times instead of the eighty-eleven gabillion times the standard ones have.

JANUARY 2nd
The best bit of Xmas telly for me is on this day. It usually all goes back to normal. Yay.

Comedy capers

2008-11-19T17:14:00.002Z

Another one of my occasional forays into the hilarious world of tv comedy - all inspired by the return of my favouritist sitcom The IT Crowd on Friday, and the lovely Harry Hill's TV Burp being back too.

Both are such likeable shows - was it in the profile of Harry in the Guardian at the weekend that the word 'daft' was used to describe him? It fits both shows perfectly -they're silly and lovely and funny and daft. On my recent flight to the US I watched the episode of IT Crowd where Chris Morris kills himself. I was in bits...

It's actually really hard to do daft. Father Ted, another top Graham Linehan shows, was stunningly daft. (His blog has good things on it - go there - clicky herey) But what else? Morecambe and Wise, obviously, but I'm struggling to think of anything recently.

The comedy of embarrassment and cruelty, from The Office to Fonejacker is what da yung kidz seem to like. Hmmm. Cringing as Mr Gervais puts his foot in it yet again, to me, is just that - cringing. Yes it's amusing, I may even crack a smile. But it's not boom-boom funny joke haha time.

(Note to self: write comedy show called Boom Boom Funny Joke Haha Time)

Listening to someone doing crank calls, no matter how well done, reminds me of Noel Edmond's Radio 1 Breakfast Show. As in being cold, wet, twelve and wishing he'd shut the fuck up and play some music.

I know I bang on about it but there's nothing quite like a really good proper normal sitcom, a one with a studio audience (real laughter!), filmed on tape (warm, bright pictures, not nasty, filmy reality!) with jokes (one-liners! catchphrases!) and a few simple story threads designed simply to be funny (no character development at all!) and make you laugh (out loud!)

As for t'other sitcoms on air, I watched Outnumbered, the second series (I think) of that sitcom with improvising kids in it, and it was rather meh. The child actors weren't as child actor-like as usual in a sitcom but it was all just too generic for me. I started to watch that thing with Jack Dee in it playing a grumpy twat (quite a stretch!) but switched off after a while as it seemed not to have any jokes in it.

My bestest tv news of the week was that Will and Grace twosome Jack and Karen might make a sitcom together. Please, if anyone involved from US tv is reading this (yeah, right) just LEAVE THE CHARACTERS AS THEY WERE - don't make them run a little cafe together, or put them in a motor-home, or have them married in some hilarious fake relationship... just have them being campy-queeny-idiot-man and bitchy-stupid-squeaky-rich woman. Hire Rosario back too, stick in some bland-but-pretty heteros and you've got a winner.

Well, you haven't got anything, nothing is guaranteed - hire back the same writers, producers, get a good slot, not be on against anything else that's a massive hit, and you've got a slight chance of being Frasier replacing Cheers (best characters, great writing) instead of Joey replacing Friends (worst character, OK writing).

Right, off to watch Charlie Brooker's Screenburn. He's not daft in any way - he's the anti-daft - and his spin on telly is the opposite of Mr Hill's, but it's a great show. Yay the telly!

Americaland

2008-11-11T10:32:00.002Z

Hello, and I'm back from the USA, refreshed, relaxed and re... erm, re-somethinged. Was in West Hollywood [very posh, walkable, hot'n'sunny], drove to Vegas [dull drive], stayed in Vegas [hot'n'sunny, posh hotel, odd place] then drove to Santa Monica [duller drive] and stayed there [sunny if not that hot, ok if very expensive hotel, nice town]

I watched a lot of tv, as ever, but the election obviously somewhat dominated the box. And thanks to a two-hour flight delay - the only time that sentence has probably ever been typed - I got to watch Obama win live in LAX. The lounge in the airport was full of Aussies and Brits, being a BA/Qantas one, but we whooped it up anyway. I shared a bottle of champers with Eric Idle, my one-and-only 'sleb spot in LA (he was off to Barcelona to see Spamalot in Spanish... apparently spam is schpam in Spanish. I had to ask). Oh, and there was music supremo Quincy Jones on the way out. And, allegedly, Peter Andre and KatieJordanPrice, in LA. I didn't see them but there was a fuss and they were at the LA Ivy that we'd just walked past (and thought looked skanky)

OK, telly telly telly. Some random US election tv-type notes:-

1 POLITICAL ADS
Now obviously we don't get these in the UK and they are extraordinary. The proper presidential ones are sort-of OK - they tend to be straightforward and end with the candidate's picture and them saying "I'm Barack Obama and I endorsed this message", so you know it's from them.

So McCain's were all about Obama being inexperienced, divisive and useless (95% of the running time) and McCain in a uniform being a hero (5%). Obama's were all about McCain being Bush's best mate and useless (50%) and Obama actually talking about policies (50%).

So far, so fair enough.

But then there are the ones funded by the parties. The Republican National Committee ran ads saying Obama was a commie socialist who was best mates with a terrorist preacher. They were hideous, with scary music and comedy scary voiceover, like a spoof more than a real, proper ad.

The Democrats ran ones looking like impartial tax advice - go to this website (which is properly independent, I'll give them that) and type in your details and they'll tell you who gives you the most in tax cuts. And, funnily enough, it was Obama - unless you're Warren Buffet or (ironically) Oprah Winfrey. A small tagline revealed who funded the ad. A few took the piss out of Sarah Palin - but, come on, who wouldn't? - but they seemed fairly genuine.

California is, apparently, safe for the Democrats (despite Governator Arnie) so there weren't that many ads for Obama or McCain there. In Nevada, a alleged swing state, they filled every break. All the time. It was a blizzard.

But there were plenty more political ads. Vote for this Governor. Elect this judge (I think the one I saw on a billboard on the way to Nevada might have had some misplaced name recognition - Elect Judge Judey. That's John Judey, but his first name wasn't in big type...)

California was awash with votes on propositions, the most famous being the anti-gay marriage one. The supporters of the make-marriage-hetro-only thing were outrageous, saying the scouts would be shut down, churches would lose charitable status and kids would be taught gay stuff in schools if the proposition was rejected. The gay marriage lot tried not to mention gayness at all and talk about fairness and equality and don't meddle with the constitution - and even Arnie was in favour, by the way, so it wasn't just a Democrat thing.

I'll not grumble about how it passed and that. Grrr.

In California there were thirty other propositions, from local county ones (a fireman saying vote for Proposition L as we'll get a new fire engine in Santa Monica) to the state ones. So you'd sit through four minutes of ads - on any channel - and they'd all be vote this, vote that. Very odd for a Brit, and, incidentally, somewhat lucky for the local tv stations helping them offset the obviously severe recession they're in.

(Selfish note: yay their recession! Lots of sales and even cheaper clothes! Empty shops!)

The only other ads were for huge, massive pickup trucks that no-one wants any more. $10,000 off! Cashback! Free gas for a year!

2 TV COVERAGE
Again, totally different here. Hardly any effort to be impartial on the cable networks at all. You watch a network, or a presenter on a network, that you like and agree with. And they slant the news to fit what you want to hear. Simple.

You tuned into MSNBC and their new highest-rated presenter is a socialist lesbian who ripped the piss out of McCain and Palin continuously. She doesn't like Obama much either, to be fair, as he's not radical enough. But from showing Obama speeches in full and cutting McCain off after five minutes, to the tone of the questions and content of the bulletins, this was totally pro-Obama.

Fox News, I hasten to add, was the opposite - although they did provide the best liberal bit with their shouty presenter Shepard Smith asking Joe The Plumber why he thought Obama meant 'death to Israel', with the somewhat ignorant yet cocky plumber saying 'that's for me to know', and Mr Smith turning to camera, shaking his head, reading out a line from the McCain campaign about how Joe is a great representative of their views, sighing, then saying that Obama is a friend of Israel and 'things are just scary sometimes'. That was as funny as it was unexpected - the rest of the coverage was as pro-McCain as MSNBC was pro-Obama.

CNN sat in the middle a bit, depending on who was presenting. Lou Dobbs, who's been there since it started, had a diatribe against Bush that was astonishing, calling him discredited, useless and 'a stain on this fine country's character'. Now most Americans would agree but it was very odd seeing a newcaster suddenly rip into a politician. Like Huw Edwards calling Blair a twunt.

The networks were more balanced, but they sold half an hour of airtime to Obama (apart from, oddly, ABC) and replaced their dramas and sitcoms with his rather well-made programme (full of policies again, not just hot air). It rated so well NBC joked they'd ask him to fill it every week if he didn't get elected.

3 ELECTION NIGHT ITSELF
The airport was tuned to CNN, which I'm overjoyed about, as we got to see their high-tech news stuff. All through the campaign John King On The Magic Wall was my favourite thing. This man knew every bit of data in the history of American elections, like Peter Snow used to be but a billion times cleverer, and he had this great interactive screen he could tap, stroke, expand and contract.

On election night he could call up any election result from the last twenty years and compare the voting so far with previously. Incredibly useful (and hugely expensive I'd think).

I won't mention the holograms as everyone else has.... well, err, um... oh God, I can't ignore them. They had holograms!!!!1!!!! Everyone hooted with laughter as presenter Wolf Blitzer (still love the name) was joined "veeeah hologram" by people. They even made them fuzzy with outlines, like R2D2's Princess Leia out of Star Wars in 1977. I wanted Wolf to stick his hand through the reporter lady from Chicago or make her fly across to the Magic Wall and start eating the swing states.

Have a butchers here

Sadly this did not occur. My wishes might have been slightly affected by the repeated topping up of my champers by Mr Idle.

Why would anyone sit and watch David Dimblebum in a tiny studio on the BBC when you could have Wolf, holograms and Magic Walls?

All the networks were very cautious about saying things in advance (last time President Kerry seemed likely early on) so they just projected results where it was obvious and kept schtum when there was some doubt. Every network and lots of newspapers put into one big exit poll which turned out to be very accurate indeed, so they all kinda knew Obama had won but couldn't say so as some states were still voting.

Still, at 11pm Eastern Time, when California and the other West Coast states closed their polls, the 'CNN PROJECTION' sting played for the final time and then... well, it's history, innit. Have a look, go on, it never gets tired...

Obama wins

Bye bye for a bit

2008-10-20T18:54:00.000+01:00

I am off to Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Santa Monica for two weeks or so, hence no postings on here. Excited to be in the States in the run-up to the presidential election, as well as having a much-needed break in t'sun.

Yay that.

I'll watch some random television there too, like always, and report back at some point.

Byebyebyebye

I watched the rest of that Peter Kay thing...

2008-10-16T12:45:00.004+01:00

... and it was even worse than the first hour. All the same criticisms - lack of satire, lack of jokes, lack of editing... contrasting massively with overabundance of money. Woolly and all over the place. The mock ITV1 end credits and odd trailers for other pretend reality shows with long names were strange to see on C4, almost childish in attitude as they didn't even mention C4's esteemed competition... even if they raised the odd smile to a tv insider ("on this time next week - except Border and Grampian")

And to see Kay's 'Geraldine' mime the winner's song (oh-so-hilariously called 'The Winner's Song') for three long minutes... and then the other lot sing their perky-ed up version for another mind-numbing three minutes... yawnarama.

If I had been producing this - yes, yes, I know, not likely as I believe the exec producer was the same as the star and the main writer (ahem) - then I'd have done a Larry Sanders-style split between the infront of camera stuff and behind-the-scenes' wrangling. All those minor celebs that appeared in clips etc., lots of fun to be had there for a start. OK, I don't think Cat, Nikki, Foxy and, er, Watermannie could've acted in it properly - as they certainly couldn't in the bits where they had to act in what was broadcast, but we could've seen Mr Kay doing different characters, as in Phoenix Nights, and had a bit of fun with the format even if it risked being too tv-insiderish. Although this is C4, they are allowed to be a bit edgy, aren't they? Isn't that what they're for?

The thing is that this show will be regarded as A Huge Triumph for the channel as it rated incredibly well. Good in a way - original UK comedy does well for the channel in difficult times, it means they'll hopefully invest more in original UK comedy - but I have to say this was the worst thing I've seen for ages. And that includes the new sitcom on BBC Three written by someone who is seventeen or something.

Spoofs.. or is the plural spooves?

2008-10-13T17:15:00.004+01:00

The Peter Kay X Factor spoof did incredibly well last night - 6.1m viewers on C4? Superb numbers there. And as a big fan of Mr Kay (more in the consistently funny sitcom Phoenix Nights than his nice-but-trad stand-up act) I was waiting with baited breath for it.

OK, so I haven't seen the last hour yet - and I will watch it, I promise - but the first hour was one of the biggest disappointments of the year for me.

I thought it couldn't fail. One of Britain's top comedians writing and appearing in it, what certainly looked like a vast, huge, enormous budget, an obvious target to take the piss out of, and a stunt schedule just like proper reality shows - well, it's an easy winner.

Except they forgot to put any jokes in. OK, that's not 100% fair - there were a few jokes. The name for one. A vaguely funny thing on paper even if it grated when lovely Cat Deeley said it for the tenth time.

Ah yes, the casting. Again, on paper, proper reality presenter (Cat!) alongside real judges (Pete! Foxy! That woman off of Pop Idol!) - very funny, so accurate, spot on. Errr, no. They can't act. Waterman pretending to flirt with Kay's character was just horrible. Not in the comedy-of-creepiness way that was intended but in the just-bloody-awful no ability to act or carry it off way.

The little boy's gran died when he told her he'd been kicked out, so they put him back in. Hohoho. That one gag stretched over ten long minutes. The songs were another flaw - they were just songs really, not much comedy there. Mimed too - tsk, no reality show would put up with that.

The group 2 Up 2 Down with two ladies in wheelchairs - chortle-tastic! Well, a bit - again I think of Phoenix Nights here - but it simply wasn't that good. When the ladies flew out of their chairs as superheroes on wires I simply sighed.

And then Kay turns up - finally, after 40 minutes without him! - and woe betide my splitting sides but he's (a) a lady; and (b) transgender. Well I never. Now Kay is a great comic actor and he lit the screen up with charisma and timing and even some one-liners (unlike anyone else) but again him being a ladyman is one joke not a third of a show.

The whole thing looked almost perfect - if a bit cheaper than the real thing, which isn't a surprise as X Factor is a stunningly well-made studio show that drips of money.

My main beef (in amongst all the other beefettes above) was this didn't even try to be satirical or cutting. It was simply too close to the real thing to be a spoof. No-one would be shocked if an X Factor contestant turned out to have had a sex change, or a group had people in wheelchairs in it, or a small boy dedicating things to his gran. Kay didn't go far enough - a good spoof, for example, was The Day Today, taking news tv to it's supremely twisted conclusion (even if nowadays the real news is far more extreme than the Currency Arse or the Mile High Traffic Pod).

This was nice and gentle and, to be frank, if you switched on without knowing you'd simply think it was a genuine X Factor rip-off, yawn, and hop somewhere else. Too soft, almost as if it was in awe of the subject matter, instead of knowing and cruel and sticking the boot in.

I'll update this soon if the last hour was a work of genius but it's still an hour of my life I won't get back. At least the next hour I spent in the company of Lord Stephen of Fry, and his American adventure show wasn't exactly stunningly original or clever, but at least he's so lovely and jolly and trulu erudite company. Perfect for a Sunday night. I simply couldn't face more of "Doctor" Fox or Pete Waterman or Nikki Thingi.

The only bit I properly laughed at was one of the msucal montages going from 'Free Nelson Mandela' to 'Um-ber-ella ella ella'. That probably says much about my comedic taste (ie I've got none) but there you go.

Comedy, gays and a QIHBAFSR. Ahem.

2008-10-10T12:55:00.004+01:00

Well I watched esipode 2 of Beautiful People last night and laughed quite a lot. Any show with a musical montage from Annie, Joseph and, er, another one (musicals aren't my area of expertise) has to be good.

Some sparky one-liners and a general positive-funny-happy feeling made it a pleasant half-hour. A typical British show about a camp kid and his even camper friend singing 'I'm A Barbie Girl' together in a school talent contest would've been full of bullying, homophobia and - even in a comedy - some bleakness. This was just, well, faaaabulous.

Great performances by the young actors again too. OK, I didn't howl at a great setup or roll around to a witty rejoinder (but did laugh loudly at someone mentioning Terry Waite and mum saying "that reminds me, I need to bleed that radiator" - look it up, oh young readers) but for a British gayish BBCish sitcom it was a smashing way to spend 28 minutes.

I still think it'd have been funnier set back in the sixties, and the plot was unconvincing in the extreme ("here's how I broke my nose"... fifteen minutes in, a nose injury... end of show: "actually, I didn't break it properly then, this is how it happened".. clip of nearer present day). I forgive them that as they were spoofing Lorraine Kelly at the time. Extra gay points all round.

Followed by Dame Graham Norton on Beeb2, and we also have E4 currently screening their only good show for a decade Rick and Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple In The World, in the words of The Flintstones theme music, "we'll have a gay ol' time!". TV is in a very slightly gayer-than-usual phases. I should mention the preceding show Buzzcocks with Simon Amstell and a very bemused Stephen Fry keeping the homo banner aloft for a full ninety BBC2 minutes. But I won't, as despite Messrs Fry and Amstell being funny guys, a quiz about music that's been running for 19 series makes me yawn.

Anyhoo, I do love Rick and Steve, it's offensive to everyone everywhere, be they gay, lesbian, dying of Aids in a wheelchair, addicted to drugs or, in the occasional minor character, straight. When the young guy who goes out with Aids Crippled Man (hey, it's how he describes himself - don't blame me) travels from the gay area (all rainbow flags, happy shoppers, gyms and flower shops) to the straight area (totally grey with shops marked "LIQUIDS" or "SOLIDS") it really made me giggle.

On the other hand it's six episodes in entirety and that'll probably be enough.

I know I said I'd watch that ITV2 thing with crap superheroes in it but I haven't managed to yet. Apparently there was A Special Effect in last night's episode. I will try, oh blogosphere, I will.

And to finish: Questions I Have Been Asked For Some Reason.

Q(IHBAFSR) 9th October 2008: "Is the current economic crisis affecting TV now?"

A: "Yes, sort of."
I won't leave it there - commissioners are looking to the future and what money that can spend, and cutting back. Lots have fixed budgets from a while back, and a level of discretionary spend for anything they really rate. I suspect their bosses will tell them they can't have that extra money from now on.

Things will bite for the commercial networks when the decline in ad income (5% for C4, up to 20% for ITV1, somewhere inbetween for most channels) hits their revenues over the next year or so.

As ever, if you're a top boutique supplier in any genre (ie Aardman in animation), a big company spread across all area (Endemol, All3Media), or a fleet-of-foot small company with a low cost base, you're less likely to suffer than the mid-market, mid-sized companies. In telly that means anyone with a receptionist I s'pose...

New comedy

2008-10-03T16:54:00.002+01:00

So I've made the effort to watch some new comedy. And... er, mixed results.

I'll not judge Beautiful People yet as it's just episode one. Well, I'll make some comments now but hold total judgement off until a few more eps have aired. Good compromise?

I just finished reading the original book last week, and very funny and light it is too, if somewhat unstructured and dashing off all over the shop in time and place. The lightness understandably dims a little when covering Aids but otherwise the word 'perky' comes to mind - smiley, lovely and fluffy, no work of genius (unlike, say, a David Sedaris book)

The main thing that stuck in my mind was Simon Doonan's tale of growing up as a fey, gay, hip-hip-hooray kid in the sixties. It was very evocative of that era, and surprisingly upbeat for this kind of subject matter. Very few beatings, bleatings or suicide attempts for example.

And what have they done with the sitcom of it? Only just gone and scrapped all that, setting it in 1997 and having a young Simon (as opposed to his fiftysomething real self) in glam Noo Yorak, with a floppy haired teen back when Blair was just being elected.

Errr, right. This means they can put in, for example, a black camp friend instead of his white one. And make one of the many odd aunties he had Asian - so far, so PC. And, yes, I know it's to make it more modern/relevant blah blah blah.

But the story simply didn't ring true any more. Who made wine from potatoes in 1997? A daytrip on the bus to Slough was an adventure - really? Maybe in 1967 but not 1997. Gay kids weren't so hidden in the 90s compared to the 60s, true, but what made the book so cool was that there was this obviously, totally, utterly gay kid back in the 60s in a suburban environment, and here is a mainly upbeat and positive story of his life.

When Things Can Only Get Better started up I sighed. I didn't laugh much at anything much, to be frank. But to be positive, it was all very nicely shot and everyone seemed to be having a nice time as they made it.

Anyway, it's early days - it's got a great cast (the two young kids are fantastic, as is Mum), the premise is still interesting and in three series' time no-one will remember the book. Or something.

The next thing I watched was The Wrong Door, BBC Three's CG-heavy sketch show. I've seem them all (I think - BBC Three is very naughty when it comes to labelling repeats as new episodes so my Tivo gets huffy with them and doesn't record things at all sometimes).

I really enjoyed episode one but by this one (episode 5?) I think it's just all got a bit stale. Initally, seeing realistic-looking planes flap their wings was new and exciting, and CG monsters stamping London to bits looking for their keys was different. But seeing them yet again is... well, just not surprising any more. Ditto with a flock of buses migrating - they did it with scooters last week. Yawn. It proves how hard it is to get these repeated sketches right.

It's also weird to see the non-CG sketches - you just wait for something special-effecty to happen and it never does. And some of them just go on far too long. Last week's train pirates is one case (although Brian Blessed hammed away even more than usual, wonderful), and this week had a very poor James-Bond-but-a-clown series that I'd have thought a script editor would've crossed out at the ideas' stage. Oh look, it's 007 - but he's got a big red nose! Hahahah! And M is in a big top. Hohoho! And the gadgets are clown-themed! Heeheehee!

And then two series of sketches (the running ninja academy one and, oddly, last week's train pirate one that didn't feature at all this week) melded with the James Bond clown one in some grand plot amalgamation.

Well, they were setting it up as such when I got bored and skipped to the next show on the Tivo, which was Family Guy. It may have none of the sophistication of The Simpsons and little of the jaw-dropping shock of South Park (their spoof of FG is superb, check it out) but it's still got more gags in it than an enitre series of most British sitcoms.

Next week I promise to watch that superhero sitcom off of ITV2. If I can find where that is - it's not exactly my first call for viewing pleasure, seeming to consist entirely of X Factor spin-offs, that Celebair thing and endless shows with Peter Andre and Jordan in 'em.

My ten point plan to fix the telly and that

2008-09-28T17:22:00.002+01:00

So when I write a title like that I really have ten points written down in front of me? Err, well, I've got a vague idea of a few of them. But it's a blog and you're s'posed to do it live and that, yeah?

I was just reading all the conflicting reports about public service broadcasting being broken, ITV merging regions, cutbacks at C4, times being tight at the BBC, footie fans unable to see even highlights of England matches on terrestrial telly, the ad market contracting (one forecast saying there could be £500m in ad revenue by 2020 compared to £3.2billion now - eek) etc. etc.

Woe is me, it's the end, bye-bye quality, hello gameshows when z-list celebrities have to stand in funny shapes to go through a moving wall... oh, hold on, the last thing has just happened. With Dale Winton. On BBC One. WWTI!*

Anyhoo, here is my multi-point plan to fix it all. Everything. Dead easily and that. Harldy thought-through but here we go...

1 REFORM THE LICENCE FEE

Split it from the BBC to a new body that gives it to public service stuff wherever it is, run by a lean body without too much admin staff. Charge a small tax on satellite and cable subscriptions, and add that to the money pot. If the digital broadcasters make a certain %age of UK-originated programming, their channel doesn't have to pay - an incentive to invest in new things instead of repeats of Will and Grace**

2 SHUT DOWN BBC FOUR

Yeah, you heard me. Close it. I know it's great, and cheap, and watched by the Radio 4 listening posh people who run the country but scrap it. And do the same with More4. Both get miniscule ratings (apart from repeats from their parent channels) and cost a lot of money. Don't shut down BBC Three, just trim it a bit. Add that to the pot from (1). And then...

3 SET UP A NEW BBC/C4 CHANNEL

...set up a joint channel that shows cult-chah, except it has a somewhat nicer budget so it can commission more stuff instead of competing pointlessly.

4 ENGLISH REGIONS TO BE FUNDED LIKE NATIONS

It costs £70m or sommit for S4C and will cost £50m or thereabouts for a Gaellic channel for Scotland (60,000 Gaellic speakers available to view). And ITV are trying to save £40m by merging huge swathes of the country to make regional news even less regional? It should be funded somehow - if it's funded by taxpayers for Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, then why can't it be for England too?

5 STOP GHETTO-ISING PROGRAMMES

Noticed how Monday night at 8pm is the ghetto for current affairs now? Panorama, Dispatches and Tonight on BBC1, C4 and ITV1. Tsk. Stop it. It makes them lazy and samey. It happens in the States with staid Sunday morning talk shows on all the networks, and the network news on at the same time everywhere. I want a choice. I also want to be able to watch all three sometimes, and even if I was all Sky+'d and iPlayer'd up it's hard.

6 CHANGE PSB OBLIGATIONS

Channel Five have just done this, cutting slightly on drama/origination to emphasize children's programmes. Hey, you know, I have an interest in this here, but it's something the public value and therefore it should be a PSB obligation. Go further. Why insist Five has to do news? What for? No-one watches it really, it's just Sky News from a different room so no diversity of content... why can't Five guarantee to invest that money into UK-originated PSB programming instead?

Do the same with ITV and C4 too. Make C4 do children's programmes - again, self-interest as a producer declared here - but it's important to have a diverse supply. Cut them some slack elsewhere to compensate. I enjoy C4 News, am a regular viewer, but things can't be sacrosanct forever and it is just ITN with a top hat on, instead of the baseball cap they wear on ITV 1.

7 BBC MADE TO FOCUS ON WHAT THE MARKET DOESN'T DELIVER

More emphasis on comedy here - it is so neglected as it's hard to get right, but a good sitcom is, in my view, so much more valued than a good drama. I'm not saying scrap, say, daytime property shows and put the money into more eps of My Family, God no, but just make the Beeb invest into things the audience enjoy and ITV 1/C4/Five/Sky can't afford to do much of. The BBC Trust need to kick ass here.

8 LIGHTER RULES TO HELP PRODUCERS...

I don't mean on the thieving bastard producers who stole money from drunken students through rigged phone-ins, but the rules on, say, product placement are out of the olden days. Get rid of 'em. Does it matter that the beer in the Rovers Return is from a proper brewer not whatever madeup name they use, and ITV 1 gets more money? Of course not. If the characters turn to camera and advertise it viewers will soon switch off, so keep the regulation simple. There are plenty more stupid rules like that, some of which are going. I mean to say, why should Ofcom decide how many ad breaks Five can put in a movie? If they put too many in, again, people will switch over. Just leave 'em alone.

9... BUT NEW RULES WHERE THEY MIGHT HELP

Make someone like C4 or BBC Three do a nightly satirical show like The Daily Show. That show is certainly doing a public service to the American voter right now and it's a disgrace we don't have one - oh they try, occasionally, but it's just not worked for years. Why can't, say, BBC Three decide to invest a sizeable amount of money into this area as it's something the market can't deliver***

That's just one example of being a bit more inventive with the PSB requirements than having a quota %age to hit.

10 DON'T PANIC

People still like and watch the telly. 20 million people still watch the two main channels when there are big event shows they like to see on them. I love the BBC but a small fraction of the billions it generates through a compulsory tax should go to ensure a diversity of supply in areas where the free market isn't allowing the commercial broadcasters any leeway.

I got to ten in the end. And there are footnotes, like in a proper article and that.

*Who Would've Thought It!

**Please leave the repeats of Will and Grace on. I like them.

***I can answer this one - a topical show doesn't repeat, and as BBC Three has to repeat everything a gabillion times to (in their own internal systems) justify making anything, nothing topical happens. That's why they'll make six episodes of Haha! These People Only Eat Crap! or whatever, 'cos they can show them 'til the tapes wear out.

Property shows on tv

2008-09-18T17:44:00.002+01:00

Right now I wouldn't like to a commissioning editor in charge of the vast swathes of factual telly that consists of property shows. For at least a decade now, daytime and primetime telly has revelled in everything linked to property. From the paint-it-beige-and-make-£50K lot to Kevin McCloud and the self-builders; from auctions to makeovers to gardens, property shows are the backbone of many schedules.

And now no-one wants to know.

Oh, sure, it'll be quite a lot of fun to see Property Ladder's Sarah Beeny putting on her oh-so-sad-why-didn't-you-listen-to-me face when she tells some idiot developer that they've lost £100K. But it'll get as tedious as it did when everyone made shedloads of cash despite painting the ceiling of the living room with a homage to the Cistine Chapel and coming in 90% over budget.

The grandad of all of them, Grand Designs, is also cutting back on who they film and when, as it's taking much longer to get money and therefore do any building at all. And, to be frank, despite being a big fan of the show, there are only so many square glass boxes I can drool over.

All those improve-and-sell shows have already remodelled themselves as 'invest in making your home better to live in'. It's not that convincing though, as the makeover show's only point to me was the "now your house is worth loads more" valuation bit.

I say all this now for two reasons. Firstly, a friend went to see that Guy Ritchie movie, RocknRolla or some other such ridiculous title. He said there were hoots of laughter in the first ten seconds when some voiceover started up about how you could make so much money on property in London, it was impossible to lose. Er, yeah? Now? Surely Mr Madonna knows that isn't the case any more. Maybe changing that script cripples whatever passes for plot in his movie, I dunno.

And I watched The Price of Property, C4's new show examining why we've got to where we are. There's some annoying man who sold his flat in London and went to live in France for a bit, then came home to find he couldn't afford here any more. He sounds even less sharp than Guy Ritchie. Can't watch British telly or read UK papers or interweb sites in France, Mr Hot Shot Reporter, eh? Ooooh big shock that houses cost more than they did, innit?

Anyway, ep one was OK, but ep two was terrible. Reporter man wandered around some small village in Cornland where the locals complained about the city dwellers buying second homes for vast amounts of dosh, and the city dwellers all said how fab the locals were. They won't think that after seeing the locals whine about how they were bloodsuckers destroying their village.

Cue lots of Cornish people whining they can't afford houses, and an odd subplot with a tenant farmer saying he can't afford to buy as he only makes £300 a month from working 70 hour weeks. Hmmm. Maybe the problem isn't with the property market, it's more with your job there matey? Just a thought...

I understand why the locals were upset but they had no solution (well, apart from one builder suggesting constructing a wall to keep everyone else out of Cornwall). They talked about how the village had been a thriving fishing port, lots of shops and pubs and community spirit... but no-one said that there are very few fishing villages any more, that without the 'second homers' (made me think of The Simpsons and laugh every time this expression was used) the village would certainly have plenty of cheap housing but still no jobs or pubs or shops.

Lots of locals worked servicing these people too, and the only good part of the whole doc was when Reporter Man stumbled across some locals who made loads of money selling in the village, moved to the council estate further away and then complained their kids couldn't afford anywhere. You had to laugh when one guy admitted he owned a second home in Spain - but Demon Reporter only found out by mistake and then wandered the beautiful streets whining about property killing the village.

No it's not. The village is dying as a viable community anyway, and the only thing keeping it afloat were the views and the property. It looked perfectly horrendous to me, but I love big noisy throbbing cities and the idea of living in a little cottage overlooking the sea drives me to despair.

Anyway, it was a fairly shabby piece of television, although I do like shouting at the screen when such things are on. Oh, and then there was a very odd US sitcom about Lego gay people on E4, but even a hack like me can't make these two items flow together so I'll do that next time.

The new tv season

2008-09-10T12:43:00.003+01:00

Yes, I'm back after a wee break trying to sort some business things out. Apologies for not gracing the blogiverse with my unthought-out streams of consciousness about all things televisual.

So it's Autumn, and the schedules are chock-a-block with new shows, returning favourites and all that. How exciting!

Have you noticed how Americanised our way of talking about tv has become? It's not a new series of something, it's a season. From the US, where they simply make 22 eps a year, repeat them over holidays and the summer, and start the new season in the fall- sorry, autumn. We haven't got quite that Yankified.

Or maybe we have.

Last night I saw someone mentioned the start on Living of the new cycle of America's Next Top Model. Now I've worked in tv and had an unhealthy obsession with American tv above all else, but I'm only vaguely aware of the phrase. I think it's because they run two series a year so they can't say season. Probably. Perhaps. Small idea: why not say series?

It all started with video then DVD boxsets - seasons became a more used word, then the cabsat channels started to say "see season 9 from the start again" as it sounded less repeat-y than saying series.

Anyway, must admit to not being that bothered about many of the new highlights. Merlin - hmmm. Looks more like Robin Hood than Dr Who to me. I'll try it out I s'pose. X Factor sneaked in at the end of the summer (as it runs for six months or something now) and so far, so far the same as ever. Great show, well made - how they've managed to keep it seeming even slightly fresh after all those endless singing eeeejits... you know, *RAISES HAT TO THEM*.

But let's look back to the US, they're boring of the endless auditions, of laughing at the tuneless morons and picking a favourite identikit karaoke muppet. It'll happen here too, some day. ITV must be quaking, although they've got Britain's Got Talent and can shoehorn Cowell into it if the other one starts to fade away.

Other Autumn treats - err, um... there's the Peter Kaye spoof of talent shows, that'll be champion I hope. New series of Mad Men, Simpsons and other top American treats. Some documentary stuff looks good - a series about money, that analysis of why British property prices have been so ridiculous manages a new spin on a tired subject, lots of new 9pm C4 shows to replace Big Brother (I managed to avoid all but twenty minutes of one show, surely a record considering the thousands of hours broadcast)

Oh, and one final not-to-do-with-Autumn-or-America-but-here-you-go thing - did anyone see BBC News at Ten last night, the day before the Cern particle wotsit was switched on? They had science guy David Shuckman (sp?) explaining how it would work, with some pretty nice CG effects showing where the big circular accelerator thing was, how deep down - so far, so Day Today but verging on OK.

But but BUT... then they had him standing next to big whooshy dubbed-on particle beams flying around and then reaching in to pick up two huge glowing balls of particles and hold them up. Er, what? This proper actual journalist was holding up his hands and having Mr CG Animator DRAW BIG SHINY THINGS ON THEM. On a NEWS programme? Utterly astonishing. It was too ridiculous to caption it 'Reconstruction' but it was a stunning piece of stupid lowest-common-denominator telly, and certainly the first time I've seen a reporter act along like that.

What next, BBC Business Editor Robert Peston gets his head bit off by a giant CG bear to indicate that stocks are in a bear market? US reporter Justin Webb dressed as a boxing referee in a ring, standing inbetween a cartoon elephant and donkey having a fight to report the presidential elections? Huw Edwards flying onto the news' set (itself virtual) on a huge 3D dragon, just because he's Welsh?

Now the last one would be cool, I admit, but come on - just have the news people GIVE US THE NEWS. I can watch it without it being illustrated in every single way. Much as I like flashy titles, good graphics and whoosh sounds, I don't need an important scientific story to be jazzed up by lying stupid animation. No-one mentioned how Cern got their 'billions' of Euros to do this, that's more important to me than pointing at the screen going "LOOK! BRIGHT SHINY LIGHTS! In that man's hands! It's the neeeeeeeeeews! Happy now?"

Errr, bit of a rant there but that's what these things are for. If you want an example of someone ranting a little bit too much, go to www.stephenfry.com and listen to his latest podgram about tv compliance procedures. I love him to bits but even the godlike Mr F has got somewhat too concerned about certain tv prodedures.

I do hope he didn't spontaneously combust seeing the news last night.

Running a small tv production company

2008-08-20T14:59:00.002+01:00

Running a company is a double-edged sword. I've sorta done it in three different iterations:-

As a video game programmer, I ran my own one-man-band business, living on quarterly royalties and less-than-quarterly advances. Tax, planning, accountancy - yes, all there and all as tedious as ever. However I slept 'til midday, did OK moneywise and got many more plaudits than I should've had...

After a spell as a proper employee, I ran a very small tv business as a separate unit of another company. More legal and money things there - directorships, company secretaries, VAT, tax writeoffs from the parent company... all ending in being bought out for a quid in the House of Lords. (Long story)

And now I run a proper bigger-than-small-but-not-that-big company that I wholly own. All the above times twenty.

You know, mostly, I totally love it. When there's lots of work lined up, when the stuff we're making - and it's a 'we' as that's how I view the people I work with, they're 'us' and 'we' to me - is great and going down well, it's one of the best jobs I can imagine. I get to think up ideas and sell them and decide things and have them done and everything ticks along nicely. I'm very lucky in that a lot of good people work with me - oh, and I say 'with' not 'for', important distinction I s'pose but not something I've ever much thought about until now.

Basically I love going into work most days. I still revel in the fact I made telly for a living. I don't all the time, obviously. I still hate the accounty side but try to keep it under control as everyone suffers if I don't (another long story). As I've said here, some aspects of people in some areas of telly annoy the hell out of me - but, hey, it's my business so I don't make anything for them kinda people.

I feel a real sense of achievement when I see one of our shows on telly, or on DVD in a shop, or in a catalogue for international sales. It's like that end logo for some American production company I'm too lazy to look up, it used to go 'I made that!" when the show finished. And even if I didn't do the animation, or think up the basic idea, or write the script, or record the audio, or edit the- well, you get the idea, even when I did nowt much apart from suggesting the font for the credits, in a way I did make that as I hired the people and in the immortal words of Captain Jean Luc-Picard, I made it so.

In its many forms my little company has made over a thousand standalone programmes, and eleven years of doing this is a nice happy thing to have. One of my friends said I was obviously an alpha male who enjoyed being in charge and having total responsibility, which really made me laugh - alpha, me? More beta I'd say - but I reluctantly concede there's some truth in it. Some being the operative word.

So yay me, and yay running a telly company,yeah?

Err, well. Hmm.

There are some times when it's just fucking awful to be in charge. I'm not talking about the aforementioned annoying people that I might have to work for sometimes to make ends meet - if that's the case I get on and do it. I whine constantly about it but I grit my teeth and smile and get the job done. Then whine some more to my long-suffering co-workers in the pub after.

As I've bleated on here many times, tv is an industry with no safety net. Contracts come and go, for companies and individuals. It's freelance, cut-throat and subject to the vagaries of who is in and out at a broadcaster, or the ad market in Germany, or a lord of the realm deciding to cash his chips in. When that happens, and the work you do seems to have no bearing on the work coming in, it's not nice. Not Nice At All, in capital letters and everything.

I'm sure you've guessed I'm currently going through - or, more accurately, we are currently going through - a Not Nice At All time. Decisions have to be made and they're all bad. And I mean bad, as in no matter what I decide, I haven't much choice in the matter and the outcome is, in some shape or form, bad. I'll try my best to make it the least bad outcome possible that word 'bad' is still there.

I try not to think I've failed when I haven't managed to get the next contract to smoothly flow from one project to the next. I think I've done well in the past to get that to happen almost continuously for a long time, that I've bridged gaps by funding them myself - not easy sometimes - and I've done all I can in trying to get everything to happen at the right time.

Well, in my totally unthought out sprit of honesty, I haven't done all I can do. I've done all I can do without appearing to be desperate to the clients we work for. Hell knows I have no pride or shame but I honestly think that any business can only do the 'but otherwise we'll go bust and you'll lose the thing you want' tactic only once. I did it with my parent companies once each time, and things came good, and I'll get one chance with a broadcaster, perhaps, but if things don't come good then the relationship is tarnished forever.

The irony in all this is that things are far from bleak for my company, thanks to the efforts of the we's and us's in it. (Can I have an award for Not Nice At All English for that last sentence ta?) We're on the verge of two great big lovely commissions, and have a slate of new ideas I'm massively proud of. It's just down to timing, that's all. And timing has meant having a Not Nice At All conversation with lots of people today.

Sigh.

So you'll excuse me from this blogging lark for a couple of weeks, whilst I try and sort this out. I'm in Meeting Frenzy Hell, and then at the end of the month I've got the Desperate Phone Call to make if I can't make the meetings come up with the goods.

Things that annoy you on tv

2008-08-11T11:40:00.002+01:00

OK, so here are a few tv things that I find annoying, plus the alleged justification for it, and what I think the real reasons are. Feel free to send me some more.

1 ADVERTS BEING LOUDER THAN THE PROGRAMME
Really, really, really irritating. Worst on Living for some reason...

(REASON GIVEN) Technically, you are not allowed to have higher volume in ad breaks, but due to compression of audio it just seems that way.

(SECRET ACTUAL REASON) We do all we can to make the ads louder so you take more notice of them, otherwise we'd lose money. Compression is a good excuse for us as no viewer knows what it means.

--

MENU-ITIS
Voiceover: "Welcome back to Property Ladder. Toby and Jocasta Idiot-Posh are looking for a townhouse in Bath for around a million pounds, and a crash-pad in Kensington for under half a million." Over this we see clips that we've seen before. There's ten minutes of the Idiot-Poshes rejecting everything and Phil'n'Kirsty making faces, then: "Coming next, have we found them their ideal pad at last?" over footage of them jumping up and down for joy. Fast forward through the commercials and start again. "Welcome back. This time, we're following Toby and Jocasta-"

No. Stop it. STOP IT! I haven't forgotten what I was watching thirty seconds ago. Just get on with it. Don't show the same clips that you showed straight after the title sequence, at the end of part one, start of part two, end of part two, start of part three. When the clips turn up on the actual programme content I want to SCREAM.

Just leave it out. Assume I have a memory greater than that of a goldfish.

(REASON GIVEN) People drop in and out of shows. It's important that new viewers know what's going on.

(SECRET ACTUAL REASON) Oh, how many do you want? Us producers think the audience are stupid. They've forgotten what was happening five seconds ago, to be frank. If you don't trail what's coming up they'll switch over to watch something else. Oh, and handily it fills up ten minutes of airtime for free.

--

BIG SQUARE 'PRESS RED' BANNERS IN THE CORNER OF MY SCREEN
A Sky thing but very irritating. Last night it was 'Press RED for GLADIATORS MULTI-START'. For quite a bit of The Simpsons, although it did go away eventually. I'm watching the best sitcom ever, and would rather shove a pugil stick up my nose than watch that regurgitated game show. Often it stays there all the time, and whereas if you're watching live it goes away with pressing BACKUP, it doesn't if you've SKY+'d or Tivo'd it. Grr.

(REASON GIVEN) We're offering our viewers extra choice.

(SECRET ACTUAL REASON) We're advertising the next show whether you're the target audience or not. It's our channel and we disrespect you so much we'll spoil the show you've chosen to watch by spraying graffiti on it.

--

SHOWS STARTING EARLY AND FINISHING LATE
Last night I sat down to watch some stuff I'd recorded. Top Gear on Beeb2 at 8pm, followed by Britain From Above on Beeb1 at 9pm. Dead straightforward, two shows with a fairly similar audience profile I'd think, surely they'll flow into each other? What with it being Aunty BBC and that?

Oh no. Top Gear started at 7:59 or so I think. It was in full flow when the recording played. And ended at well past 9pm as there was plenty left (ie no credits, at the end of a report). The recorder switched to BBC One and there was Andrew Marr already going with his new series. OK, it was a special series trailer thing, but still - er, why is this happening? I want to see BOTH shows ONE AFTER THE OTHER. Is that so hard for our lovely BBC to organise?

(REASON GIVEN) We engineer the programme junctions carefully to minimise viewers switching channels, and maximise our audience for our shows.

(SECRET ACTUAL REASON) We faff on with everything like this 'cos if you switch over to ITV and something's already started you might think, oh bollocks with that, and switch back. And we don't care that much about you lot with Sky+ and the like as you bugger up our live ratings anyway.

--

TRAILERS THAT REPEAT EVERY BREAK
The latest marketing wheeze is to push a small amount of shows at almost every promo junction (ie the start and end of breaks). So if you watch, say, two episodes of Frasier on Comedy Central- er, I mean Paramount Comedy, and switched on a bit early, you'll see eight or nine promo breaks.

And they'll show three trailers max in those breaks. They often don't consider the target audience at all - ie intelligent, wordy Frasier was packed with trailers for moronic kiddycom Two and a Half Men.

(REASON GIVEN) We focus our marketing on key brands, and research proves more promos for less brands delivers eyeballs.

(SECRET ACTUAL REASON) We have to make less trailers which saves us money. Our average viewer only watches fifteen minutes a week (ie one episode a fortnight) or something - if we're lucky - so they won't realise this.

--

A small selection of gripes there, mainly culled from watching the tv on a rainy Sunday. I will no doubt return to it.

Worst. TV. Ever

2008-08-01T17:20:00.004+01:00

American tv is coming up with some corkers at the moment. Here are three, in reverse order of worstness:-

3 HURL
This show consists of people eating until they throw up. Or 'hurl'. The last one to throw up wins. That's genuinely it. Nothing else. Just eat and puke.
http://www.g4tv.com/hurl/splash.aspx

2 DOG VERSION OF BIG BROTHER
A competition between two doggie shows here. Firstly a reality show currently airing where twelve dogs and their owners move into a house and compete against each other in challenges, one being kicked off each week. Naff title though, Greatest American Dog. Nah, let's put this one second.
http://www.cbs.com/primetime/greatest_american_dog/

1 ANOTHER DOG SHOW
But with the best title ever. It's about grooming dogs. So it's called.... drum roll... Groomer Has It. Hahahahahhhhahahahhahahah. Campy people who 'style' dogs compete in front of campier judges. Perfect.
http://animal.discovery.com/tv/groomer-has-it/groomer-has-it.html

C'mon British tv, we need to raise our game. Nothing on air over the summer is as crap as this. Well, apart from Big Brother. It's so far off my radar I didn't realise it was still on. The papers and mags I read don't mention it at all, and no-one has been racist or violent (for a few weeks) so it's not on the news. For some reason I'm conditioned never to try C4 at 9pm either so I don't even hop by it on the lookout for a show about dogs eating too much they vomit (hey, that's my copyright, OK?)

But British tv has one potential winner, something so bad in concept it might be unmissable. A big cheer to ITV 2 and a title to die for :-

CELEBAIR
Celebrities! Being cabin crew on an airline! And voted off by the passengers! Can you imagine the horror of turning up for a 5am charter flight and it's staffed by, say, Jodie Marsh, someone off of Hollyoaks and Brian Dowling*. Truly, deeply, utterly rubbish. Roll on the Autumn!
http://www.itv.com/Entertainment/reality/CelebAir/default.html

*I know, I know - he used to be a trolley dolly, and probably is back on Ryanair now, but he's still someone you really wouldn't want making knob gags at you at thirty thousand feet.

TV that s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-s itself out

2008-07-29T12:40:00.003+01:00

Did anyone see Dispatches last night? It featured an earth-shattering exclusive:

SHOCK!
Pre-packaged sandwiches can be bad for you!

HORROR!
Big posh sandwiches full of cheese and meat can have a lot of fat in them!

OUTRAGE!
Some factories that prepare these sandwiches aren't that clean or nice!

I actually sat through the full hour of this show, with Mr Third String C4 News presenter striding around shopping centres and looking at pigs' hooves in a bin and turning his nose up. God it went on. A mate said it was one minute of actual information strung out over an hour. Too bloody right.

I've been railing against Pret and Eat for not putting any info on their sandwiches, saying that because they're made fresh on the premises they can't exactly tell what's in each one. What tosh. I've eaten sarnies from at least fifteen different Prets and they're all the same. So what if it's +/- 10% - at least there's a guide. You can check on their website but that's not particularly practical when you're in a sandwich shop. Although I've got an iPhone so perhaps...

Well, anyway, the trouble with this show is all down to C4 trying to be good. A full hour of current affairs every Monday, that's half an hour more than poor old wee half-hour Panorama. Look, Ofcom, we're super-nice and public-spirited! Ignore the hour of Big Brother on after, we have a 50 minute news bulletin then a small documentary thing made by a tiny company about something quirky then an HOUR of hard-hitting factual programming.

But it's not. It's padded as much as David Walliams dressed up as a fat lady in Little Britain. It'd been far better as a half-hour. You would've lost nothing apart from Alex Thompson (yes I've remembered his name) hassling innocent sandwich eaters outside Subway.

The one thing I got from it was that Boots are quite good - fairly healthy and clearly labelled. I went there this morning and bought a salad. I'm not sure if that's a good thing, being influenced by the television and all that, but there you go. A programme I'm berating Changed My Life.

I'm nothing if not complex, am I not?

Better late than never...

2008-07-17T12:36:00.002+01:00

OK, I was away when the finale of Doctor Who was on. Also my Tivo froze and didn't record it, meaning it had to be reset. This took three full days, one of which was poor old Teevs sorting through hundreds of channels using computer tehcnology from 1987 no doubt.

But when the little Tivo cartoon man did his warm up run and swung into the corner of my screen I shed a tear. Sniff. It would've been Sky+ otherwise, even though I only have one satellite socket and therefore it wouldn't work properly.

Techie issues aside, I managed to record it again on Sunday, thanks to the BBC running out of money and rescreening it/deciding to treat viewers who had malfunctioning PVRs to a welcome encore screening (DELETE AS APPLICABLE)

My main thought was that if, in the last ten minutes, a massed army of walking kitchen sinks stomped in I wouldn't have batted an eyelid. Russell T Lady threw everything else into it. Mickey! Rose's mum! K9! That kid off of Sarah Jane again! After the first part when Harriet Jones, Former PM turned up too.. as well as Dempsey out of Dempsey and Makepiece... if Servalan out of Blake's Seven came in riding on Jabba the Hut it wouldn't have surprised me in the slightest.

A load of old hokum, to be sure - shaky story, two Doctors (one with a slightly worse suit and somewhat less terrific hair), Donna having some of the Doctor in her (steady!), Captain Jack hamming away mercilessly (well, the 5% of his face that haven't been Botox'd into maskness), plot holes totally ignored (that Dalek squishy starfish thing saying "one of the Doctor's family will die" - er, will they?), and a fairly shitty ending with poor Donna becoming a simpleton again ("but she's better wif' you" sniffed grandad Bernard Cribbins as Real-Doctor-Fab-Hair looked on blankly) and Rose having to settle for the alternative world and Fake-Doctor-Merely-Lovely-Hair... a bit poor to be frank.

On the other hand...

Fantastic, incredible music. Special effects that were simultaneously great yet blended in perfectly. For God's sake - K9!!!!!1!111!!! Jokes. Utter Britishness, through-and-through. Totally gripping from start to finish, tv drama at top pitch. I bloody LOVED it.

The thing is Who is ALWAYS a load of old hokum. A man travelling in time in a police box? Yeah right... Regenerating every so often when the lead actor leaves or dies? Very convenient for the producers, ain't it? Sonic screwdriver? Don't make me larf. The Face of Bo? Please....

None of this matters. It's just rollocking good fun. As said before, best show on telly full stop. I'm normally not a big fan of the end-of-series ones but this was a cracker - as the ratings and audience appreciation figures reflect.

Well done Russell T. Now go off and write something as groundbreaking as new Who or Queer As Folk or Bob and Rose or the one with Ecclestone being Jesus II: The Sequel. You can do it Russie boy! We're counting on you...

And back in Wholand, we've Cybermen at Xmas to look forward to. The hairdressers in Cardiff must be stocking up on Mr Tennant's hair gee as we speak. He does have the most stunning hair though, doesn't he? A tribute to the Hair Product Industry of this fine nation.

Holiday tv musings

2008-07-11T14:36:00.002+01:00

OK, apologies for the gap in postings - yeah, I've been away. Italy and Spain, very nice ta for asking.

I managed to miss all the six-hour variety shows with ladies in bikinis singing songs to fat moustachio'd men in white suits this time. Sky News seems to have spread everywhere, complete with a hardly-ever updated text list of stories where the UK ads go. CNN is there, as ever.. they've now got ads to replace the "CNN is shown at these fine hotels" captions they used to run.

But a few English language entertainment channels were being shown in Spain. Fox was one, otherwise known as FX here - complete with original soundtrack US voices but Spanish-voiced ads and trailers. So I got to see some eps of Family Guy and those fair-but-strong-district-attorney-against-crooked-local-mayor shows that fill up the endless hours on that channel.

Even more interestingly (well, to a tv anorak like me) they subtitled the songs in Family Guy but nothing else. I assume cable operators stick on a different audio track on the voices but not over the songs. Indeed some shows I've made for kids have been translated in a similar way, despite the target audience being mainly unable to read. Simple really - redubbing voices = cheap, re-signing songs = ooh costly.

From what I could make out via my fairly useless language skills (ie not much in Italy, a bit in Spain), their tv news was labelling the G8 summit as a triumph for Gordon Brown. Err, probably. He was in it a lot and the words 'triomphe', 'Zimbabwe' and 'climatic controllio' were used over pics of our socially inept leader. And, um, it said people thought that in a paper I read on the plane back.

All the news I saw was being presented by Carla Bruni-style gorgeous-but-strict looking ladies in immaculate short-skirted-posh-jacketed outfits. In Italy she was made to stand up and lean against a high round table, like out of a pub with no stools left. There was a distinct lack of "LIVE!" whooshes or CG graphics, which made me sad, but the occasional featurey piece with sad tinkley music over footage of old ladies in black weeping. I have no idea what made them cry, save it wasn't the lack of sound effects or cartoon reconstructions on their evening news.

But my favourite bit of foreign telly was watching the same European hospital drama in two different countries and realising it was either (a) not Italian; (b) not Spanish, or (c) not the product of any one country, as the words didn't fit the lips in either nation.

How Not To Make A Sitcom

2008-06-20T12:55:00.003+01:00

I've been trying to write a comedy show over the past few weeks. OK, so I've been doing other things, stuff that might actually pay my wages some day, but this idea for a sitcom has been churning away in the back of my head and I've finally put finger to keyboard and started to write it.

God knows if it'll be any good at all, and the chances of the People What Run Proper TV commissioning a sitcom from my babyshow company are miniscule, but I'm in one of those 'just give it a go' moods.

Except now, obviously, I'm avoiding the 'go' and blogging instead. It's because I've lost my chocolate bar. I wish that was an innuendo or allusion but, disappointingly, it's a simple fact.

My frankly illogical and pointless decision to try and write a sitcom - something that happens at least once a year - has reminded me of my long-dead cartoon sitcom about just-dead people. I'd just started my own company, came up with this idea, and set about raising some funds to make it.

And - what a break! - someone I'd worked with introduced me to a very rich man who wanted to fund comedy. Result, eh? Well, not really. Firstly, this man might have been very rich but he certainly wasn't going to give actual money to me without a fight. Meetings, parties, booze, meals - that was all fine, lots of lovely schmoozing in great places, but genuine money for scripts or characters or the existing-in-the-real-world items that might get a broadcaster interested in the show - nah...

Secondly, he was somewhat... er, slightly... now, how should I put it? Incredibly, astonishingly, overwhelmingly rude, arrogant, unfunny and loud. And, lastly but not leastly, he was disliked by almost everyone in the comedy industry - as in totally hated and bad-mouthed and cursed about. Until he'd turn up at the Groucho Club, card behind the bar, when everyone smiled and laughed at his puns and agreed to do reams of work for no money but more wine.

One such meeting - or 'meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeding' as he'd call it - had me and my techie co-company owner being picked over by an Animation Expert to see how and why our cartoon systems were so special. The truth was that they weren't, it was just we used computers and programs designed to create video game animation for the telly. And video game animators, who were a tenth of the price of proper ones.

We couldn't tell anyone that - we thought they'd copy us, and our paranoia was fuelled by lots of beer at 11am in the morning for a lunch at 2pm - so we made up loadsa shit. My mate said he hard-wired the computers himself. I had to stifle a giggle. The expert asked if he could see one. I said no, the software was secret. My mate hid his face behind the menu, pretending to cough to cover his laughter. The expert asked if we could bring a computer to his office, not even switch it on, just so he could see what we'd done to it. My mate said the computers couldn't leave our building, they were attached to the floor for 'stability'. I had to go to the toilet to laugh for ten minutes.

After my boss threatened to pull the plug on the whole thing Mr Rich Man finally promised some money. It turned up months late but it was something. In the meantime he got on with asking big-name writers and voices to do things for free. The people who wrote a pilot script have since written some mighty fine sitcoms. The voices in the show were even more famous then than they are now - and you'd recognise all their names today. The animation looked good for the time, if a little scratchy ten years' later.

But no-one bought the cartoon. Mr Rich Man mishandled the sales process appallingly, being all bolshy and salesman-y about it. That dun't work in the hallowed world of the meeeeja.

He got the then-head of C4 comedy (now Very Senior C4 Boss Person) in at the same time as the Sky head of comedy (now Very Senior BBC Comedy Person), and made them wait outside his office together. They smiled politely and then both rejected the show immediately. He went to the biggest comedy independent producer and boasted he could make the show himself. They said they were sure he could and therefore there was no need for them to be involved.

In desperation, I went to the head of ITV comedy on my own. She loved the idea, liked the pilot and script - yay! Then she asked to meet the backers, and we then sat through a disastrous meeting where Mr Rich Man said he didn't want any input from ITV as their comedy record was shit. So ITV said fine, they'd give no input and, obviously, no money either, and we never heard from them again.

It's easy to smile at the memory of the endless writers' meetings that would start with cocktails at noon and meander on all day. One such affair ended up with me, my comedy writer mate and a very old alternative comedian sitting on a balcony of someone's flat in Soho making up limericks. I have no idea who's flat it was but their fridge was well-stocked with fabulous wine.

But it was a grim and depressing time, to be honest, and has really scarred my view of the funtastic world of tv comedy.

Reality Show Clip Time

2008-06-12T13:07:00.003+01:00

The title is from The Soup, the world's best tv show ever (see http://www.eonline.com/on/uk/shows/thesoup/index.jsp?edition=uk ) when host Joel McHale takes the piss out of the worst of America's reality shows. Well, that's the caption that pops up, but Mr McHale usually just looks into camera and screams "it's reaali'eee' hoe ipppp ime!!"

My thought today, with the meeja websites full of Apprentice bumper ratings news, Big Brother bullying rows and the like, is why... well, er, just... WHY?

Apprentice is massively popular - as well it should be, a well-produced show and a worldwide format. BB is less popular generally but hugely high-rating for that all important (to C4 and advertisers) yoot audience.

But I can't be arsed with either of them, and was wondering why.

BB first. My view is that the first series was genius - original, compelling, a good mix of people and a genuinely interesting premise. Series 2... well, fatigue set in and I thought I'd kinda seen it all before. And now it's up to series 9. Or 15 if you include the celebrity versions and that very odd thing they did last time instead of the celebrity thing.

The reason I find it unwatchable is simple. The contestants - and that's what they are, not 'housemates' - know the construct. They are aware that by being chosen to be on the show that they've made it. By the time they step out of that limo to enter the set - and that's what it is, a set, not a 'house' - they're famous. And that's what every spoddy yoot watching wants to be. Famous. Even if it's for being thick, like millionaire Jade Goody, the average young viewer watching just wants to be An Celebrity.

So there's no jeopardy at all in the format any more, as all the contestants have won. The meeja often forget or ignore the actual winner in favour of someone else (Ms Goody versus that Christian virgin man from a Scottish isle who disappeared after winning). The contestants will forever have the prefix "former Big Brother star" in front of their name. Someone somewhere will always recognise them. And that, to them and to the audience, is champion.

So what's the point of watching these people sit in a set dressing up, getting drunk, being split into groups and slavishly following the dictats of a bunch of producers in a darkened room, pretending it's all Very Important Indeed. When it's not. As the contestants in series one sang occasionally "it's only a game show". Bet that annoyed the producers no end.

Apprentice is different, in that it's all pre-recorded and the press, oddly, go along with the conceit of it happening sorta-kinda-now. The fact the Guardian do a live web blog when it's being broadcast is one of the oddest things I've ever encountered. There are preview tapes of the show available. Why watch it live and type stuff up like it's new? It's not. It's on tape.

In some ways this show is more harmful than the wannabe-Heat-cover-star mentality of BB. It encourages the idea that to succeed in business you have to be a right twat, mouthing corporate speak, destroying all others and being a sneaky, underhanded, evil arsewipe.

What a load of shite. Yes, in some businesses you need to be ruthless. But if you act like a total twunt all the time, no-one you work with will like you. And at some point in the future, when you go for an interview for a better job, the person in front of you will be someone you shafted previously. And they'll smile sweetly as they hire someone else...

The even funnier thing is Sir Alan Sugar being presented as this incredibly successful business guru. Er, right. SAS (as no-one abbreviates his name) runs a small company that doesn't really produce much of note. When did you last actually choose to buy an Amstrad product? You may have a Sky box with that brand on, but you get sent them for nowt when you subscribe. SAS runs a company no-one would actually choose to buy a product from. His brand name is worth as much as Saisho or Matsui, the two pretend names that Dixons and Currys used for their own brand rubbish cheapo tellies*

Amstrad's last products, that awful email phone and the anti-wrinkle zapper, are the sort of thing you see advertised in the back of Sunday supplements, like elasticated-waist fat pants and baths with doors in them. SAS makes lots of money, but that's from property he's accumulated - wisely and very efficiently, sure, but not exactly rocket science. Amstrad itself makes little profit.

But, oh no, working for him is like worshipping at the feet of a modern day God of business. Pffft. Loada shite.

So Apprentice doesn't work for me either as it's a bunch of over-gelled hateful sales people doing crappy challenges to get a pointless job they probably won't even take up. Where's the jeopardy? The contestants on this show are the BB contestants for a slightly upmarket and older demographic - being interviewed by Steve Wright on Radio 2 or the Mail, instead of Moylesy and the Star.

Or maybe I'm just getting old.

*Dixons and Currys purposely picked Japanese-sounding brand names for their own stuff as people liked buying Japanese brands, as they were seen as reliable and high-quality. Anyone who had the misfortune to own a Saisho tv or a Matsui hi-fi (my hand is in the air at this point) will know these were, to be frank, unreliable creap crap.

Best ever tv?

2008-06-02T12:36:00.003+01:00

There was a bit of fuss recently in The Times when one of their reviewers described one Monday night as the best ever night of tv in ten years. I'd link to it but searching timesonline.co.uk for 'best tv ever' doesn't really work.

Anyway, the poor tv reviewer was laughed at by all and sundry for his views. I must admit his choice of a Monday night was a bit poncey - all Dispatches, Panorama and some arts' programmes.

But he has a point.

Last Saturday night was a top tv treat, and no mistake. You can say what you like about those 'find-a-musical-star-and-advertise-the-musical-too' BBC One shows but they're good to watch, full of familiar toons and earnest new faces. And I'd Do Anything was very well made, the great Barry Humphries adding a layer of intellect to the constant Norton gags about Nancies.

So there was the final of that, with a sublime ep of Doctor Who in the middle, easily the best of the series so far. And boding so well for the next lot, as Little Mr Moffat who writ it will be in charge of the whole kit and caboodle when Russell T Ladyboy leaves.

Over on ITV1, there was the twelve-hour final of Britain's Got Talent, surely the only time in history Piers Morgan and talent have been billed together. But what a great show, reminding me why Antandec are the best presenters of live tv in the business today, looking utterly fantastic, great simple format and, yes, Simon Cowell doing what he does best. He's got three facial expressions - his "God, this is pants" face, his bored face and the double-take-look-of-shock-at-how-good-it is-after-initially-being-bored face.

He used all three over and over again. Amanda Holden only has one face, as it's been botoxed to hell, and cried slightly less than she did last year. Probably due to botoxing her tear ducts.

And what can you say about Piers Morgan? He's possibly the least likely ITV1 face ever, and joins Anne Robinson in the list of ex-journos with massive tv success to their name.

But again, a great show. The winning breakdancey boy will, er, not be the world's hugest star in my opinion, but great story and marvellous show.

And for the poncey ones, there was a repeat of Andrew Marr's peerless doc on modern Britain.

Top tellytastic night! And here's an odd fact - there were more people watching network tv in the UK (pop:60m) than in the USA (pop:360m I think) last Saturday, fifteen million alone watching Talent. And they say broadcast tv is dead.

Pah!

PS: Eurovision obviously rumbles on. Dame Wogan Of Floraldance echos what was said last week on this very blog:-

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/2058833/Eurovision-song-contest-Terry-Wogan-blames-Eastern-European-racism.html

Why-on-myou-nee nul pwoins

2008-05-27T11:59:00.005+01:00

As you probably can't tell by my attempt at phonetics in the title, this is about Eurovision.

I managed to miss it as a televisual event for the first time for ages, but have iPlayered it... well, the bits I could manage to sit through. Favourite part: Lord Terrence of Woganville's line when a rather, er, hefty lady singer came on stage. "Just so you know, it's not over when she's finished", or words to that effect.

As usual with Eurovision, it was lavishly staged, stunning to watch and full of hilarious singers and the compulsory Worst Costumed Act Ever (pirates!) thanks to Lordi's win a few years back. And Sir Wogan of Irony was on top form, gently poking fun at something that has long lost any sense of being an actual song contest.

And then the voting. Ah yes, the voting.

Now it's true it's always been stupid and arbitrary, the Scandis all voting for each other, Greece and Cyprus shenanigans, and our pact with the Irish. But there was always a chance anyone could win. Not now. The block voting of the new Eastern Europeans means, realistically, no Western European country can ever win now.

But I don't think it was a mistake to let these countries in. It's good that everyone is there, even those bits of countries that no-one can remember, especially if it provokes Duke Wogan of Terrytown into even more splutters of indignation.

Singing in English is also mentioned but, if anything, that evens things out more as neighbouring countries tend to have similar languages. Err, well, I have no actual fact to base that opinion on, but it's a blog so fact isn't really required.

I've even heard the war in Iraq blamed for making the UK even more unpopular. Hmmm. I don't think people boogeyed to Andy Dustmanthing on Saturday then decided to vote for the Russian lad with his shirt undone due to deception on WMDs or our policy in Helmand province.

(Although I've also read interweb gossip that lots of the newer democracies in the east are known to have 'issues' with race, and the UK being represented by a black man would have influenced their votes. Disgraceful, but there you go)

Here's my solution. I think the rot started earlier, with letting the public vote on the whole thing. Let's face it - the public can be mighty stupid. Lordi and 'Hard Rock Hallelujah' prove that conclusively.

The public can also be very canny. Azerbaijan are more likely to vote for the Huge Powerful Neighbouring Former Superpower Wot Provides Their Heat And Water than, for example, Belgium. Who provide, um, some chocolate they can't afford.

Bring back the juries of 'music experts' I say. Scrap the phonelines and go back to the way it always was. Or, simply, ignore the country that comes top in any vote. That is almost always the one the block vote goes to, and it's too hard to fiddle them to come second, so leave out the one that gets the most.

OK, OK, it's totally undemocratic but neither was the old system. And I agree with Woges that block voting will end up pissing off the major funders of the competition - ie us - and that the competition will die. It will be dead for me the day our beloved Irishman decides he won't commentate on it any more, even if the ratings-hungry BBC won't scrap it as, yet again, it reached a massive audience for them on a Saturday.

There are more important issues at stake here than viewing figures, oh BBC highups. And, yes, I do realise the ridiculousness of using the word 'important' in a sentence about Eurovision.

British tv taking over American tv

2008-05-15T12:55:00.002+01:00

The media-about-the-media has been full of claims about British formats becoming more and more prevalent on US tv. It really cranked up during their writers' strike, where our cheap'n'cheerful reality formats filled up the hours usually screening sitcoms and dramas.

And now there's talk that even though these shows don't rate as well as a top-notch drama or hit sitcom, as they're a fraction of the price maybe they should keep running them. This doesn't impact British terrestrial tv too much, but means a shortage of product for places like Sky One or Living.

Anyway, the thing that most commentators miss is that US reality shows are almost always very different to ours. Seven big differences, in the inevitable list format, follow:-

1 MUSIC
If you've ever watched any American reality show, it's been cut together then scored by a composer, just like a drama, soundtrack swelling for emotional bits, comedy music for funny bits... all slightly ahead of the action so you know what to expect. It's very odd to us Brits - imagine Big Brother with the soundtrack from Desperate Housewives. Somehow a lot less... well, real.

2 EDITING
They use many more cut-in interviews with the contestant/participants than we do. US Big Brother seems to be almost entirely made from people talking to camera (to soppy music) - not in a diary room picking their nose to a fixed camera but in a lushly-lit interview studio.

3 CONTESTANTS
The first winner of Survivor was a big fat ugly old naked gay man. What reality show has ever been won by such a character in the UK?

4 FORMATS
US Big Brother dropped audience voting after series one. Every other edition in the world has it as an integral part. Americans just couldn't be arsed to ring up and vote for some reason. They can for American Idol but not to pick which twentysomething pretty girlie or boyboy wins this show. This change of format is common to most reality show imports, sometimes because of different laws - ie premium rate numbers and text/SMSs are illegal in some states meaning shows with that as a concept don't work nationally - and, incidentally, no nasty viewer-conning scandals for the USA.

This lack of voting formats is one of the reasons number 3 above can happen. If you look at the list of winners of such shows worldwide, they tend to reflect the majority of the voting audience in race and age.

5 PRESENTATION
Generally, much, much, MUCH glossier. Show an American audience E4's streaming BB coverage and they'd hoot with derisive laughter. The idea of cutting to bird song or shots of people sleeping or, shock, smoking isn't attractive at all to US producers or audiences.

Interestingly, the exception here is American Idol, which until recently looked far cheaper and shoddier than, say, UK X Factor. Maybe it's because we've been doing these shows a bit longer...?

6 EXTREMITY
The trouble with exporting our mainly harmless reality formats to the US is that their rapacious tv execs have taken things to a new level. If you've ever seen A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, you'll know what I mean. A transexual person picking from male or female potential partners. Or one with that rapper who wears a big clock round his neck picking what he charmingly calls "his bitch". The somewhat, er, hard-nosed vixens competing for these dubious honours normally end up fighting and bawling, their pixellated body parts falling out of their skimpy outfits.

There was even one where an adopted kid had to try and pick his real father out of a bunch of blokes (although even Fox cancelled it quickly). Or current gameshow Moment of Truth where people reveal if they've shagged their wife's sister for money. In front of their entire family... wife and sister, of course, sitting together in a nice two-shot.

7 PIXELLATION
Writing that above reminded me that swearing isn't allowed on US tv so their version of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares mainly features 'Chef Ramsay' (as they call him - hey, he's a chef and let's make sure the viewers don't forget it) with a blurry mouth. They can't even bleep someone out and show the lips swearing. So Gordon's mushy features look even weirder with a blurry beige mess over his lips.

And, of course, we do it on their shows - but for different reasons. American Idol's pixellated Coke cups in front of Simon, Paula and The Other One. Some poor British editor has to sit and blur out that thousands of times over and over again. The dullest job in tv, perhaps.

--

Still, at least the Americans can laugh at their reality shows. See http://www.c21media.net/news/detail.asp?area=1&article=41804. Look, a hyperlink! It's like a proper blog or something!

More bad shows I've worked on

2008-05-12T13:11:00.002+01:00

Thinking further about this over the weekend - whilst trying to come up with new ideas that aren't bad - I was reminded of some other corkers that I've had the misfortune to work on. Here goes...

ONE OF US IS LYING
A show named after an Abba song. Not a great start, you'd think, and you'd be right. The idea was it was a problem-page type show but (CUE ROLL OF DRUMS) it was told from three different points of view.

So wife accuses husband of shagging the neighbour - you'd see the wife's story (he's out late... mysterious texts... woman answering his phone!), the husband's story (he's working late... neighbour coming on to him...) and the neighbour's story (husband coming on to her... she resists...) One of them was true but which one? Intriguing eh? OK, OK, maybe not, but C4 at the time thought so and stumped up some dosh for development and a pilot.

I was assigned to the head of development to work on the show. Nothing seemed organised, and Mr Head would just sing the theme toon at me when I asked about anything. I got more and more concerned over the weeks as we were supposed to be shooting something in a fortnight and didn't have a script.

It then turned out he'd got a new job and left over one weekend. Oh.

So muggins here had to write a script. And writing a complex script from three different viewpoints that can't contradict each other proved a little too much for me. And for the other two writers who had a go. It was just about possible to write something that could logically work but it was dull to watch. And anything interesting and dramatic would give the game away.

We sat and told C4 this, and they had the good grace to let us keep the money we'd already spent on developing something unusable.

EUROHUNT LIVE!
I won't go into details on this show, but it was a monthly gameshow co-produced by a German broadcaster designed entirely to get a million quid grant from the EU. Er, I mean, to 'foster co-operation across the Eurozone via the medium of televisual entertainment'. The show was an awful cross between Treasure Hunt, Jeux Sans Frontieres and Eurovision. It was a stinking mishmash but was entirely paid for by the tax payers of Luxembourg. Or something.

ADVERTORIALS
Picture the scene: a big multinational broadcaster's ad department comes to my little company and says they want us to make 26 short episodes of a cartoon publicising a new fast-food product for an even more multinational food company. We were short of work and, hey, these guys were funky and trendy and had lots of other things they wanted us to do. Cool.

Errr, no it wasn't. Advertising is even more twuntastic than tv. We sat in massive meetings to decide the name of the pet dog. The main characters were tweaked until they were duller than ditchwater. I believe three different 'brand executives' had 'input' into the colour of one character's top.

Our silly little comedy stories had to be cut right back to show the characters taking this food product (absolutely inedible, by the way, and in packaging that made it look like toilet cleaner) out of the freezer, microwaving it, then eating it. Yum! The little inserts were supposed to run weekly, and were keyed around events like movie openings, holidays etc. Oh no. The product was delayed on the shelves so they all fell by the wayside.

And then the 'brand guardian' went on holiday for three weeks so nothing could be approved. And then the product, which was just a trial launch in several regional UK markets (despite being shown on national TV) was taken off the shelves.

Still, they paid us. Nine months' late. And much less than we were expecting. The moral of the story? Never believe anyone in advertising, I s'pose, not particularly original or unexpected, but there you go.

Terriblevision

2008-05-08T12:28:00.003+01:00

So I was sitting talking to a mate, someone who runs his own small business (ie just him) making corporate videos and the like. He's successful and fairly happy, and gets to employ people he likes (mainly ex-Doctor Who and Blake's 7 actors) in his videos. They're mainly for councils, the police, ambulance staff - that kind of thing. Always enlightened by Servalan from B7 or Ace from Who turning up.

Anyhow, he asks me what the worst show I ever worked on was.

You'd think I'd have a ready answer. Hey, I write this stuff up, I should. And, yes, it's an area I've touched on before. But THE FUTURE is stream-of-consciousness blogs and so I won't go into THE PAST by re-reading my previous typesplurges and actually doing some research.

TOP FIVE RUBBISH SHOWS I'VE WORKED ON IN SOME WAY

3 Try Your Luck!
A live weekly game show, part of that Sky series about video games I bleat on about more often than I should. This was the worst night, presented by Mick Thingie, off of Capital Radio, in a set designed to look like a shoot-the-duckies stall at a particularly rancid fairground. Mick Thingie used to do the afternoon drivetime show, when not appearing with Pat "Mullett" Sharp in dreadful pop videos, and opening branches of Costcutter in Swindon.

The show consisted of kids shouting "left!" and "shoot!" at very badly designed 'specially written' games on the telly, ultimately to win a console and/or some video games for it. I writ the 'specially written' games, hence their pooritude.

And, in a shocking state of affairs that'd be all over the papers Mr Murdoch doesn't own now, Mick Thingie used to prerecord the last hour of his Tuesday afternoon show on Capital so he could do our live show. Tsk tsk. Anyhow, the show was dull, cheap-looking (and -costing) and as it was presented by a "housewives' favourite" totally unsuitable for the teen audience it was aimed at.

2 INTERACTIVE POP SHOW ON TIN BOAT
As mentioned a million times previously, but it really wasn't a good tv show at all.

1 QUIZ SHOW ABOUT ADVERTS
I did some development on this and it was going to be a big show for BBC1 or ITV but it ended up being shown for 2 weeks every night on Sky One. Good idea for a show but bad because (a) all the good ads were too expensive to use; (b) the presenter was inexperienced; (c) the guests were cheap; (d) the set was cheaper; and, most importantly; (e) the contestants weren't allowed to use brand-names more than once.

I only found this out when, returning from filming a different show for three weeks, I was drafted in as a contestant on the run-through, to test the format. It all dragged on, and we were fed wine in the green room. Note that only happened because that "Papa!"/"Nicole!" lady was on, off of the Renault ads, and she insisted. She couldn't speak English, which didn't exactly make her a hit on this show. In English.

So I was a bit drunk, surrounded by mates, and was told by my boss (in a whisper so the producer - another mate - wouldn't hear) to "try and break the show". She was always doing that kind of thing, bless her, and it needs to be done occasionally; pushing things to their limits to make sure the format, presenter and team are sound.

I've apologised to said producer many times, but I was a disgrace. The answer to one question was Pot Noodle - but we couldn't say it. We had to say "noodle-based snack product". It's catchy, isn't it? (Actually it is, I still use it to this day)

So we collapsed with laughter at this and then I answered every question in the next round with either "noodle-based snack product" or "Not Poodle" or "Pot-shaped Noodle-snack-product". Then the Shake'n'Vac ad was shown and me and the other team captain spent ages riffing on what on earth the generic name for that could be.

ME (buzzing in on the "It's all yoooooo have to do!")
Oh, I know this one! But I can't use the brand name?

PRESENTER (smiling to camera)
I think he's learning the rules viewers...

OTHER MATE (buzzing in)
Lemon-scented about-to-be-Hoovered-up-stuff?

ME (buzzing)
You can't say that brand name for vacuum cleaner. He doesn't know the rules, viewers.

PRESENTER (anxiously)
Any idea then?

OTHER MATE
Hoovell-based suck-product?

ME
Suckupable freshening scatterash?

PRESENTER (producer yelling in earpiece "GET ON WITH IT!")
No.. er...

OTHER MATE
Dust?

ME
Shake 'nnnnnnnnnn' leave on the floor for no reason?

PRESENTER (with boss now yelling "CONTROL IT!" in earpiece)
Let's see the full ad.

--

And then they brought that woman on, the one who's obviously high on the fresh scent of Shake'n'Vac. Sad. She was old way back then, and her only claim to fame was that ad. She talked dead posh like though.

As I said, terrible television. Luckily, thanks to rights' issues with the ads, it was never repeated.

This flaw in the format couldn't be fixed.

"I've got a great idea for a tv show, how do I..."

2008-05-02T17:16:00.001+01:00

When someone starts saying this to me I have to confess to wilting internally. I try my best to look engaged and positive and smiley, but inside I'm thinking of how I can run away without pointing over their shoulder and saying "Oh look, it's Princess Michael of Kent in a gorilla suit!", and dashing off when they turn around.

The truth is that you can't really just think up a show and get it on air. It doesn't happen. Here's an example.

Take Propertunities, my title-without-a-show. Let's try and make it into a show. Three properties for sale, three makeover experts, they turn up and alongside the owners do it up. The one that makes the most money (or in the current market, loses the least) wins. Daytime, every day, it's a winner.

How would I sell that?

Well I can't, as I've no track record making shows like that. A big daytime commission will be a million quid or so, loadsa money. Except that'd be for masses of shows, so tight cost control, volume production, ruthless management and a keen editorial eye are needed. Only daytime tv producers can do that.

OK, so say I hire in a producer who has that experience. We go and pitch it together. The broadcaster says hmmm, OK. Who's going to present it?

Nightmare. If you say the wrong name they'll dismiss it instantly. If you say the right name they'll be chuffed - but if you can't get the right name you'll lose the commission. If you say "err" and waffle, they'll think you haven't done your homework.

So say you manage to mumble someone they like. And hire them. Great! Job done.

Oh no.

Now you need to do a pilot episode. As a one-off, it'll cost far more than making one of fifty episodes. But it's better than the newer alternative. Either make a 'taster tape' (clips of things you shoot at your own expense) or a broadcastable week of shows to see if it works on air. And then they put you against Deal of no Deal and you're sunk.

Say you make a pilot, it works, they love it. That's it then, job's a good 'un.

Hahahah. Fool.

This is when the accountants and lawyers come in. Crawling over your budget - they see what you spend and will try everything to get it down. And will try equally to get as big as percentage of the show as they can. So you end up making it for barely cost price and not owning it.

But, say, you get through all that. Great! Then they say they want it on air in three months. And you have no team, no infrastructure and no way to get it donw by then. That's fine, they say, on air in eighteen months. But you haven't got enough work or funding to keep your existing team going...

And then-

I'll stop there. It's a Bank Holiday weekend and I've a pub to go to. But it's why the big companies get more and more commissions. They can tick all the boxes above. And they deliver a product at the end - it might not be as good as Propertunities but it'll fill the airtime on time, on cost and on target.

And that's what so much of tv, like any other business, is about.

On that cheery note, byebye!

What you can and can't do on tv

2008-04-30T17:30:00.003+01:00

TV regulations (now please don't run away, this is funny, honest) can be odd at the best of times. Over the -ty years I've worked in tv, they've changed a million times. Here are a few things we did on the television that weren't allowed:-

HANGING
You can't depict a corpse being hung by a noose at 6pm in what is technically "kids-stroke-family viewing". Fair enough, you may say, we don't want that at 6pm, you evil man trying to broadcast it.

But it was a comedy show. And the 'person' being hung was a hand-puppet. Like Sooty but a pig. A bright pink comedy pig puppet. Red-tape-gorn-mad etc.

RUDE WORDS
The word 'fart' wasn't acceptable before 7pm once. Now it is. No idea why.

Once of our shows had a character who was a spoof of a Sweeney-style 70s detective. (Life on Mars, tsk, stealing an idea from a children's show on Sky in 1993. Tsk again). We got into a bit of trouble as he'd say to a thirteen year old girl "Get orf my manor, you nonce!". None of us knew nonce was slang for child molester. Still, he said it to kids so it couldn't be offensive. Er, no. I had to recut 10 shows' worth of sketches replacing the word 'nonce' with 'bonce'. Made no sense at all, like when the very rude phrase is replaced with 'melon farmer' on American TV.

SPONSORSHIP
I had to spend 2 days in an edit trying to blur out the logos from the front of footy shirts, on a feature I'd shot at a premiership football ground. The sponsor was Carlsberg and alcohol advertising of any form is illegal in kids' tv time. It'd be easier now but was incredibly hard back in the pre-digital edit days.

IRONY
When a po-faced lawyer is watching your show and reading a transcript, it's no use claiming it's obviously ironic. We had a 'Gadget of the Week' slot on a comedy show. The plot would be continuing and one of the characters would find something, point at it and go "what's that?". Then everyone in shot would turn to camera and say "it's the Gadget of the Week!", cheesy QVC-style music would start up and the actors would go out of character and sell it to camera.

We purposely mixed fact, fiction and utter nonsense in the scripts. On an electric bike: "It does 5mph. But not on the Moon. Moon not included". On a GPS thing: "This item is available in... shops. But not ones that sell just bread. Or meat. Or buttons." On a widescreen TV: "The screen is wide enough to show a whole man lying down. But not tall enough to show a mountain. A flaw there I think."

And so on. We got into trouble every week as the lawyers thought we were advertising the products not reviewing them. So we had to brand the segment with a big logo in the top corner and extra 'facts' scrolling up, so (in the words of the channel) "people know it's not a shopping channel". Sigh.

ERECT NIPPLES
We filmed a lady presenter in a rubber dress in a very cold indoor swimming pool. I had to zoom in on her head and shoulders, cropping out her, um, indications of how cold it was in her chestal zone.

INNUENDO
It's the one area we got away with murder, as lawyers have no sense of humour and tend to consult the scripts. So suggestive winks when aforementioned presenter-in-rubber-dress welcomes viewers to her "little slot" are fine.

RACE
One of those oh-so-tricky areas. We got into trouble for a cartoon where the owner/authority figure was black, as he snoozed a bit during the show and that was allegedly racist. I say trouble, there was one letter from a schoolteacher. We pointed out he was (a) a pensioner; and (b) secretly did lots of work when he was pretending to be asleep; he was just doing it for fun, winking to camera after. We didn't hear back but there again you never do.

RELIGION
Er, no. I won't go here.

Live tv going wrong (again)

2008-04-28T15:14:00.005+01:00

I've mentioned the crappy live pop magazine show I worked on many times before. Well the show was interactive too, aeons before such things were thought important. The viewers picked the presenters, in a big live one-off special, then the series kicked off the next week. The idea was each presenter pitched ideas for features then the ones the viewers voted for were filmed*

In the special, there were ten presenters up for four spots. Only four of the presenters were any good (and I'm pushing it here by the use of the word 'good' - one was properly good, two OK, one less-car-crash-than-the-remainder). I wasn't working on the show at the time, sitting at home watching, jaw dropping at how poor it all seemed, as it stumbled along it's running time, barely staying on air never mind being entertaining. I rang up a mate and we bitched to each other as we watched. Always fun doing that, even when I really liked the two producers making the show. Hey, tv is cruel yeah?

The viewers voted all through the show and the results were read out at the end. And the properly good one hadn't won. What? He wasn't even in the final four, his place taken by a dwarf pixie with a speech defect. Huh? The voting patterns seemed very odd, everything in round %ages - 30% for this one, 20% for that. Durrr?

Next day I was told what happened. In a panic to get the results through, the boss had handed over the wrong results - not the just-collated live votes but the piece of card they'd made up for the rehearsal. The actual results were left on the desk. The ones that picked the only four decent presenters, as any sane person picking up a telephone would've done.

But what could be done? The producers couldn't fire the tiny wee boy who couldn't talk, could they? No, they couldn't. Or, rather, no WE couldn't as I was drafted on board as a producer. The solution was simple. The microscopic talent-free laddie was given his own 'special' segment of the show, kept as a presenter. And the proper good one was hired pronto, with a comedy apology at the start of the actual series the next week.

I was told to adapt an idea I'd been working on as a development producer for the small bloke to present as a pre-recorded segment each week. It was called 'Weird News' and was odd silly stories from Fortean Times. They provided their archive - ie sent over every magazine ever and yours truly ploughed through them all finding bits and pieces. Dog-shoots-man... man-falls-off-balcony-and-lands-on-man-coming-to-kill-him, those kind of stories. The things you see on the Funny News of any website nowadays but that weren't as common way back when I was a nipper.

I now had to put these weirdities on air. My show in development had reconstructions, animations, photo archive and the works. We couldn't afford anything, as this was all an extra expense off the show budget, so I got someone who could draw sketches and then we'd cut to them randomly, with lots of spooky sound effects, odd music, flashes and all that. Anything to disguise it was just a man who couldn't present talking about things he didn't understand in an accent no-one else could understand.

So I found myself sitting in some gentlemen's club with a tiny person-ette sitting in a leather armchair failing to read "Welcome to Weird News" hundreds of times over. He couldn't even say 'news'. It came out as 'nooooos'.

After a full day of filming we made around six minutes of barely-watchable tv. The pointless munchkin complained he was tired. My crew and me smiled politely and said we may as well finish now. He went off, thinking he'd come back and do the next lot. I knew the score - there'd be no next lot as he was so bad it wasn't really broadcastable.

We did show two installments of Weird Noooos I think, and we crammed all the pictures we had into them, jumpcut all over the place and made them almost interesting. Almost. I think we paid the guy for all ten episodes but didn't bother to make them. He wrote in and complained but the show was on it's way to cancellation anyway so no-one replied.

All because of the wrong piece of card being handed over.

*This seemed good but in reality only a few thousand people voted, and they always, always, always picked any feature with a celebrity in it.

Nighttime tv

2008-04-21T13:56:00.002+01:00

Many years after my adventures in daytime, I got to make shows for the opposite end of the schedule. Way back in 1999 C4 actually spent (a little) money on programming that ran all night. There were video game shows, clip programmes, docs and even a bit of comedy.

I went to pitch a cartoon video game show, having made a pilot by stitching bits together of other pilot programmes we'd put together over the past 6 months. I sent it in to this new guy at C4 and didn't think we'd have a hope in hell of being commissioned. Our stuff was fairly mainstream (as anything originally made for kids and 'aged up' would be) and the things on his channel were decidedly, er, weirdstream.

But I got a call. A "come in for a chat tomorrow"-style call from his PA. I got very excited, as it had looked like I'd have been out of a job in a couple of months as my company had burned through our start-up cash and not got a lot of work in. So I based my entire future on (a) a meeting with someone I'd never met before; (b) an unsuitable idea; and (c) a tiny weeny budget. I told my boss we'd get some work, his eyebrow arched so much it floated above his head cartoon-style, and I went back to refining my CV.

Next day I got to C4 and met the com.ed. I initally lost all hope. To add to (a), (b) and (c) above, he was (d) American; (e) from the then-new area of the internet; (f) very arty and educated and visually aware, and (g) even stranger in his tastes than his output.

I made my pitch for my video games show. He then said (h) he had already commissioned one, presented by three 'hot chicks' and then showed a bit to me. It was fine, cheap-looking but rude and outspoken. And the audience of geeks would love the predddy layydies. I thought to myself "well, that's it then".

But it wasn't. He liked the odd animation style we'd got. He wanted us to go off and think about interstitials that popped up for up to 2 minutes between the shows. He fancied something dark, edgy and 3D. Cutting edge. Weird. Scary. A "timeless place, like a motel somewhere between heaven and hell" he said.

A motel was a good location, I said, lots of strangers brought together somewhere they'd rather not be. He agreed and gave me a VHS of the interstitials they currently had running, a spectacularly surreal thing with a man and a woman in a virtual set jumpcut to bits so it made no sense.

He told me to come up with an idea. Oh, and that whatever I came up with had to be on air in seven weeks. Otherwise he wouldn't order it.

Gulp.

Three days later our idea went in. It shamelessly used any and every character we'd ever designed. Gay robots (robots = easy to do in CG). A swearing baby (came free with the system). A slightly redesigned lady dancer (the video games presenter made skinnier). A man in the shadows who ran the place (so we could reuse the footage with new voice every episode). A boring bloke who no-one liked, the only real 'customer' (designed as a starjumping newsreader for the kids' show). And a slug (used on a previous programme).

Concept-wise... well, it was arty and surreal and odd. One 30 second link a week was the baby walking in, saying "arse biscuits" then walking out. We proposed a spoof on Kurosawa and other high-falutin' concepts.

Mr Com. Ed. loved it. He wanted twelve minutes a week. In six weeks. I had 3.4 staff (one part-timer) and 4 computers. We couldn't get half that amount per week in footage.

Double gulp.

So I did what I do best - cobble together a way to make something work. Not necessarily something good but something of use. Everyone congregated in the motel bar every episode, in the same spots. We'd make 650 standard shots, of backs of heads, hands tapping, eye closeups, wide shots, top shots, a speaker vibrating, the man in the shadows from 20 different angles. Half each week's output was made with those.

Another 15% of the footage were beautiful motion-captured dances of the lady character, with the small benefit that they came free with the software we had.

The titles were long and elaborate, and used up another 10% of the airtime. So we only had to make a quarter of the actual amount of footage. Even this was a strain so we rendered everything half resolution, which had the odd effect of making it grainy, something 3D animation generally wasn't way back then.

We stumbled on air and got into a relentless routine, myself editing the week's stuff on a Sunday (on my own, struggling with shots that didn't work or were bugged). Creative-wise, the arty stuff was difficult and boring, but for week 2 we did a spoof of one of C4's own late-night shows, more Carry On than Kurosawa. Com. ed., despite himself, loved it.

So we got to do fart gags, bad language, gay robot sex and an Easter special with one of the characters dying and coming back to life. Evil twins turned up, the lady turned out to be a transexual, Diana Ross arrived, and the dead mum of the only customer popped up to haunt him. She was just his character in a wig. There was a smoking monkey, the slug talked backwards and Mr Lee, a Chinese cook, came along to cook with zombies. All this and Bingo MCQuenzie, a news reporter who'd pop up occasionally to recap what had just happened, the microphone in front of his mouth (ie one shot reused repeatedly) and clips of previous episodes used to illustrate it (ie free footage). All we did was change the spelling of his surname.

Please don't ask me to explain any of this.

It did well - we think, ratings weren't something late night did - and we couldn't spend all the money they were paying us as we had no staff and sort of cobbled it together ourselves. This made me v popular with my boss. We got our run lengthened and then recommissioned.

I remember one particular Sunday edit. It kinda defined the show for me. I sat and cut together a sequence of shots for a minute long episode. It consisted of the only customer going into a cubicle and having a wee. For a full minute. Just shots of the cubicle, his face, his feet. Nothing rude. And as we couldn't animate water, no wee either. All the time he was sighing in relief, but in a strange, trance-like, satisfied way, echoey in this public lav, with a very strong water-landing-in-a-loo weeing sound effect.

I sat back and realised I was probably the luckiest man in the world to be paid to do that.

Daytime tv

2008-04-17T15:38:00.002+01:00

With the gods of daytime off from C4 to an as yet unnamed new UKTV channel (see http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/organgrinder/2008/04/richard_and_judy_switch_channe.html for details) it reminds of my limited forays into daytime tv.

I've mentioned being Junior Farm Researcher in the Cotswolds with Leslie Ash, doilies, sheep and lovely rolling countryside. But I haven't spoken about one of the biggest shows I had to write.

It was a few months before Channel 5 launched (it still had the prefix 'Channel' and was a number not a lower-case word). They'd asked a 'selected' group of independent production companies to come up with a daytime magazine show to run between 1pm and 3pm every day. The proposal said "to be 'This Morning' but in the afternoon". It then said it was a huge commission, and the annual budget certainly seemed like a lot of money.

Until you divided it by 250 shows per annum, 2 hours each, and it was a pittance. As in ten percent of the aforementioned R&J morning show's budget.

Our little indie had been asked to pitch, as our boss was old mates with the commissioning editor - she'd worked with him before. So the 'development team' had a meeting - ie me, the boss, her two financial partners (two er, larger than average-sized ladies) and the 'head of marketing' (a man married to one of the larger ladies).

I had to write the show in two weeks but no-one would agree on anything, from format to location to presenter to content... even the bloody name was a problem. And then our boss decided to take herself off on holiday for a week, right at the crucial moment. So me and the others cooked up a show we could at least partially agree on.

It was, to be blunt, a pile of old turds. Garnised with new turds. And piss sauce. A bland, boring, in-a-studio magazine show presented by two people of such unfamousness that I couldn't remember their names way back then never mind now. Although they looked nice. And were cheap.

The price was the main factor - putting financial controllers in a creative position is a bad thing as they pitched a show that could be made for profit for peanuts. A show that was viable. Commercial. Feasible. Totally forgetting that no-one would watch such a bland blend of beige and b..b... the power of alliteration has failed me. It was that bad.

The boss returned the day before the pitch was due in, totally stressed up by a terrible holiday spent arguing with her son/family/hotel/airline... well, it wasn't nice. She read the show - carefully researched and put together by me - and hurled the sixty page document across her office and at the door. My desk was just outside. I heard the crunch and then saw the other 'development team' members scurry to their offices to hide until the wave of anger had subsided.

But I had a plan. Not perhaps a master plan, more of a minor plan. But a plan none the less.

When the boss summoned me in, staring and frothing with hatred at the idea she'd just read, I pounced first.

"I know you'd hate that idea, but the others were very keen on it. I couldn't do anything, they own the company with you, but they can be a little... erm..."

The boss jumped in at this point, snarling and wild-eyed.

"A little. Fucking. SHIT. Hmm?"

I ermed and ummed and then presented her with another sixty page programme treatment. It was a weird on-location thing presented by a strange-looking man I knew the boss liked, it was all over the place and formatted tightly, with the crew featuring heavily as in The Big Breakfast (cheap, funny and a winner with the C5 commissioning editor, as it was him who'd first greenlit the BB). It was manic, bright and far too youthy for a daytime slot.

And the boss loved it. Right down to the oh-so-up-it's-own-chuffer title. I'd called it 1to3for5. Geddddit? On between 1 and 3 on 5. Hahahahah bonk. That's my head falling off from laughing. Sigh.

The boss smiled and scribbled a few notes as she read. I stayed up all night rewriting, with the 'development team' ordering in pizza and cakes and Indian food (told you they were large) and cutting out pictures from magazines and pasting them in. No Photoshop back then, oh no. It was then off to print at 8am, me grabbing a couple of hours sleep before taking it to C5 myself to deliver it before the noon deadline.

I went on one of those taxi bikes, an absolute nightmare, and got off sweating and terrified. In the lift at the channel I bumped into the man delivering our then deadly rival Planet 24's proposal. It was a giant suitcase with expensive graphics all over it. Mine was a document with things cut out from Women's Realm and You magazine on it. I was too tired to care. And still full of takeaway food - hey it was free.

Mr Planet 24 (one of the drivers from the company actually) handed over the wheelie suitcase. Com. Ed. arched an eyebrow and said thanks. I then handed in ours, making some comment that I'm sorry it wasn't as exotic or well packaged as Planet's. Mr Com. Ed. smiled and said words to the effect of "on these budgets I can tell you we couldn't afford that show already". I toddled off happily and told the boss who roared with laughter, gave me fifty quid, and told me to take the rest of the day off and go out and celebrate that night.

I think I went back to bed for the rest of the day.

And the punchline? Oh, nothing really. The contract went to one of C5's shareholding companies, a blander-than-bland thing with Gloria Hunniford chatting inanely to minor celebs in front of an audience of twenty pensioners.

Hey ho, that's the scheme of things. I was quite pleased - no need to scrabble together to make a show that would be damned hard to deliver on price... beating Planet (in a way)... and the channel awarding the contract, in effect, to themselves so we didn't have a chance.

The only thing that pissed me off was not getting 1to3for5 as a programme title on air...

Celebrities I have met

2008-04-02T16:16:00.003+01:00

Apologies for the pause in bloggerising. I haven't been too busy, or away on holiday, or suffering from RSI or anything. I simply ran out of things to say.

And now I haven't. Here's a random list of celebrities I've met, or been in the same room as, or cut together a show around.

ANT'n'DEC
They were known as PJ and Duncan the first time, so it shows how long ago. Both as nice as anyone could be. I seem to recall meeting them again at a BAFTA ceremony when their show beat our show for the Best Children's Entertainment award (we were so NOT robbed - SM:TV was a gabillion times better than our wee thing, if 94% less camp). I believe I joshed with them about Geordies winning BAFTAs so it was OK and they smiled. I can't really remember though, as muchos champagnos has passed down my gullet in a very brief period of time. I do remember...

CAT DEELEY
... dancing with her and her nephew at the post-awards do. I did not interact with the lovely lovely Cat, save a look of extreme sympathy and concern from her to me. I did have a red wine stain on my shirt and I was gyrating like a gibbon with his foot in a bucket, so she probably thought I was having an attack. Needless to say that's my best dance that is.

MUHAMMAD ALI
He was endorsing a video game, and our little show accidentally got invited to some event at a very posh hotel the legendary boxer was attending. Sadly, he didn't say much, but he sparred with our fat kid presenter, and shook hands with him. Incidentally, the only thing I've done in my tv career that really impressed my dad - meeting the one-time most famous man on the planet.

RICHARD BRIERS
You imagine he's lovely, yes? Well he is. Just times by a million how lovely you imagine him to be. And add a bit.

ALEXIE SAYLE
You don't imagine he's lovely, yes? Well he is. Just very VERY serious. Like a lot of comedians.

CLIVE ANDERSON
The opposite of the man above, wise-cracking and sort of like he is on the telly. Probably because he was a barrister before he did comedy.

CHRIS EVANS
One of Mr Evans's gang did a voiceover for a show I did. He invited me on a Bank Holiday bender with the Ginger One. It was at the height of his massive stardom, and I was somewhat in awe. I don't think he'd slept for a while and he was wearing a knitted jumper that a viewer had sent in, one with his face on it. I was so drunk by the time I met him I can't remember much. I was told (and it may have been in jest) that he offered me a job and a share in his new company. The one that was sold for tens of millions of pounds a few years later. I can't remember. I'm glad of that, in a way.

MR BLOBBY
He danced into the sunset with our fat kid presenter on a feature about his videogame (that was a slow news week). It was hard to tell which was which as the light faded.

HUGH LAURIE
He did a voice for a cartoon I produced. I never met him, apart from once when he accidentally wandered into our part of an open plan office. I said hello. He didn't know who I was. Our sound producer said he was totally lovely.

DEXTER FLETCHER
He presented a show I was... well, I was going to say producing but that technically isn't true, I was Senior Researcher. We had a hoot, even when our mad boss ripped up our carefully written scripts... well, innuendo-laden puntastical intros and outros, saying Dexter had to react live to situations as he was a presenter now, not an actor. I pointed out the previous presenter had an autocue. She paused, nodded slightly, then wandered off. Cue staying up til 5am to rewrite everything. Many a whiskey was drunked. Very lovely fella, very funny.

SEAN LOCKE
When he wasn't famous he did a voice for a cartoon we did, appearing as himself on a cartoon talk show. He was very serious and deadpan. I think that's (a) him; and (b) his act.

JOHNNY VAUGHAN
I think he was colouring in the bald bits on his head. And this was a while ago.

RICHARD BACON
It was his first job in telly, and he was very young and and very angular-looking. Like the characters in that first 3D CG Dire Straights video (look it up youngsters, Google is your friend). Even his hair had right angles in it.

ALEX ZANE
He was the opposite of Richard Bacon, all fluffy and smiley and round and soft.

KYLIE MINOGUE
Very very small, but with a normal-sized head, so she looked like Lady Penelope off of Thunderbirds. A TV producer's dream, she was co-operative and friendly and great on air, despite us having to remove a stalker from outside the studio after her security spotted an innocent-looking housewife-type standing at the gates. I kissed her hand when she left. I was lifting her off the ground doing so, obviously as she's two foot six and I'm six feet tall.

--

It's the little things you notice about 'slebs that stick in your mind, the things that don't quite go with the way you imagine them. They're usually a different size (almost always smaller - well, apart from John Leslie, who's twelve feet tall). Presenters that you're used to seeing manic and jumping and in-yer-face always seem quieter. That's because, in my case anyway, I usually met them after a show and they were exhausted.

Comedians are usually serious and dour. That's because they're paid to be funny, and being funny is hard, so they save it for when they're on air. They don't try and make the sweaty researcher howl with laughter.

Older actors always sound luvvier than they do on telly. Younger ones usually sound the same, as they're not really acting. Most of the pop stars I've met have been plain tired - the thing they were doing with me was one of twelve things that day, after flying in overnight from somewhere and flying off overnight to somewhere else.

Parties

2008-03-19T15:34:00.002Z

I found myself trawling through some old photos from a lovely end of series party the other day. Don't ask why, it's even sadder than you'd think, but it got me thinking about the 'joy' of media parties. I've been to loads of them, from tiny intimate affairs to humungous happenings with thousands of attendees. Here's a lazy awards' ceremony spoof of some of them:-

BIGGEST BASH
An Xmas party with the theme 'white' in a warehouse on London's trendy-now-but-still-shitty-really Brick Lane. Me and my little band of five staff turned up to this enormous venue, past the ice sculpter and a man painting a collage of the event on one of the walls, drinking sponsored ice vodka and eating tiny dollops of food that was white. That'll be eggs on bread then.

Upstairs, in the special VIP room, proper ministers of the realm were in attendance, as well as big name celebs off of the telly and everything. I got taken up there by my immediate boss, and sat in awe as breakfast TV presenters chatted to channel controllers, with a smattering of very pretty men and women gliding around with trays of drinks.

MOST BORING BASH
See above. My immediate boss was a very clever and astute man, and good company. Until he proceeded, as he did at any venue serving booze, to get well twatted and have to be steered away from people he didn't like. That was everyone else in the building, and he'd snarl and point and slur at them as he stumbled around. Luckily he made no sense. He eventually went to sleep, I escaped the VIP area and ended up in a nasty little boozer down the street with a mate who lived down the road. And a few staff who'd just left the company so weren't invited - we had a reet good time.

MOST DRUNKEN BASH
You know, I can't even recall what it was for - we went to a tapas bar locally for lunch and drank lots of beer then wine. My other immediate boss then went back to the office. We all stayed and drank tequila. And flaming sambucas. And more wine. Staff drifted back to work, most of whom fell asleep on their keyboards. I stayed until 6pm, surprised it was still light when I exited the bar and proceeded to fall flat on my face. Commuters stepped over me, tutting at my drunkitude. I giggled and somehow managed to get home in one piece.

MOST DRUNKEN BASH II
A party for a company I'd left years back, me being invited due to some clerical error. I went dreading it, going with someone I used to work with but really REALLY didn't like. He bored me shitless on the way there. When I got there the only people I knew were the accountant (dullest man ever), the senior management (on full schmooze-with-everyone mode and not at all interested in me) and - oddly - a commissioning editor from Sky who'd been in charge of a very troublesome show I'd produced.

The venue was the Polish Embassy (no idea why) and topless male models were offering vodka continuously. Oh dear. I drank lots and lots of it. I mean gallons of the stuff. I danced with said com.ed., telling her of all the people I'd worked with she was by far the best (a lie). I told my old boss she was the loveliest person I'd ever worked for (another lie). I got stuck in a corner with the accountant and the guy I came with and managed to leave them deep in conversation with each other, keeping them out of my way all night.

Old friends then turned up and I had a ball. I think. It got even blurrier. I snogged a lady. I tried to snog a topless male model. I then wandered home and fell asleep on the Circle line and went around several times. Someone then tried to mug me - well, went through my pockets whilst I dozed, so I had no money.

I then fell asleep again and had to be picked up from central London at 3am as I was totally lost, disorientated and skint.

Top night!

BASH WITH NASTIEST ATMOSPHERE
The end of series party for my one and only foray into ITV, it was in the upstairs room of a fairly ordinary pub in Covent Garden. The bitter rivalries and simmering tension on this show had been a nightmare throughout, especially as it was the first big thing I'd been in charge of. Even if the show was actually run by the lovely exec producer and his old Irish director mate.

The researchers hated me, and each other. The celeb booker hated everyone. The cast hated the writer. The writer... well, he wasn't bothered really, just glad to have free booze. The technicians hated all the producers as they thought we'd ruined their show. My big boss hated everyone except me as she thought they'd ruined her show.

So there was quite an, erm, atmosphere.

Booze flowed and it all went much more smoothly that I'd expected... until, of all people, exec prod and director bloke had a blazing row and off stomped the director. At least this shocked everyone into behaving well for a bit. I stayed sober for once and had a miserable time. Even more so when I found out I was expected to pay for the entire thing - it was a 'proper' telly tradition that the producer pays personally for an end-of-series thing. I pointed out my researchers earned more than me, and lovely exec producer footed the bill in the end. He was paid six times my salary so could afford to.

--

So the next time you think you'd love to go to a glam media party, think again. That's the shocking err-I-can't-write-any-more-on-this conclusion to this collection of blogbits.

Adventures in journalism p II

2008-03-05T14:12:00.003Z

After the 'triumph' of filming the inside of my bag for an hour (see last blog entry), I got one more chance at undercover reporting. This time was better as I didn't have to film anything, there was a cameraman and everything.

It was in the late nineties and there was a lot of fuss about people hacking into mobile phone calls. I'd done it myself - well, not quite true - my mate had done it when we were both pissed, and there was nothing on the telly. We'd howl at the genuine Cockerneee folks screaming and shouting at each other on the airwaves of East London.

But the networks were changing to digital, something they claimed was "100% crackproof". One in particular emphasized their security aspects, having a retired major bloke (complete with shouty posh voice, shiny bald heed and little 'tache, I later found out) as their security supremo.

We were piloting a show explaining technology to an adult audience. The show started very grandly with a virtual presenter, incredibly heavy graphics and lots of aspirations to be trendy yet accessible, informative but funny. It ended up on air with our usual games presenter outside in the streets doing leaden links, hand-held camerawork and the thin one off Birds of a Feather explaining how to work a mouse. Sigh.

Anyway, my idea was to hack into digital mobiles. I did some digging amongst the, er, more dubious people I knew, and found a hacker blokey. Another stereotype - heavy metal T-shirt, lank long hair, odour of stale pizza. But he knew his stuff - he had hacked his electricity meter so had never paid a bill, had copies of the latest 'uncrackable' games and showed me how to listen into digital calls using a scanner and a piece of software on a laptop. The fact it was the Head of Finance (a very large woman so fat that if you threw a beachball her way it would orbit her like a moon) talking saucily with her equally rotund bf slightly put us off but there you go.

So off we went to the only service station on the M25 to film the feature. We filmed people on their phones, and filmed Hackerboy listening in. It did seem to work, even if all the calls were from some poor salesman telling his office he was halfway to Slough or something.

Then we went to the phone company, just for a chat about their fab security I'd said, Hackerboy sitting in the corner with a clipboard as if he was a researcher. I was the interviewer, but said to Major Security-Breach (or whatever his double-barrelled name was) that I'd be cut out. He was to put the question in the answer, as we're all trained to do in MakingSoundBiteTV courses.

I asked lots of nice easy "So why is digital better than analogue" type questions, and then Major Soon-Exploding made a bit of a boo-boo. He said no-one could break his systems. I asked how he knew. He said that he'd employ anyone who cracked the systems to work on improving them, quite a liberal answer as hacking was (and still is) illegal.

I said that he'd better give the researcher guy a job then as we have footage of him cracking their security. This started to play on our monitor.

Major Losing-Control watched for a minute or two, then glared at me, picked up his very shiny small phone (as the camera zoomed in) and dialled 999.

Gulp.

I said that we informed those we'd listened in on what had happened, that no personal information or compromising details had been retained, and we'd come straight to the company to inform them their claims were incorrect. That they were lying to their customers. Surely exposing such injustice was more important than making a point.

Major Snarling-Crackpot leant forward and almost spat into my face "GET OUT OF HERE NOW", and then stomped off. We packed in silence and left.

Awaiting me the next day were legal summonses, tens of messages from various legal and phone company bods and one from Hackerboy saying he thought he was followed home so he stayed at a mate's place that night and slipped out at 2am.

The boss was delighted, toasting me with champagne and saying we'd got a massive result. She even loved the final feature, with the back of my head featuring prominently as I courageously stated our case, the slight tremble in my voice sounding more indignant than terrified, even though the latter was the truth.

And the BBC loved it, fab, the pilot got a series commissioned. Yay all round.

Well, er, no. The feature was never broadcast as the phone company actually did improve their security and make the calls crack-proof (well, until PCs got faster and more powerful anyway). Hackerboy seemed to have 'borrowed' things from where we filmed, and from our office. And the back of my head and dodgy accent was deemed too "untelevisual".

Hey ho.

Me as a tv journalist

2008-02-28T08:33:00.003Z

In the long list of TIHDIT (Things I Have Done In Television), being an undercover tv journalist has to be the most unlikely. Consider the facts:-

I have no training in anything even remotely journalistic;
I'm a great big scaredy cat;
I've worked on many shows that had a factual side but to say they had a lot of sound journalistic content would be pushing things

I went undercover a couple of times. Once, inbetween series of the video game show, my boss kept me on over the summer. A few of the other researchers and producers remained, to 'develop' the next series. This involved lots of trips to the pub, a few meetings and ideas being generated, some more journeys to the pub, playing Championship Manager and going out to meet our video game contacts. In the pub.

But occasionally we had to do some work, and mine was to find out about pirated games. The boss was astonished that her son had bought pirated games from a market. I was astonished too. Why the fuck did he actually buy a game? His mum owned a company making shows about games. We got 'em for free. And then there was the fact that his mum was also loaded. Why was he at a market when he could send the butler down to Harrods to pick some up?

Anyhow, the boss's wheeze involved a trip up North to see my family. I'd mentioned I used to see my own games on sale in pirated form at markets, back when I writ games for a living. She said I must've been furious. I said I was, but the massive no-teeth-dog-on-string-tattooed stall holders probably wouldn't have given a hoot if I'd said anything.

But, no, I was to be a Journalist. I bought a crappy boxy shoulder bag, cut a hole in it for our little camcorder and gaffer-taped it in there. A bit of dark-coloured translucent plastic on the hole, and voila a sort-of hidden camera. The remote I worked in one hand, the wire up one arm and down the other, and stuck it under my watchstrap. The other wrist had a tiny mike taped to it, with wires running to the camera. It kinda worked if I waved my arm in the general direction of the person talking. I practised in the office much to my mates' hilarity. I practised down the pub, much to my mates' concern - what if the boss saw it?

Off I went up North (at least the company was paying my bus ticket... yes, bus ticket, we weren't made of money*). I went out to the blowy dodgy market in Seaton Sluice (lovely name), next to Whitley Bay. And there were rip-off copies of games. And, yes, there were big hard men with big hard dogs. Ulp.

I put on the bag, clicked record and went to it. "Why's this Nintendo game only a fiver?" I asked, in fearless journalistic stylee, pointing my arm at a squat twitching skinhead with many more tattoos than teeth. I could see why. I hope the camera could too. The box was a VHS sleeve with a photocopy of the actual game box on it. No, that was untrue. It was a photocopy of an ad for the game. Inside it was a ROM-board, not even a proper cartridge.

"Eh?", said the market trader, another tooth falling out. Probably.

"This isn't even a proper cartridge!", I stated indignantly, holding it oddly in front of my bag, "It's pirated!". Roger Cook had nowt on me.

"Yeh... and?", said the small businessman, scratching his pants.

"Um.. erm.. well, that's not, er, legal", I stammered.

"Uh-huh?"

"Sell lots of these?"

"Yeah."

"Right."

"Wannit hinny then?"

I then made my excuses and left, as The News of the Screws would say. I walked around and filmed many people doing this, including one stall that had games way before their release. The camera battery eventually failed and I had an hour's worth of material.

Back I went to London, not so much in triumph as folded up in a tiny seat next to a sweating fat lady.

But there were two problems. Firstly, the camera had fallen over in my shabbily-made camera bag. So there was a tiny semi-circle of picture at the top of the lens. It was enough to see some things, but not much. The microphone worked a bit, every other word was made out, but I was incredibly loud and the hardly-saying-much enormous brutes I was confronting were quiet and faint. It made me sound dictatorial and them sound effeminate, not exactly a crusading journalist, more a shouting lunatic.

And the stall with the pre-realised games? Well, they looked a lot like the ones we got sent at the show. As in exactly like them - I didn't realise but my mates did. Turned out one of the researchers who had left at the end of the series had been floggin' them off. We couldn't show this at all, we'd be in trouble with the games companies.

I put my camera bag in the bin and went back to working out what we'd call the new researchers-dressed-up-like-Gladiators-but-for-video-games for our thrice-weekly game show. My mate and me came up with a female character called Victoria Station, No Relation. Made no sense but made us larf.

*OK, they gave me the £75 for a rail ticket but I spent £25 on a bus one and spent the rest on a big shop at Kwiksave to stock my bare food cupboards. I was poor then.

My sitcom writing career part II

2008-02-15T15:42:00.002Z

THE STORY SO FAR....

As a Junior Junior Researcher, I wrote a sitcom treatment and left it in my top drawer hoping my boss would find it when she was hunting for sweeties late at night. She did, loved it and dragged me to her office...

--

My boss, bless, was actually frothing with excitement for my odd idea mixing cartoons and reality (and this was many years ago, so it was dead original and that). She said she wanted to talk to writers, get them involved, I'd need to sign a deal, it could be a huge hit, I'd get an advance on sales as soon as I signed, Channel 4 would love it... my head was in a whirl as I ate an Executive Biscuit off the posh plates.

This was it, I was going to work in comedy. She wanted me to have a go at a script, just story ideas and constructs to start with. I said that I couldn't wait to get started... well, I'd have to, as I was editing tomorrow and then had to film a feature on Thurs and-

At that point, the boss leapt up (and as a six-foot-plus woman who was about four inches wide that wasn't an easy thing to do) and ran to the door of her glass-fronted office. She opened it, clapped her hands, looked at me then announced loudly

"Just to let you know, this man here has written a fucking GENIUS comedy idea and is to develop it for me and not do ANYTHING on your show for the foreseeable future, yes?"

And then folded her arms, smiled and told me to get to work on comedy.

I was in quite a good mood, as you can imagine. Sat at my desk and did some notes, thought a bit, looked like a GENIUS for a while. I hardly noticed my producer going in to see the boss.

Next day there was an envelope on my desk. It had a contract for the sitcom and a short note saying that due to the fact I was a "hard-working, dedicated and integral member of the team" I couldn't be spared from the show I worked on. However, I could have an afternoon a week to write comedy. Other writers would be found to work with me, as I "wasn't experienced in the scripting arena". I remember the last phrase particularly well. A scripting arena. Is that like the arena off of Gladiators, except with nerdy writers cracking one-liners to lions who pause and say as deadpan as possible "that's so funny...."

Anyhoo, I did some writing and the boss liked it. No other writers joined. The afternoon a week got eaten up with worky things, especially as I got promoted and started to write comedy links for the actual show on actual television I worked on.

It wasn't quite the end - six months in, the boss asked the gangly young presenter of the show I did to do some development work. Including on my sitcom. He went off and came back with many, many pages of neat, hand-written notes on the characters and scenarios. They were, in the main, really funny and clever, packed with visual gags. He hadn't actually written any script though, the point of his work, and then he got a new agent who was horrified he was writing a script for a sitcom for almost no money. He went off to do stand-up stuff, came back a few months later for series 2 of our silly games show, and my sitcom sat on the shelf, unfinished and unwanted.

I got the rights back after a year and have tried to sell it, or variations of it, for ten years, never succeeding (although getting meetings and great feedback about the idea). It's probably the right time to try again.

Oh, and that presenter? Regular readers will guess it was David Walliams. Bless. I have his scribblings in a box somewhere, must dig 'em out...

My "career" as a sitcom writer

2008-02-13T12:15:00.004Z

So when I worked making shows about video games I yearned to work on shows NOT about video games. Hey, I like dem games and that, especially back then when buckets of red wine and aeons of age hadn't addled my reactions, but I wanted to work on something proper.

I got it into my head to write a sitcom. Genius idea, eh?

Well, no it's not. It's The Stupidest Idea Ever. Sitcoms are not only hard to get right, they're damn near impossible. And there was me, a year or so into a tv career, thinking "Hey, I'll do the next Fawlty Towers. I can do that, me. Oh yes."

I wrote up an idea. It was - and still is - a good idea, and I wrote it up... well, in an OK style, this was well before I'd churned out a gabillion programme proposals so it was a bit rough. Although I did do stickman sketches of all the characters. Which was nice.

I put this idea, stickmen and all, in the one place my boss would find it. No, not her intray, her desk or as a free pullout in that day's Sun but in my top drawer. That's where I kept the chocolates and sweeties she would raid at 10pm in the evening when bashing out programme proposals.

I know, I've mentioned this before, but she'd leave 12p for a bit of Galaxy, or a pound and take the whole drawer away. She was a I-always-pay-my-way style lady. On the wages she paid me that was just as well.

She didn't hit the chocos for a couple of days; each morning I'd get to work and my sitcom idea was there. It got to Friday and I noticed a few chocolate buttons had gone and 10p was there, but the idea remained undisturbed. I reckon she'd looked at it and laughed at me. Not in a good oh-this-is-comedy-genius way, but in a it's-so-bad-he's-had-to-draw-stick-men stylee.

I went into the weekend with a heavy heart, and came into work on Saturday morning to pick up some games for filming first thing Monday, to avoid a 5am start.

And the shitcom scribblings were gone! Gulp! I was sooooo excited all weekend. The filming lasted all day Monday but I turned up to work early on Tuesday. My friend Hester said the boss had been pacing around, reading some document and hooting with laughter continuously, asking where I was and saying the phrase "He's a genius. A fucking comedy genius!" over and over again.

Me? A genius? I almost wet myself. I went to my desk and started the glamorous process of ringing up video game companies and begging for those deadly dull press-button-A-X-Y-B to skip a level cheats that made up a lot of my job.

And then she burst in. The boss. She came over and grabbed my shoulder.

"Come with me, young man, no more games' cheats for you, you're a fucking comedy genius", she bellowed, as everyone else looked on with their mouths hanging open.

And I went into her office, as she said to the PA to get us a pot of tea and some biscuits. I heard a small gasp from the office at the request for biscuits. They only ever came out when Channel 4 turned up. They were for celebrities or tv bigwigs, not the likes of a lowly Researcher Boy like me.

I could sense my career in telly was on the way up.

And... well, come back soon for the thrilling conclusion. I've got to write up this thing about a dog. Then this thing about a bird that's a doctor. That's a feathery bird not a sexist term for a ladywoman. And then this thing about- ok, ok, I'll go now.

Being on tv again

2008-02-04T18:04:00.000Z

People have asked me what it takes to be 'good on the box'. Here's a random list of six things you'll need to Get Ahead On Television:-

1 A LARGE HEAD AND A SMALL BODY
To look good on tv you need to be a bit of a Thunderbird puppet, over generous in the noggin area and small of shoulder and limb. It sounds weird but it's true, and it holds for movies as well as telly. Tom Cruise, in the normal world, looks incredibly odd, about five feet tall and with a GINORMOUS bonce. But in movies he looks well proportioned. I met Keanu Reeves once and he looks like that square-headed robot off of Red Dwarf in reality, and a hunktastic dreamship on the screen.

No idea why but there you are.

2 THE ABILITY TO STARE
Into a camera, at another person, into the distance whilst the music wells up, at an autocue without moving your eyes - you have to be able to look at things you really shouldn't look at for extended periods of time. Without a single flinch or glance sideways. One false move and you'll look edgy and untrustworthy.

This is for all tv jobs, from newsreader (staring at a blue wall that has someone's face dubbed on it only for the viewers) to actor (staring into the middle distance when another actor is blethering behind them so they're both facing camera, where every sinew in your body is shouting "turn around and look at him - he's talking to you!") to presenter (staring into camera as people talk on the phone - all you can see is a lens. A bloody lens. It's round and clear. It's not that person. But they think you are looking at them. It's just odd.)

3 A SLOW. TALKING. VOICE.
A normal person tends to gabble on camera. They're nervous, unprepared, excited. A tv person talks very slowly. It sounds good. Calm. Smooth. Short sentences. If you gabble in your everyday life, you'll be constantly fighting that urge on telly. It's possible to train yourself but not easy.

4 AN APPROPRIATE ACCENT
Brummies tend not to read the national news. Scousers tend not to be cast in soaps as high-flying executives. Geordies tend to play nice characters ("aw, such a friendly voice!"), an Edinburgh accent is perfect for a newscaster, but a Glaswegian one isn't. And yer Irish just sound warm and classless. On account of being from a country with no major class divisions. The Irish Irish, not the Northern Irish. They sound knowledgeable and stern.

It's all a load of old ballcocks but it's how you're perceived. Telly is the same as call centres - there's loads in nice accented parts of the North-East and Scotland, and not many in the Midlands. Hey, don't blame me, blame the viewers.

5 YOU NEED A SLOW METABOLISM
An odd thing to say, you may think, but undoubtedly true. I've got a very fast metabolism. I eat and drink more calories than average yet have always been trim. I go to the gym, yes, and don't eat wads of transfat-stuffed fast foods, but I've always burned up my food quickly. This means I usually feel warmer than most people.

Sadly this also means I sweat when I get hot (ie when it's slightly above freezing and I've got more than one layer of clothes on). So I appear shifty and shiny on telly, not a good look at all. The combination of bright lights and warm studios is a killer. If you're David Letterman - he's a Person of Increased Temperature too - you can crank the aircon in the studio to the max to stay cool looking. But if you're second-presenter-on-the-left on Rotherham Tonight, you can't. And if you start to sweat you'll look like you're melting. See Broadcast News, that seminal tv film, for a perfect example.

6 HAVE SOMEONE SHOUTING IN YOUR EAR WHILST YOU TALK IS FINE
This is for live presenters only, the dreaded earpiece, where the producer can yell "right, we've lost Michael Portillo next, we're doing the paragliding puppy instead. In five...", all while you're asking Westlife about their latest dirge. Not easy at all - even hardened veterans can be seen to flinch occasionally.

If you can tick all those six boxes you might be ok on tv. Might.

When I was an 'actor'...

2008-01-29T11:10:00.000Z

So, yes, I was a games reviewer in one ep of a show, then I appeared as an extra in a soap almost daily... but my longest in-front-of-camera gig was as a regular recurring character in the comedy-soap-factual show I made for Sky.

I've mentioned it before but I didn't go into the ins and outs of being on tv. My character - I must admit to stifling a giggle as I type that, it sounds too luvvie for words, "ooh yes, dearie, my charact-orrrr had such a complex backstory... it was soooo difficult playing him I had to submerge myself in his every word for hours beforehand to get him just right..."

Arsenuts.

I turned up, put a wig on, a T-shirt with the show's logo on it (that had NEVER been washed, over 26 episodes filmed over 26 weeks - lovely...). I then had a black beard drawn on my face for no apparent reason. Well, there was one. I had a goatee beard for a while, in one of those fashion errors that everyone goes through, before I realised it made me look like an idiot. So I shaved it off during my summer break - sadly, we'd filmed the pilot episode of the show (which went out as episode 4 as we couldn't afford a proper pilot, even though we changed things after it)

The director insisted the beard was drawn back on as it made me look "authorative" - yeah right, more like it made me look even stupider. As the boss, standing there in a hot hippy wig, smelly T-shirt and stupid drawn-on beard, most of my staff laughed at me. But at least I didn't get recognised in the street or anything, a boon if ever there was one.

So I played a researcher for a fictional TV show about games, in the actual show about games I produced and wrote. It was already too post-modern for words, and this was 1994. One of the other researchers played a newsreader (fake tash, no trousers, suit jacket) and got coaching from Sue Cook off of Crimewatch to make him more proper. He was very posh and took it all far too seriously. I simply made him Mr News to his desk with no trousers on in most episodes. It looked stupid and made me laugh.

The two other researchers played, er, researchers. Me and them would appear twice in each show and review games. It was filmed in this chaotic games room in batches of 5-6 episodes, a high camera with me and my researcher researcher standing looking up at it, the other researcher researcher sitting at the back.

Here's the character part. I was called Spike and I moaned a lot. Researcher researcher one was called Freebie and he believed all the PR crap about games - ie was enthusiastic. So enthusiastic he went to work in games' PR when the show ended. And researcher researcher two was called Saddo, wore a woolly hat and gave all the geeky info on games.

I hated doing the reviews. It was filmed live and you had to basically talk in 20-30 second sound bites, all three of us throwing to each other, getting across relevant 'journalistic' points, yet being funny; mentioning anything important and leaving plenty of cut points so we could put footage in or cut the review down if needed.

By the end I was quite skilled at it, looking at camera properly (not that easy, just try it some time), mugging and making faces if people disagreed with me, talking reasonably pithily and that. But eight hours of filming that, especially in summer, was totally exhausting.

We all also appeared in the comedy part of the show, usually at a 'production meeting' at the start, and often in the background of other shots. This was a mixture of boring and stressful, especially if we had to 'act'. As producer I simply cut my lines out so got to do less and less as the series went on, but the occasional one slipped through and my hammy acting, odd accent and sweating form was not something I liked to see.

The best ep I was in I actually got a body double to do me, Jake our props guy. He was a far better Spike than me, even if he had his back to camera all the way through the episode. It was a party ep and Jake/Spike could dance far better than me/Spike ever could.

I was recognised precisely once, in a Chinese takeaway that, oddly, had Sky on in reception. I'd ordered a curry and then up Spike popped on the telly, talking in the same voice. The teenage bloke serving me looked at the screen, then me, then the screen quite puzzled. I said "yeah that's me", in a slightly proud "do you want an autograph?" way.

He looked at the screen, then at me again, then said "nah" and walked off.

When I was in a soap opera...

2008-01-25T17:47:00.000Z

Yes, the dodgy cable company I worked for did a soap opera for a while. It was set in a dodgy cable company. Oooh, big leap there, eh? Sort of like Moving Wallpaper but made for the budget they spend on hairspray. Genuinely - it cost something like two grand an episode.

Sets? Free! Let's just film it in our office!

Scripts? Free! We'll get our staff writers on other shows to do them! (This eventually changed)

Locations? Free! We'll film in the (then) deserted streets of Docklands, without permission or anything.

Actors? Almost free! We've done a deal with Equity meaning we can pay 'em £50 a day or sommit. But we'll pay more for some. A bit more.

Producer and director? Free! We'll use people on staff. Again.

It was totally hilarious, like one of those odd African soaps you see around channel 190 on Sky. Long shots (editing = money)... hardly cutting (one camera)... dark, dingy, mushy lighting (lights = money), terrible acting and even worse costumes (no budget for costumes, people just wore what they came in)

And they'd film it at the end of your desk. So I'd be sitting trying to think up ideas next to my staff who were producing actual shows and that, then an over-made up fortysomething lady would sit next to me screeching at a hammy man out of Grattan's underpants ads "No, it's not your baby! It's Sir Mortimer's!!!!1!". Over and over again until everyone else on the desk remembered not to look at camera.

Surreal. Once me and my techie biker mate pretended to have a fight in the background of a shot and they actually used it on air. I seem to remember one of the characters ad libbed and said "Look, the channel's financial plight is affecting the staff morale!!!11!!!". But that might be my head trying to justify why they did it.

The show was terrible, beyond bad, but was the baby of the Head of Programmes so ran for six months. They cancelled it, and gave me and my fledgling animation department the job of making the last shot where Canary Wharf disappeared. Which we did to a Tardis sound effect, the tower fading in and out of shot. The reason for it ending that way? Well aliens were running the station secretly and decided to take Canary Wharf Tower away with them. Or something. My head probably made that up too, but I reckon in this case it was probably worse.

When they repeated the "best" of the series, it was labelled as the programme name then ": Silver". Legendary Tabloid Editor who ran the station said "the show's ain't anywhere near good enough to be called 'Gold'", so Head of Programmes suggested "Silver?" and they all had a laugh.

Them were the days.

Coming next time: how I played a researcher in a show I produced and wrote about a crappy TV station. Are you noticing a theme here?

"Starring" on tv

2008-01-24T13:42:00.000Z

I've been on telly quite a bit I suppose. The first time was when I was junior researcher on a show, and had to organise a video game review segment. I had 13 episodes to do in one day, each with 3 games in it, then some spare games. Each was reviewed by 4-5 people, to cut together into packages of 2-3 comments per game and a score.

Some of the games were so far ahead of release we, er, hadn't seen that much of them. Stories of other shows I know reviewing a game from a faxed copy of the cover and a still aren't that wide of the mark... at least I'd managed to get all the games in for the reviewers to play, a first.

It all went champion - the reviewers were (a) on time; (b) concise; (c) funny; (d)informative and (e) accurate (in order of importance for telly). Except one got stuck and didn't turn up*

There was a tradition when this happened. Researcher had to go on.

Gulp.

So it was 5pm, after being up at 5am to organise this thing (tired); boiling hot studio (sweaty); dressed for comfort (scruffy) and without any preparation (stupid) that I made my tv debut. I was labelled as a "games expert" - everyone else had the name of the games magazine they worked for as a credit in exchange for their employer letting them come along for free.

I remember the first game, Jimmy Connors' Tennis. It was poo. I said something to the effect of that but in far too many words. The director teased me and said that I was rubbish, and I needed to think in 15 second soundbites, just like I'd told everyone else. Yeah, yeah, you sarcastic twunt, I thought as I gritted my teeth and smiled into the incredibly bright lights (ow sore contact lenses). The makeup lady came (she was there to take our presenter off to do something else, not for us) and dabbed my swatty brow, looked at me and just kinda shrugged. Oh well. I prepared my soundbite.

"This game is about as playable as a box of used tissues"

Everyone laughed. Brill. Cool.

The next few games were better and I got to be dead fluent and funny, the director even saying how I was a natural at it, great with the camera etc.

And then I forgot about the day totally, working my arse off until Xmas when I finally got some time off. Up North I go, to visit family and friends, and then I get a call from the producer to tell me I'm the undoubted star of the Xmas Eve edition of the show. I'm a bit confused, and can hear laughter and the show's theme music in the background - they must be watching it in an edit.

I excitedly tell everyone I'm on the telly and that. I gather with my family and we sit and watch the show. Obviously my parents are confused ("what's going on here?" they say repeatedly, never having watched the show before) but it finally gets to the review section.

And, yes, there I am! Cheers all round. It's the tennis game and my killer line about used tissues. Hohoho, my family all laugh - apart from Pedantic Brother ("but used tissues aren't in a box", he whines, "they'd be in the bin or on the floor")

Up comes the next game and I shush them all up, saying how I'm better on this one. And... er, oh. Apparently that game is about as playable as a box of used tissues as well. Hmmm. Well, no time to wait, here's the final game. There's me, and I'm not saying that line. I'm looking to camera and asking "well what CAN I say about this one?". That wasn't meant to be used, that was me thinking on my feet. Never mind, I'm sure I said something good - natural, the director said.

Yes, you guessed it, they used my tissue line again. And our lovely presenter made a pithy innuendo about me getting through rather a lot of tissues, something I hope went over my parents' heads.

I was told when I got back to work the boss had gone ballistic with the producer and director. Not about making me look foolish, but about compromising the show's editorial authority.

I realised soon afterwards, by the snarky comments of the Very Unpopular AP on the show (ie never been asked to be on it) as well as my friends on other shows, it was actually a bit of an honour to have the piss taken out of you in that way. Apparently. Allegedly.

Remember, kids, appearing on tv is a double-edged sword. My parents and mates up North genuinely thought I'd said the same stupid thing three times. The rather good games I'd appeared to slag off - well, the companies weren't too happy but realised I'd been stitched up and ended up buying me beers to commiserate. And the director and producer, after giggling like little girls when I first turned up, said my other comments on the other games would play properly (which they did).

Even if at the end of the series I won the 2nd Worst Hairstyle Award Ever. And considering the quiffs and mullets on show, that wasn't fair either. I nearly said "tennis" instead of "fair" but I've had an aversion to tennis comparisons since these events.

Next time: my "acting" debut...

*It turned out the missing reviewer hadn't even been asked to come. He was a mate of one of the other reviewers, who'd been told by our presenter not to bother to get him on as they wanted me to do it. So it was all a set up...

And finally...

2008-01-22T13:36:00.000Z

So it's been a while since I've posted. Oops. Been away (Switzerland, thanks for asking, and the only tv I saw there was BBC One. It was odd watching the BBC London News in Zurich - they just take the main Beeb feed so that's there by default. Still shit though...)

Also not been much on the telly, apart from endless shows about chickens (enough, please, Jamie, Hugh and Gordo) and a big rejiggle of ITV1.

The truth is does anyone give a monkey's chuff about News at Ten and Sir Trev and That Lass Off Of Sky and The Bongs? I do, obviously, as I lurrrrrve pretentious pompous news graphics and music - yay NaT for being totally Day Today about the whole thing, with echos of the old BBC News graphics when they used to look like a Nazi propagranda video (http://youtube.com/watch?v=C3wpcsKzgIk&feature=related) or was beamed from London and space (http://youtube.com/watch?v=vPmiB6IhShs&feature=related)

I once did the news. It was a Sunday afternoon in July, on an infamous cable station that has more people remembering it than ever could've seen it. I was in a rabbit costume, mainly pretending to play tennis at the Wimbledon results. There was someone else actually reading the news obviously. Hey, we took our news seriously. So a 19 year-old work experience person read it, working the autocue with a pedal and sitting in front of a static camera.

The only reason I was on was that the person who should've been dressed up like a rabbit pretending to play tennis was trapped in the bogs. I think he'd had a dodgy curry or something but when the panicking Boy Newsreader ran over and said I'd have to be the bunny I didn't exactly jump at the chance. I was the only other person in, true, and the boss would fire him if he saw a news bulletin without his beloved bunny in it, yes, but why me?

The costume smelt of stale sweat and, bizarrely, chips.

Apparently I was "ok for the tennis bit but shit at the news miming", as the boss told me the next day. As I was Head of Stupid Ideas, it had proven quite funny that I was all bunnied up.

Next day I starred in the even rubbisher soap they made next to my desk. But that's another story...

Moving Wallpaper / Echo Beach

2008-01-11T09:04:00.000Z

Yes I sat and watched ITV1's new flagship comedy/soap/sitcom/drama thing last night. My main interest, to be frank, was in the adverts. They actually showed a one for Cheese Strings.. or is it Cheezstringz? I've never seen such a product advertised on primetime telly. For a show aimed at an upmarket audience, it was an odd thing to see.

And my view? Well, as a tv producer I enjoyed Moving Wallpaper. But I always enjoy shows set in telly, it ticks a box on my anorak list of things wot I like. I even put up with Studio 60 far longer than any normal human being with working eyes and ears should.

To be frank, the comedy one wasn't as funny as it could've been. And - although this is a minor thing - utterly unrealistic in every single way. Ben Miller seemed to think a Nasty Cynical TV Producer is the same as any soap bastard but just talks with his mouth more closed than is natural. Maybe he's pretending to have Botoxed his cheeks but it just came across like he was mumbling a lot.

I think the major flaw is that other tv-shows-about-tv-shows have programme clips in them - the sublime Larry Sanders, the up-it's-own-ass Studio 60, 30 Rock, even back to Mary Tyler-Moore and Murphy Brown. The mixture of behind-the-camera and in-front is where a lot of the comedy can come from, the alomst immediate juxtaposition of the two forms can be dead funny.

Apart from a lame gag involving an extra getting a line 'cos she blew the producer, none of the actors in Echo Beach turned up in Moving Wallpaper. You then end up waiting 45 minutes for a reference to a wet room to turn up in front of the camera when it was obviously a punchline... well, it's not ideal for comedy timing purposes.

Others have pointed out a soap audience isn't going to watch a post-ironic sitcom about making it, and that's undoubtedly true (he confidentially asserts before seeing the ratings) But, post-ironically, my dislike of soaps mean I don't watch them and therefore I quite enjoyed Echo Beach as the no-doubt cliched acting, hilariously literal music, familiar faces from other shows (look, it's that dead one from Corrie! Ooh, isn't that Mrs McClusky from Grange Hill!)... all this is new to me. Like ads for string made of cheese.

In my humble opinion, one of the reasons this concept took so long to get on air was that it's fundamentally flawed. It somehow worked better when they said they'd show the soap on ITV2 after the comedy on ITV1 - not sure why a change of channel makes it right but it kinda does. I s'pose the soap cost too much money or something (lots of helicopter shots, no volume savings like a daily soap).

A sitcom set around people making a soap should be ideal. The people-who-don't-like-each-other-trapped-together thing is there, big characters etc. etc. - it works. But maybe Acorn Antiques total cheesiness made the actual producers (not the fictional ones... sigh, this gets confusing) plummet upmarket and try to be sophisticated. Hmm. I've got friends who've worked on soaps and they've told me plenty of great stories, like the lead actress in a, er, hospital soap who can't ever remember the word 'hospital' and screws up every line with it in.

I'll give it another go - hell, it's the first episode(s) - but my season pass is more than likely to be deleted soon.