The agony and ecstasy of tv

New post, new font. It's a bit clearer, that's all*

I've just been sent a link to a website that's made me howl with pain. But in a good way. Sort of.

http://www.myspace.com/minisodenetwork

It's not that well implemented but basically the idea is to compress old hour-long shows to five minutes, to fit with today's tiny attention spans. It's quite funny, although the shows they've used are rubbish. I find it hard to believe they've actually bought rights or cleared anything, more that they think cutting up ancient Yankish shitcom Who's The Boss is post-ironic modernism or sommit.

My howl is because I've been trying for ages to flog a tv channel entirely based on short programme length. 2minuteTV, to be precise, a channel where everything is... I'm sure you're ahead of me.

I've been trying for five years and even won a Broadcast magazine-sponsored competition for best new idea with it. I've spoken to funders who got very excited and then... well, then they weren't any more.

The idea's got a few things in it that are unique, and just in case anyone reading this has a couple of million squid they want to bung my way I won't spill all the beans. Needless to say it's v cheap to make, v varied to watch and v carefully thought through to work financially and creatively.

I'll give you three of the ideas in it:-

• There's a spoof drama series called Avenue Road which works in two minute slots as it consists of a "previously on Avenue Road..." recap and a "next time on Avenue Road..." trailer. And nothing else.
• There's a list in the corner showing what's up next, what you're watching and what you've just missed. The latter is the bestest invention as it means if you've just missed something you like, you're more likely to think good of the channel. It's like if the Tube had an indicator saying a train left a minute ago you would feel better about waiting seven minutes for the next one. Probably.
• Any channel with Sherlock Homeless on it is surely a winner.

Now I know Al Gore's currentTV does 'pods' of 5-9 minutes' length, and mixes current affairs with sports and cartoons and the like, but it's, er, all somewhat worthy and that. 2MinuteTV is anything but worthy.

The Minisode network and Mr Gore's channel made me howl because it kinda sorta proves the idea works - but those channels are so not what mine is about. There's a full business plan, channel line up and oodles of catchily-named promogrammes if anyone's interested. And a slogan. I like them.

2MINUTETV. You're never more than 2MINUTES away from something else. Not necessarily something better but definitely something else.

Bit long perhaps?


*Trebuchet is a lovely font but Verdana is clearer really, important on small screens. As I found out trying to read websites on my little handheld PC. Hence the change, fontfans.

Thinking on your feet...

Live telly is something quite, quite different to working on recorded stuff. I've mainly done the latter but when I have worked on the former it's really got my juices going. As in I've been (a) shit-scared; (b) adrenaline-fuelled; and (c) absolutely exhausted afterwards.

The old maxim is the audience love it when a live tv show goes wrong - and they do - but as a producer you hate-hate-HATE it when everything goes moobs up.

Some of my toppermost and bottomest live tv experiences:-

BAPTISM OF FIRE

A tiny-rated gameshow for Sky where viewers would control tacky games I'd produced by shouting instructions. Satellite tv had a 3 second time lag - to get the picture up to the satellite then back down to 12 Acacia Avenue - so the games had to be, er, helped along a little to make sure they worked at all. And before the TV Honesty Police look up my IP address and throw me in jail, we only ever helped the viewers, we never hindered, and did it all equally for everyone. Isn't that nice and fluffy?

Anyway, my first experience of live tv and jolly thrilling. Even if it was presented by Mick "Mick" Brown off of Capital Radio (who used to have to record his afternoon radio show and pretend it was live tsk tsk) from a bright pink gypsy-caravan-style 'set'.

BEING IN CHARGE OF SOMETHING

A slightly-less tiny rating gameshow for Sky where I'd been promoted to be "games producer" - ie I sat with the guy in charge of running the video games live on air and we tried to make sure they actually worked at all. Now the kids pressed the number buttons on their phones to control the games, all via some big grey box that had a phone socket at one end and a joypad-replacement socket at another.

Things worked fine with two-player games as each had the same hindrance, even if they looked like they were being played by people with no fingers. Or brains. Or eyes. But the one-player games needed help. My main role was to stop the show's Actual Producer melt with nerves every week, as he was rather highly-strung, had fallen out with my mate who did the games (to the point of lawyers being involved) and was wound up to the point of explosion every week. My mate getting drunk with me the night before, sleeping in someone's shed and turning up just before airtime didn't help matters.

CAPTAIN PUGWASH

The bizarrest of the lot, a live Sunday afternoon 'yoot' show from a little boat in Docklands. I was in charge of coming up with something live to do inside the show's 40-celsius hull each week, fitting with whatever stupid arsey theme the show had. I didn't like the show at all - it was interactive, in that the viewers chose the feature content (after picking the presenters in the first place, in a live show where the wrong winner was announced - so the show ended up with an extra, really useless, presenter from the get-go).

My live bits were, er, a bit crap to be frank. The best one was the last instalment of a feature where we were putting a band together. We had to pick a drummer, but whatever Z-list actual pop drummer man we had booked to do the deed didn't turn up. Cue panic all around. As someone who didn't care, and really would've loved to be fired, I was totally calm. I said to leave it to me and went off to the office. Cue screaming and shouting and that. I said, again, give me three minutes on air and it'll be fine.

(My boss, by the way, was loving this - she thought fights between the staff were A Good Thing)

I came back armed with three phone numbers. The show started and I got the telephony guy to get the three people I'd selected from the phone book lined up. The Actual Producers said they trusted me (except I could see them lining up an emergency video bit just in case).

And so it was that three drummers played solos and the 'best' was picked by three totally random blokes called Phil Collins. One was deaf and saying "what?" loudly. It was a top piece of telly. My boss said I was a genius. The Actual Producers smiled and thanked me profusely. I went home to bed early - hey, it was a Sunday afternoon and I worked six days a week...

I still wouldn't let them put my name on the show though. On the final episode they put me down as 'Token Male Producer', which I found totally, yeah, sexist, mmm?

When my Tivo gets the heave-ho...

My Tivo is a thing of wonder. Conceived when Sky+ was nary a gleam in Mr Murdoch's eye, when a 'Mediacenter' was the place WNBC6 Boston beamed their Action News from, when Freeview was the nineteen minutes after midnight the softcore adult channels broadcast unencrypted to entice the dirty mac brigade in...

So I bought the first PVR available (early adopter, as ever) and have lovingly maintained it through three remotes and two new hard drives (thanks eBay!). It's a bit slow and can't hold many shows; it only has one input so if you're recording something that's all you can watch, it takes around 4 seconds to change channel (by feeding the adjacent Sky box through a hidden wire) and it's the size and weight of three VHS recorders glued together, but it's a lovely, lovely thing.

Until recently I had no choice in what PVR I could have. I live in a block of apartments with a communal dish. When I rang Sky to ask about Sky+, they put me through to their 'local authority housing' department. Harumph. The results weren't good. Sky+ needs two inputs and the whole 39-flat block would need to be rewired. But, hey, they'd send the new dish for free.

So Tivo it was, and it still is my recording option. It has three features I love. The first is a cartoon opening sequence when you switch it on. It's champion. The little Tivo logo surfs along on cogs and chips to a grand trumpet fanfare and stands in the top corner, swaying slightly. The second is the fact the backgrounds all animate nicely too, and there's no Sky-style muzak. And the third is that, bless it, the Tivo tries to predict what you should like to watch.

You're supposed to give shows thumbs up or down if you like them or not, up to three each way. That, along with what you record, tells Tivo what you might quite like to see coming up. It's hilarious in how wrong it can be.

I once set it to record American Queer as Folk on E4 (much better than the UK one) then the ten millionth repeat of seminal doc series The World At War on the History Channel. Tivo struggled with this information for a wee while then decided that the Five documentary Was Hitler Gay? was the motherlode, it's best recommendation ever. I'm sure the little Tivo logo man was actually jumping up and down*

For work I record a lot of cartoons, and I have an unhealthy appetite for Sunday afternoons full of light tat and rubbish, so mix repeats of QI with US TV gossipfest The Soup from E! Entertainment Television and the aforementioned World at War. Tivo therefore gets very confused. I had to switch the feature off in the end as it would sit for minutes at a time, stuck, pondering what the hell to say I should watch. And then recommending The Hoobs. There's never any need to watch The Hoobs. Ever.

Exciting news has just reached me though - our block can now get Sky+ and even Sky HD by putting up a new dish and some sort of frequency splitter to send out the two different feeds down one wire. Finally I can record one thing and watch another! At last I can have a picture feed to my HD screen that doesn't look like Teletext close up! And, wonder of wonders, I can go back to hopping channels in fractions of a second instead of pressing channel up and waiting for Tivo to slowly type '1...0...2' and move it on.

Tivo is hardly used now. Some of the newer channels have no programmes listed on Tivo, even when they do on Sky. I imagine an old lady typing them up on a manual typewriter inbetween knitting jumpers. She'll be in Sky's call centre in Scotland as that's where you call if you have a Tivo problem. I've called a few times. It's always the same woman. I think she's the only Tivo employee now.

But I'll feel a pang of affection for my Tivo, the hundreds of hours of television I've watched on it. The ickle dancing Tivo logo man with his lovely cartoon sequence. The way it thinks I live in BBC West's catchment area as the new hard drive I bought came from a man who did - and I have to retell it I live in London every few months.

But it was the first way to pause live telly, to record series with ease and to get rid of clunky, nasty VHS tapes. And for that I love it.

*By the way, the answer is no, Hitler wasn't gay. Another example of a programme with a stupid LOOK AT ME! title which sets up something that can't possibly be true. Thanks to Tivo, I ffw'd to the last three minutes with three button clicks and saw the expert saying Hitler was hetrosexual, possibly asexual, but not gay.

Watching TV eat itself. On TV

It's all getting even trickier at the coalface of tellingvision, what with all us tv types being tarred with the 'more dishonest than a Foxton's estate agent at bonus time' brush.

But, hell, we deserve it.

Reading the press over the weekend depressed me. There was some anonymous daytime BBC producer saying they didn't know what to do now as they couldn't cut together two separate auctions on two separate days as if they happened simultaneously. My question would be why are they doing that to begin with. OK, it might make Bargain Boot Challenge or Car Booty Hunt slightly more dramatic in their eyes, but - still - it's somewhat odd to complain you can't slap two things together and tell some porkies in voiceover and pretend something else happened.

One wildlife producer was also quoted saying he'd glued a dead beatle to a leaf to "tell a lie to get at a greater truth". Hmmm. Really?

The one thing I personally detest are noddies. No, not the rather marvellous children's cartoon, but the practice in news, factual and docs of having just one camera, filming an interview, then refilming it from a different angle with the presenter asking the questions again, and nodding/reacting to what was said. Often an interview is filmed, in effect, three times - the first close in on the interviewee, being asked and answering questions; the second over the interviewer's shoulder, just with a few general lines, the interviewer talking and the questions they asked previously dubbed on; then finally the noddies from the other side. The interviewee has often departed at this point.

The first time I saw this being done I was aghast. You can change the questions on pass #3 and present the answers as True Fact! And I did just that on a comedy/factual show a bit later. It was funny though, Brian May With The Hair Out Of Queen talking about some music for some video game or something, and we recut the interview to be entirely about his hair. But still... apologies to Mr May.

They should either send two cameras or not make interviewers and interviewees have to pretend, to act, to lie, when we're supposed to trust everything they say. It's The News for God's sake, not some infomercial for a video game. That probably excuses my behaviour but certainly doesn't excuse theirs.

Confessions

Well, just as I thought, the papers are full of stories about how dishonest tv is. Let's not look at the newpapers' own record when it comes to honesty, let's stick with the tellybox.

I, too, have some skeletons in my cupboard.

Oh blog, I confess that in 1996 I was 'a caller' on a phone-in show when I wasn't a bona fide member of the public, I was a bloke who worked for the channel sitting around the corner. I am SO sorry.

In my defence:-

• The station was L!VE TV, the world's oddest channel ever;
• The phone-in show, being on L!VE TV, had hardly any callers, as the channel's usual audience was 2,000 viewers an hour;
• The calls weren't premium rate or owt;
• It was a psychic show, with some woman reading 'the vibrations' in your voice. She was therefore talking shite;
• I can't remember her name - we called her Nina Biscuits for some reason, and they'd record 5 half-hour shows as live and she'd blether on talking shite about people's families, bad backs, relatives called John and the like;
• I tried to do a Northern Irish accent and failed;
• Nina Biscuits said I "had a lot of unresolved aspects" in my life. Yeah, like trying to do a Northern Irish accent and failing.

L!VE TV, despite a reputation for rubbishness, was actually quite a moral place to work. The boss fired the man who made the comedy show (half an hour a night, live, with a budget of £250) because he took backhanders from comedians to appear on it. No-one would see them AND they could put "as seen on TV!" on their posters. And when the weather lady was found out to be a prostitute, they got rid of her sharpish.

I'm struggling to think of any other tv dishonesty I've been involved in, as I watch some man on Sky talk about tv dishonesty. He's obviously sitting in front of a green screen, known as chromakey, and they're dubbing on a background of Westminster. There's tv dishonesty for you. He's probably *NOT EVEN AT WESTMINSTER* shock.

Sigh.

The BBC, the Queen and the documentary maker

Sounds like the setup for a gag or something, doesn't it? Sorry for the pause in my bloggerising, no particular reason for it. I s'pose I'm used to only bothering to typing up things if there seems like something to say. Kind of against the spirit of blogging perchance. Like using the word 'perchance'.

Anyway, my three-Euro-cents' worth on all this hoo-hah (sp?) about that trailer for the doco on HMQ. Why do I feel like some Californian bleached blonde teen (there's a first) and want to hold up a hand and go "Yeah, well, what-everrrrrrrrr?"

Every factual programme ever is 'economical with the truth', reality shows even more so. We've all read the tales of people leaving the Big Brother house and being shocked when they watch how they've been portrayed. Of course, they would say that, 'specially the racist or thick ones, but still - editing can make everyone who says anything look like anyone. Charlie Brooker did a great piece on it in his last season of Screenburn so I won't go into it here - he's much funnier, more successful and cleverer than me.

I sat and watched a great thing off of my PVR with Nicky Campbell in it (another first). It was Who Do You Think You Are?, the always-entertaining family tree yarn series. I say always entertaining - it was odd seeing David Tennant is actually Scottish. No he's not. He should talk like the Doctor ALL THE TIME. It should be in his contract. Someone make him do it.

Anyway, this fascinating doc was full of... well, I was going to say 'lies' but the legal birdie on my shoulder says I shouldn't. Erm, 'economical truth-telling scenarios".

Nicky found some stuff out, went to Australia and was amazed at what he found out there, then came back and told his equally astounded mum the news.

Except he didn't really. I'm sure the researchers who did all the finding out kept Nicky slightly in the dark, but I'm equally sure Nicky didn't trawl through thousands of documents in libraries as the voiceover implied. "Nicky went through the parish records" - er, no he didn't - "Nicky sat and looked at the parish records we'd found a few weeks before we spent £10K flying him over to Australia to sit here and pretend to look through them". Not quite as dramatic eh?

The punchline was that Nicky was related to the Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane. Again, this was presented as if it was all discovered when Nicky was there. But was it? Really?

Hey I'm not complaining. This is a brilliantly well-made show, top marks all round. But as a viewer I know - and accept - some liberties have been taken to make programmes more interesting for me to watch. As people get more media-savvy, this is surely not something to be shocked at. Although the Queen, bless, might not be as media-savvy as a teen used to YouTube. I liked the Queen more when it looked like she's gone in the huff. "You go girl", I thought, like a sassy big-haired big-boned lady off of Ricki Lake. Not a first there, I should add...

And as I can see from the Sunday papers lots of other 'shocking' revelations are coming to light. Star TV Chef Didn't Catch Own Fish As He Said! Newsnight Report Was Shown In Slightly Different Order! Yawn.

More advice for newbies...

Back from my hols where I made the mistake of telling a Random Young Person I worked in tv. The RYP then asked me how to get into telly.

Now I've been here before - http://televisionsecrets.blogspot.com/2007/03/getting-started.html - but before I went into my shouty monologue verbally stamping on his face until he shut up, RYP then surprised me.

"F'r example, yeah?, why did ya hire other, like?, people to work for yer, yeah?"

Hmm. So I gave him five examples:-

HIRING #1
They had exactly the same favourite episode of The Simpsons as me ( http://televisionsecrets.blogspot.com/2007/06/final-thought-on-comedy.html ) - 'nuff said;

HIRING #2
Their CV said their hobbies included “drawing the strange images that flash across my mind”. This was the only thing I remembered about the twenty people I interviewed that entire day so, in a fit of desperation, he got it the job;

HIRING #3
She was a girl. Now before the sexism police put me away, it was job that way back then only men seemed to do. My entire team was male. My new hiring stopped their continual stream of shitty blokeish banter in its tracks, and made the place better for everyone;

HIRING #4
The guy came in wearing a hat. A Fedora hat;

HIRING #5
I was on holiday inbetween series and I returned to find six people hired in my absence, including a fat spotty sweaty mute man, a bitter shouting Welshman, a far-too-tall posh bloke who was already asking for more money before I sat down and a flailing gibbon of a man who appeared to possess six arms and four legs.

--

And you know what? Simpsons Guy is now a really good mate of mine. Strange Images Guy ran a channel. The Girl One was excellent and has worked with me forever. The Holiday Hirings were the weirdest bunch of people I’ve ever worked with but ended up making a terrible show into something rather good.

Only the Hat Man was a mistake. He was on the run from the CSA, wanted to be paid in cash and slept under his desk. He went to Alaska in the end, I believe. With a warmer hat I hope.

TV SECRET:
THE REASONS SOMEONE IN TV MIGHT HIRE YOU ARE EVEN MORE RANDOM THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE

As you can imagine, the Randon Young Person didn't really say much to all this. Mind you, that was because he was distracted. We were in St Tropez next to some yachts and some James-Bond-villian-type one turned up so RYP ran off to see who was on it. And, yes, it was a celeb. That Australian pap photographer Darren Thing with amusing hair. Sigh.