New talent, old clips...

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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.