Adverts

Three phrases that make me want to vomit:-

1 From anyone who works in tv:
"This is a very important piece"

Piece. PIECE?! No, it's not a piece. It's a programme. A show. A series. A one-off. It's not a piece. That's something out of a jigsaw. The word is usually bandied about for dull documentaries about worthy things, or those po-faced docudramas that "shed new light" on something Current or Bad, like Iraq. I know it's nasty and horrible and Our Boys are doing and have done some nasty and horrible things. It's a war for Christ's sake, and we don't need someone off of Hollyoaks and that old one out of Heartbeat pretending to kick some poor innocent prisoner to tell us that.

2 From anyone who commissions comedy programmes
"The core problem is that the main character isn't sympathetic enough"

My reply would be "You know I think the core problem is you haven't a bloody clue". I say 'would' as if I actually said that I'd never get any comedy commissions and I need the work. I actually nod and say "hmmmm" as my mind flashes images of me stabbing the commissioning exec with a knitting needle. In their eye. Or maybe their ring "piece".

Name a sympathetic yet funny sitcom lead. Borderline psycho Basil Fawlty? Lazy, useless, child-strangling Homer Simpson? Worst boss ever David Brent? OK, I know, Homer loves his kids really, and Brent means well and is desperate to be liked, and Fawlty... er, um, well, has few redeeming features apart from his height. But sympathetic? No. They're not. They're monsters. And that's what makes them funny.

3 From any viewer
"British tv ads are the best in the world"

Just stop it right there. Our ads are the most stupidly complex, artsy-fartsy, "look how clever we are"-type "pieces" in the world. American ads are the best in the world - they have to be, they have the most highly evolved commercial tv market anywhere. By "best" I mean they do what it says on the tin - they ADVERTISE things. A fat shouting man in a cowboy hat called Chad will stand in front of his carpet warehouse covered in CHAD'S CARPETS signs and bellow "I'M CHAD AND I RUN CHAD'S CARPETS. IF YOU WANT A CARPET, CHAD'S YOUR MAN, AND CHAD'S CARPETS IS WHERE YOU FIND THE BEST CARPETS AT THE BEST PRICES, PERSONALLY GUARANTEED BY ME, CHAD, FROM CHAD'S CARPETS".

OK, so you won't go "oooh" at the arty waves turning into pretty horseys as some monovoiced thespian intones crap about tick following tock, but I guarantee you'll remember Chad and Chad's Carpets. And that's what adverts should be for, not to bolster the ego of some coked-addled stupidly-bequiffed ad exec.

And don't get me started on car ads, with endless swooping shots of the Ford Boobjob or Fiat Bumhole driving through mountains. All people care about is how much it costs and whether it's got a fancy start button or iPod connection. You're never going to drive your VW Arsecheek over the Alps. Ever. You're going to drive to Tesco and back. That's what it's for.

OK, rant over. Next time I'll talk about something nice. Promise

Religion and drama

I know it's been a wee while since I last graced the interweb but, hey, breaking into the most lucrative tv market there is has taken all my time up.

Religious tv.

I'm not going to tempt fate and/or any gods by talking about that much here. Just to say that, as ever, tellydom is so random that a rabid non-believer like me can be in charge of a show about Jeebers (as Homer Simpson once referred to Him). I've done three things:-

• Made sure one of the characters is aetheist (yes, I know - "is there an agnostic?" - no there's not and that's fine, OK);
• Got a proper religious expert to check things (actually the channel did... very wise of them, even if one of my staff nearly finished one term of a course on, as he put it, "Islamism and them others"). He's now a Pastafarian. Don't google it. It'll just encourage him;
• Spent rather too long debating with said Pastafarian about religious-themed hats. Veils, skullcaps, turbans...

Mmy reason for blogging today is drama on BBC Four. I watched one last night and it... well, it was just as I expected. Marie Lloyd, the musical hall lady out of the early nineteen hundreds, featuring Kat Slater off of EastEnders and lots of top hats.

Entertaining though it was, this was exactly like that Kenneth Williams thing from last year (who's next I wonder, Bob Monkhouse?). They simply don't have enough money. Now I'm an expert in making stuff on the cheap - hell I did a sitcom-gameshow-factual-yoof thing for Sky for £10K an episode - but with period drama you kinda expect something more than covering the set in tinfoil to pretend it's the future. (That didn't happen on the Marie Lloyd thing. I did that on the Xmas special of the Sky thing. Christmas past, future etc. etc.)

Back to the drama. Tight shots of a music hall audience consisting of five people. One horse and cart. Bits skipped over and not shown as they'd cost too much. Patchy acting from the (probably) cheap cast. Lots of backstage scenes. Oh, and a guy wandering around singing old songs to camera at certain points. Odd.

Anyway, Kat Slater was fine - apart from when she was pretending to be a teenage girl. I mean, come on... was it an ego thing or a we-can't-afford-another-actress thing?

Now back to religion. I need to find out at what age lady-woman-Muslims start to wear a full burka/hijab/whatever. Joy...

Getting Ahead In Television

What's the talent you need to have the most to succeed in tv? That's the question no-one asks - let's face it, watch most tv shows and you'd imagine no talent at all is the best way to be. But I'll plough on anyway.

Say you didn't work in the meeeeeeja but for FLPHC Ltd, Fred’s Little Paper Hat Company. It’s one of around two thousand other similar paper hat companies – not in the UK but in London alone. Some are bigger, some are smaller but they’re all competing to the death in a desperate cut-throat market, forever coming up with newer, better, more inventive head coverings of a paper-type nature.

The paper hat market is so competitive because there are only ten people who buy them. Ever. And most of those ten make their own hats in-house, employing – for example – the Fred who set up your company and left years ago, taking all his considerable paper-hat-making-expertise with him.

This didn’t impact your profits much because there aren’t any really as the ten people who buy hats get to see all your costs and pay you a small percentage ‘profit’ on the top. Which normally goes to improve the quality of the hats anyway...

You hear stories, of the guy who invented a paper hat that sold all over the world and made a killing, or the woman who did the first hat aimed at 0-2 year olds and is now worth two hundred mil, but FLPHC is only just managing to scrape by.

All it ever seems to do is scrape by, even when it invented the Paper Pooper Wrapper Upper, the revolutionary combination of paper hat and receptacle to dispose of dog poo. Two products, I think you’ll agree, that had been apart too long.

Unfortunately within weeks every other paper hat company was making the same kind of headgear/turd wrapper combo and bang went your market advantage. Sigh. Never mind, there’s always tomorrow. And-

OK, forget paper hats. It’s tv as if you haven’t already guessed it. The tv industry is fundamentally fucked up because the normal rules of capitalism are reversed. There are thousands of producers to every consumer. Not the viewer – God forbid we mention them at all – but the channels who buy programmes. In this environment you primarily need one skill:

tv secret:
selling is everything

Selling, in a business with too many suppliers and not enough customers, is key. It might not seem that way at 2.34am when you’re alone in a dark office watching a battered old TV/video combo trying to find the one good take of your useless presenter introduce the crappy daytime shit you’re stumbling to finish but, no, he’s forgotten his line yet-a-fucking-again and back to the start and-

Nasty flashback there. Deep breaths. That's better.

Anyway, being a good salesperson is all in tv. Even if the creatives won't countenance such an idea.

Back from t'other side of the world

OK so I didn't get to post anything about Foreignland tv from the other side of the globe. Three simple reasons:-

• I didn't take my laptop as my slavish desire to travel hand-baggage-only trumps my wanting-to-interwebulate needs;
• I did have net access on hotel machines in their business centres but spent that time checking work emails. Sadly;
• My sunning/drinking/sunning-whilst-drinking time was paramount.

But I have to admit South African telly did have some genuinely odd moments.

The main soap (or "soapie" in the delightful way they refer to these things over there) seemed to be set in a coffee shop. The cast - seeming to stretch to around six people in any one episode even if there were twenty on the titles - were all fine soap actors. That is they can remember vast tracts of rubbish, spew it out without laughing or bumping into each other and hold the look of shock/upset/anger for the requisite five seconds at the end of every scene.

The plot was interminable, about someone nicking money from the till. I saw several episodes from this daily show over two weeks (it was on in between afternoon sunning and evening drinking times, I'm not that sad) but nothing happened in that plot in ten episodes. Hell, they discussed it at great length. And discussed who to discuss it with. But nothing actually happened.

So far, so Neighbours.

Except I must admit a huge admiration for this show, something I've never had for the Ramsay folk thing. Because the six cast members switched between languages at will. English in one scene, then Xhosa in another, then the occasional burst of Afrikaans. Subtitles popped up occasionally but not all the time. So these people had memorised pages of vacuous shite in three languages. Bless.

Otherwise the tv there was of a fairly standard abroad-like quality. Lots of 'empowerment' shows with people saying how they'd learned to read and got a job. Bad half-hour infomercials about car insurance. Cheapo sets. Hilariously bad graphics. Imports all over the place.

I must mention the one person who livened up every evening, the newscaster on SABC2's Afrikaans news service (or 'nuus', their cunningly disguised word). He was obviously a hundred years old, but disguised this masterfully with what must've been an inch of white powerdy makeup so he looked like Michael J. Fox's ghost. Without the twitches.

But the SABC2 makeup lady, obviously taken on after Barbera Cartland popped her clogs, didn't stop there. Mr Nuus's cheeks were wonderfully rouged up, two lovely red circles on his oh-so-pale face. And he wore one of the worst wigs I've ever seen - a full head job as well - in a fetching shade of gingery puce. It even seemed to be at a jaunty angle.

Champion.

I'll be back after this break...

Just a quick post today, on a Bank Hol and everything, to say I'm off on my hols for two weeks so this place might not be updated much. For five days I'll definitely not be posting anything, as I'm going to a place with no interwebs, mobile receptions or even electricity I think.

But on the other 9 days I'm in cities with all those things and so might be tempted into posting something about how awful tv is in the foreignlands. Three hour variety shows with topless ladies, fat balding presenters in primary-coloured tuxes and incomprehensible games. Versions of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? with the same music and set but a fat balding presenter in a black tux instead of Mr Tarrant, but the million is only worth around a grand. Badly-dubbed seventies American cop shows. CNN Interntational, the home of exotically-named and accented newsreaders - oh, and Richard Quest, the shouting English oddball, usually screeching away from a hot air balloon in some look-the-tourist-board-in-this-wee-country-has-paid-for-this-holiday-jolly-I-mean-big-proper-thing type show.

I'm lucky enough to have wangled a BA business class flight for my twelve hours and so am looking forward to the only time I really can sit through an entire proper movie. Strapped in, wine being topped up constantly, almost edible food turning up at regular intervals, flying to All Abroad And That is when I catch up with the fabulous world of film. Although everything's aimed at brain-dead twenty-year old Americans, obviously, and Borat is considered a work of subtlety and sarcasm. Ahem.

Off to pack my transparent unguent bag...

non-tv secret: hand baggage only is the only way to go

... and will post as and when I can, tvsecreteers...

The Worst Rejection Letter Ever

OK, so here's my worst rejection ever. It came to a programme format called The Greedy Bastard Show. The idea was to try and encourage people to do really bad things for money, to see how low they would go.

(Note to self: when following last time's tv secret rename the programme The How Low Would You Go Show. Better title. Rhymes and that. Hmmm.)

So this show was an hour-long late-night gameshow. The contestants would have no idea what was going to happen, and be known only by nicknames. Fatty, Skinny, Four-Eyes, Ugly, Dogface etc. The first round would be Piss Wins Prizes, where portaloos are wheeled on and the person who pisses the least is eliminated.

We'd then have a series of animals to be, er, humanely destroyed, starting with an ant (for a fiver) and then ending on a cute ickle doggie. Would you put a dog down for a hundred grand? If the contestant, like any normal person (but unlike most people who want to be on tv) was appalled, we'd say the poor ickle doggie was dying. In pain. The owner was going to do it anyway. Press the button to end Rover's life. Go on.

There were other games, from ringing up your partner and pretending to be HIV+ to smashing up badly-needed NHS equipment to win a Fiesta. The last round involved choosing between helping something you really believed in, like a charity or cause, and winning hard cash.

Before you lynch me, the whole thing was a spoof. Only the contestants and studio audience thought it was real. No doggie would die. Girlfriend knew boyfriend was reading a script. The NHS equipment wasn't real. We'd only reveal this after the last episode finished with what looked like someone dying and the show falling off air.

Cool eh? Well, sort of. Post-modern and ironic we thought, as did the boss of the achingly-trendy and edgy company I was working for. I'd never managed to impress him much - too square and sensible for his addled eyes - but this show made him howl with joy.

So I sent it in. To, er, the BBC. To a bigwig there I'd met once about a sitcom. He'd been very nice and seemed to like the comedy idea... well, until the mad idiot who was funding the pilot pissed everyone off and the sitcom fell to bits around me. That's another story.

He sent me back a letter saying that he thought the show wasn't post-modern or ironic, just awful and a new low for television. The idea about abortion made him physically sick. I won't type it in here as it was really, really, REALLY bad.

He ended by saying if British television ever screened anything this exploitative he'd leave the country, and that it was customary to wish people success elsewhere with a programme that was being rejected, but he wasn't going to do that here.

I was scared. Terrified. A really big important man hated me and thought I was a sicko. So I hid the letter and told my boss we hadn't heard anything. And buried The Greedy Bastard Show away.

Ironically, if not post-modernly, the BBC bigwig then left the country. And British tv began to screen shows where shouting Welshman set fire to their penises, and minor celebrities ate testicles for laughs. And, apparently, a radio station somewhere did Piss Wins Prizes.

Tsk.

Titles (ii)..

Exciting news - two emails have flooded into TelevisionSecret's HQ. OK, both from the same person (hello "Bazza") and one was correcting a typo, but, hey, I was thrilled to get any feedback to my bletherings.

I have to say, "Baz" - if I can call you that; I kinda feel I know you somehow - that you're not actually correct in your assumption I whipped the title of Propertunities from a certain .co.uk Spanish villa seller I'd never heard of. Their website says (c) 2001 onwards so let's assume that's when they started. I've no idea mind you but I can assure you, dear readerines, that my interest in Spanish property is zero. And I haven't gone to the bother of actually researching anything properly either. Oh no. You've probably worked out already.

Yes, I am a shyster and have been known to, er, take inspiration from everywhere. But, Mr B, you underestimated the longevity of my career of making up daytime shit for the tellybox. My first one-liner for Propertunities was written in late 1996, when C5 was just starting to commission stuff. (I was at their tenth anniversary party last week and would impart any scurrilous gossip but I didn't really notice much. Trisha's quite short. Er, Matthew Wright's not that short. I drank lots of shorts. End of story)

My boss snorted coffee out of her nose at my pitch - the same rubbish there's-not-really-a-show-just-a-title stuff I mentioned last time - and said "NEXT!". She went for the daytime magazine show idea I'd had, even though it was very poor. It had to run from 1pm to 3pm and I'd called it "1to3" (sigh). She hated the title but it was the biggest commission financially ("you can tell they're the fifth channel 'cos they expect you to make their crap for a fifth of the price!" she screamed)

It didn't get commissioned. Gloria Hunniford did instead. Bless.

tv secret: old tv ideas never die - just dust 'em off and sell 'em again a wee while later

Just make sure it's someone else in charge when you re-submit "Britain's Ugliest Babies: LIVE!". Which, with the average life expectancy of a commissioning editor, means waiting all of, oooh, six weeks max.

Next time I'll spill on The Worst Programme Rejection Letter I Ever Got, something I hid from my boss as it scared me senseless. The big TV cheese I'd sent an idea to even threatened that if any other channel in the UK screened my show he'd leave the country. And soon after he was off.