tellymole.com

…why would you inflict such a fucking horrible TV programme on the nation?

It’s not often that I hate something within 30 seconds of watching it. But Fresh Ones’ BBC commission, ’Delicious Miss Dahl’ actually made me want to throw a brick through the TV, and one of her stupid little twee sash windows.

Floating around her faux-rustic designer kitchen, Dahl basically mimics a Nigella-esque food and literary wank-a-thon for the Laura Ashley brigade. I hated it so much that my hands are literally shaking with rage. I HATED this programme!

Now, some of my frustration with this self-indulgent, pretentious piece of shit is probably borne out of of the fact that I probably don’t fit into the target audience. Who is that, though? I can’t see who is actually going to have a use for the this programme. The recipes aren’t complex or original. We’re not seeing anything that anyone with half an ounce of cooking motivation hasn’t already done before. Chicken soup, bubble and squeak, some sort of salad thing. Yet, we’re treated to what seemed like about four hours of her unbelievably pompous babble on “how Winnie the Pooh is the embodiment of melancholy…” WHAT?? What the hell are you talking about? What the fuck do you even know about being melancholy anyway? Do you have a feeling of melancholy because you scratched your Maserati? Do you you feel a bit down because that rural health-food bistro had run out of your favorite elderflower juice? Fuck off. A few moments later, Dahl goes on to talk about how bubble-and-squeak from a ‘greasy spoon’ help to cure her first hangover… said with such a plum, I actually laughed. They don’t even have proper greasy spoons in Barnes or Oxfordshire villages, anyway. 

I don’t mind the floaty, lightweight composition of this programme so much. It’s shot well, it looks ‘nice’ (apart from the self-important links between recipes.. heavily-graded dirty frames shot through leaves, of Sophie, staring doe-eyed into space while loosly grasping a chunky, highly obscure piece of 19th century literature.)  It could be a good little programme. I can even put up with the fact that the thing is draped with a nauseating soundtrack.. exactly what I’d expect to find in a 30-something, middle-class woman’s CD rack - looking at the credits confirms that theme too.. a real floral estrogen-fest.

But I just can’t live with Dahl’s infuriating dialogue, though.  It’s pretencious, it’s sickly, it’s not patricularly helpful. I don’t care that she’s concocting a ‘bar room brawl’ of flavors or if she’s a ‘mushroom fiend’. That kind of talk actually offends me.

So this is a fairly short review of this programme, but as always - my main motivation for writing is when something really irritates me and I need to vent before doing some physical damage to my TV. To finish I’d like to put out a plea. Please. Do NOT re-commission this programme. If I ever accidentally stumble across it again, as I did today, it might actually ruin a decent chunk of my day. It’s that bad.

What I would like to see is a 1×60 of Sophie being force-fed McDonalds, made to live in a new-build studio flat in Thamesmead with a up-and-coming ‘grime’ MC called 8-Ball. She’d only be allowed to read Nuts magazine, wear clothes from New Look and drive an 11-year old Ford Fiesta. Working title, something like “Living Without Jus”.

When I say ‘you people’, I mean production managers. Years of mulling this over has recently brought me to the conclusion that I’ve got a massive issue with production managers. It’s something I’m not sure that I’m going to be able to get over… but then, I’m certain that my feelings are well founded. So who cares?

While trying to reverse-engineer my disdain for the PM and find out why I harbour such an apparently irrational feelings, I’ve come across, what I believe to be several fairly straightforward root causes.

I started by trying to figure out what characteristics the average PM displays which might have triggered this response in me. Well, for me, it’s just the overriding feeling that they don’t belong in the TV environment. They represent ‘health and safety’, ‘per diems’, ‘being careful’ and ‘checking to see if that’s in the budget’ - which, alone, makes me want to pull out my fingernails and use them to slice open my femoral artery.

Production managers always seem smug to me. I don’t know why. Maybe I see an evil within them that nobody else can see? It’s like… some girl who wanted to work in TV, to be able to say that they work in TV, but basically does an administrative job, but with a trendy fringe… kind of scenario. I get the feeling that the majority of PMs ‘gave up’ the TV idea when the tea-making got a bit too much, decided to bin-off any dream of creativity and just go for the one, solid, ‘officey’ role that exists in telly.

But WAIT!!! That’s not enough for the production manager, oh no! Production managers are given the illusion of power. A terrible, terrible thing. Firstly let’s re-cap what has happened to them so far; work experience, runner, (possibly a bit of junior researcher/PA/clapper loader/other dogsbody), then junior co-ordinator, production co-ordinator, junior production manager, production manager. So they’ve wound up in this weird role. A role that means they’re controlling a budget, making decisions on resources, ‘micro-managing’ little helper minions like junior co-ordinators, PAs and work experience peeps - but not really fitting into any sort of hierarchy of the production team. I can’t stand it!

A few weeks ago I heard a production manager lecturing an AP about arriving into the office 5 minutes late (on the back of about an 80-hour week). No!! Please don’t do that. Not your job. Your job is to schedule. Your job is to budget. Your job is to tell all your friends about the meeting you had with a certain ‘talent’ and post semi-cryptic comments about said ‘talent’ on your facebook status to lure your acquaintances into probing you for more details; ie ‘What a meeting today, my job really sucks. ps…FIT!!’.

Much of my anguish comes from a feeling that production managers simply haven’t experienced the highs and lows of telly. They haven’t spent those long hours on a set or location. They haven’t felt the creative demands of an unreasonable exec or commissioning editor. They haven’t lived their life in the depressing gloom of the edit suite, trying to knock 3 minutes off something that already feels too light… Yet they’re still around to hoover up the free drinks at the end with the rest of the team.

I would suggest the following changes be made across the TV industry.

1. I don’t think you should necessarily sit anywhere near the production team. We gain nothing from you being in close proximity. We have email. We have phones. I’d quite like you to be in a some centralised production manager call-centre, ideally in Bolton or somewhere else far away.

Me: “Hello is this my production manager?”

PM: “Yes, how can I help?”

Me: “I’d like some more stock for my production please. I’m also going to film next week, please prepare the call sheet.”

PM: “Of course. I’ll get right on it. I’ll give you £500 more float than you need, so under no circumstances will you need to use your own credit card for any production expenses.”

Me: “As it should be. Ta.”

2. Production managers should be specially trained from graduate level. They should have no aspirations to be part of the creative world of television whatsoever. They should be, quite simply;  competent organisers, properly drilled in the workings and processes of television production. If they own a pair of skinny jeans or signed up to the ‘Secret London’ facebook group just to feel a bit more cultured, arty and edgey - they should be ineligible for employment.

3. If a production manager begins to confuse the role of PM (ie managing the budget, resources and schedule of the production) with exec, series producer, producer or director (ie managing the creative aspects or creative staff of the production) - then they should be immediately reminded of their role (via the call-centre freephone number).

Well, look. Production managers, you’ll be glad to know that in writing this little article and exploring my annoyances a little more, it’s all proved quite cathartic for me. I don’t HATE you. I just find your role in the industry a little strange. That’s all. Why would ANYONE who spent the time and effort to break into the TV industry want to then just sit at a desk all day and feel important for slightly better money than an AP? Very strange. I mean, just go and work in the accounts department of a financial company. You’ll work less hours, have less stress, get an annual bonus and won’t be subjected to degrading internet rants. On the flipside, you won’t be able to impress your friends with ‘telly’ stories any more, or have a picture taken with the presenter at the wrap party…. tough call isn’t it?

The good news is that my rant here today has been inspired by only the worst of the worst. I just thought I’d poke a little fun while it was fresh in my mind. The majority of these girls do a very difficult job with increasingly smaller budgets and have to put up with a lot of shite from us creative types. Luckily the bad-eggs tend to move on to other jobs by their mid-thirties and the good ones move on to head-of-production roles or other suitably well-earned posts.

I’m now in two minds as to whether or not I should publish this post. I feel like I’ve been a bit cruel and pointless.

Sod it.

So first off, apologies must be made for the length of time inbetween blogs. 5 months or something like that? The obvious excuses would be that I’ve been super busy, which I have, but then there have been a couple of lazy weekends too. Suffice to say, the blog is alive and well, just slightly neglected.

So what’s been happening in TV in the past few months? Well the credit crunch still seems to have a firm grip on the industry… Even the BBC, who don’t have to worry about advertising revenues seem to be as sluggish as ever in their commission processing. There are fewer commissions in general and they’re harder to get than ever before. It goes without saying that budgets are looking about as grim as I’ve ever seen them, which sort of brings me around to what I wanted to talk about today; the cheapening of TV and poor pay and conditions as a result. I touched on elements of the issue in my rant on the Sony Z1 a few months ago. That was more about production values really, but you can certainly conclude that low production values quite often will be stuck over the top of a particularly shitty budget, like a manky old plaster clinging to the infected flesh surrounding a unsightly gaping wound. (Too strong? Nah, I’ll leave that analogy in for now).

But a bigger problem, I think, is that of freelancer wages. I don’t know about anyone else, but a couple of years ago when script writers in the US all simultaneously threw their pens down and shouted ‘NO MORE’, I couldn’t help but think ‘You bunch of absolute bastards’. Not because they disrupted a stream of awesome HBO Dramas..and ‘Heroes’ (well, maybe a little for this reason), but mainly because I instantly became furiously jealous of the strength of their union.

Its hard to imagine that happeneding within the UK television industry, isn’t it? Do we have just cause for such a revolution? Probably. As a whole we’re expected to take on  more work for less or equal pay. We’re working to tighter budgets, multi-tasking like never before and all while delivering programmes with supposedly the same level of quality. Is this fair? Its not uncommon to see jobs like this on productionbase; ‘Self-Shooting Producer/Director with fluent Japanese must have own FCP suite’.. Undoubtedly paying sub 1k a week.

Is it within our power to anything about it? Yeah, I think so. Now might not be the most appropriate time to begin a revolution, though. Even before the current financial crisis people were relieved to be in work in the freelance world. Now more than ever, there are hundreds of people would take a piss-poor weekly rate over unemployment. My worry is that even once the resession subsides, rates and conditions will continue along the same shitty path that they were long before we were talking about bankers bonuses and negative equity.

Think about how sickening it is when purchasing your Oyster card top-up, knowing that the driver of your tube train is enjoying a nice, steady 36k per annum, 38 days holiday a year, and a health plan to rival a top city executive…not to mention free travel across London. How do these jammy bastards do it? Union. And people need the tube. Well guess what, people need ‘the tube’ too!!

What on earth would happen if suddenly the freelance world went on strike? I’m pretty sure there would be suicides if suddenly there was no X-Factor. You can bet that even amongst a sea of tax-dodgers, benefit scammers and general lay-about scumbags… even the poorest of the poor would rather sell their children to some weird child circus (I’m assuming they exist) than ditch their subscription to Sky or Virgin. So how would the nation cope if suddenly their screens went blank? Would they JUST watch American TV? Here’s hoping that they’d miss out humble contributions.

In order for that to happen of course, we’d have to ensure widespread union membership throughout the industry. While there are still thousands of young-uns coming out of media courses willing to sell their kidneys to work in telly, it just aint gonna happen. The sad fact remains… If YOU don’t want that self-shooting-sound-recording-editing-japanese-speaking-trainee/junior-series producer role for £800 a week, some other cheeky fucker will. And the programme will be shit. But it’ll come in on budget and some mindless morons will love it and make a Facebook group about it too, while you’re at home gutted that someone else got your job because you got precious about how much money you were after….. ‘well not next time!’ you’ll tell yourself… ‘next time I’ll just take the bloody job!’

This is the world as the mole sees it at the moment. It needs to change, but I’m being completely hypocritical by spouting all of this nonsense without doing something about it myself. Maybe that’s the problem.. I find it ‘only just acceptable’ at the moment. In the same way that they seem to set train ticket prices ‘only just’ cheaper than if you drove to work, paid the congestion charge and parked. They know you’ll eat the shit sandwich because its almost too much hassle to complain. Rates are bad, but you can just about survive on them. Workload increases, but I’ll just end up staying in the office later. Crews keep getting smaller, but I’ll just do more of it myself. Programmes feel more and more like, ‘that wouldn’t have been acceptable 10 years ago’, but nobody cares now anyway. You see? A culture of acceptance has crept in! Will I ever be compelled to stand up and rally around support for a strong union? Maybe not. Maybe I’ll just pussy out and quit TV, bitter and miserable like so many others that just give up and start lecturing in a media faculty.

Quick show of hands then…who else is willing to stand up and fight?….

The Mole

TV’s a funny old place. It’s often quite disappointing for kids turning up into the industry to discover how gnarled and bitter the freelancing world is under that layer of sugary niceness that everyone puts on. The truth of it is, there’s hundreds of people in the industry that are consistently made miserable by the industries ways and are desperate to get the hell out of it. Don’t get me wrong, on the flip-side, there are thousands of us that are content with the way things are and are happy to put up with the down-sides.

Anyway, every now and then you’re given a stark reminder of how nasty things can get, ie the catalyst for this particular post. A couple of weeks ago I was given one such reminder when a friend of mine received one of those “I’m going to make sure you never work in this town again” emails from a disgruntled exec. who he hadn’t seen eye to eye with. I don’t want to go into too much detail, as it’d end up identifying the poor chap, but safe to say he didn’t deserve it. 

Every now and then I trick myself into thinking telly is a lovely place to be, a soft Tellytubby-esque grassy landscape where it’s safe to run around with no shoes on. Usually it’s while running around in this velvety-smooth grassy landscape, frolicking gaily without a care, that one usually ends up treading on a tetanus-ridden nine inch nail. That’s how I’m feeling today. I’m lying on the grass, prying a rusty old nail out of my blood-spattered foot while wondering why I tried to kid myself into thinking that telly was a lovely, harmless place to be.

Weak, melodramatic analogies aside - that’s the way TV makes me feel sometimes. You settle in to a nice run of getting back-to-back contracts, working with lovely MD’s, execs, etc and then a couple of times a year you meet some absolute c**t that poisons it all for you. Why do people feel the need to be so wanky? I remember going through a run of trying to find work as a runner (a few years back now) and after sending out hundreds of letters, finally securing myself a few weeks work experience at a couple of indies. My first stint at Leopard Films was a dream. Lovely people, not at all pretentious, very down to earth and I was made to feel immediately at home.

After a couple of weeks there, I went on to another indie during which time I’d landed myself an interview for an ‘internship’ at a third company. Wow! An internship!? Bloody brilliant! They were going to train me up to be a director, or a producer, or something impressive like that. Their website said so… “All of our interns get to work with celebrities and go on to be important people’.. or something like that. All I had to do was write down three proposals for programme ideas (which would be hoovered up by some lazy development prick, if half-good) and a begging letter telling them why I wanted to work in telly and why I’d be suitable. After a few weeks I’d been called for an interview. Walking in to that office nearly made me puke. The rumours were true! Telly WAS a pretencious, filthy place after all! The horror! Dozens of boys and girls with trendy haircuts busily scuttled around the office, not forgetting to keep that ‘pleasant demeanor’ plastered across their cutesy faces at all times. Seriously, everyone in this office was good-looking and gunning for next presenter’s opening. I was made to wait an extraordinarily long time for the big interview, by which time I’d already decided that I wanted to exit by the nearest 4th-story window. I was eventually greeted by one of the minions, and taken to a cold-looking corner office with a big conference table in it. Holy shit… my guard was really down after the friendly, informal nature of those other indies, what the hell was going to happen here? I was eventually met by one of the MD’s, Connie and later another important-looking person, Scott, who grilled me on why I wanted to be in telly for a few minutes and told me what a damn good opportunity it was to be in this interview before getting me to come up with some more programme ideas. I was given 10 minutes to scribble these down on a piece of A4 before being told ‘thanks’ and ushered out.

I never heard from that company again - but since sitting in that boardroom, being made to feel like an insignificant little urchin all those years ago - I’ve heard nothing but bad things about the place and some shockingly ‘TV prentencious’ tales about the people that run it. I’d put my feelings at the time down to naivety on my part, and nerves on the day - but so many dozens of people have reinforced my initial feelings when walking in to that office that it now remains the only production company in the world that I wouldn’t EVER consider working - purely because of who they are and what they represent. It’s funny that in a world where people are sometimes very wary of criticising a production company, for fear of never getting work there or because they’re worried about the sway the bigwigs there may have in TV circles…. this company always gets slated, usually putting a smile on my face, because I know I’m not alone.

Safe to say, if you’ve worked at this company, think you know who I’m talking about and don’t agree with me.. you’re probably also exactly the kind of person that this article is written about. ‘TV pretentious’, egotistical, two-faced, wanker(ette)… or you’ve been lucky and had a pleasant experience there.

Thankfully, the production companies that I want to work for aren’t so generously sprinkled with arseholes, which is lucky for me. You generally find there’s maybe one or two at a good-sized indie, sometimes none at all. But how is it that these narcissistic cretins are still in operation? Who’s employing them? Why are they still here? How can we destroy them? Well, hopefully at some point, they will die. But other than that, it takes a lot of bottle to step to someone who’s prepared to discredit you or try and make sure that ‘you’ll never work in this town again’ if you cross them. It’s hard to imagine that anybody in TV has enough power (certainly in the indie world) to invoke a blanket ban on rendering your services - and making such bold statements are just as likely to make them look like an idiot. However we’re always very careful about what we say about who, allowing ourselves to be swept along with the two-faced nature of TV. Be warned though, if there’s negative stuff to be said about you, it’ll generally happen behind your back, after they’ve smiled in your face. There also still remains networks of people who don’t actually really like each other, but recommend each other for work because they have a mutual fear of being slated themselves; a self-perpetuating little gang of wankers that are all about reputation, will refer to their TV programmes as ‘films’ and meet at TV industry functions to tongue each others anuses. Ah yes, the two-faced nature of TV takes on many guises. 

The comforting thoughts to take away are these: The people that sit you down in an office and make you feel small, talk to you like shit when the coffee isn’t good, or the research isn’t right, or the offline is running behind, or the budget is over…. those people could one day be coming to you to have a programme commissioned or be asking for a exec position when their indie goes under. But stay humble please…don’t turn in to one of them. 

The Mole

Okay, sensational title aside, I’ll clarify before I end up with a lawsuit from Sony. This camera isn’t killing the industry all by itself. That’d be silly. It’s more to do with who ends up using this camera. I’m not going to get all technical in this post. I could write a long, boring missive about the downfalls of this piece of kit - but that doesn’t really hit the nail on the head.

For those of you who don’t know or don’t care, this is the Z1 - or to be more precise, the Sony HVR-Z1E. It’s what this camera represents that I’ve got a major issue with, not the camera itself. This camera is the ‘poster-boy’ for the TV industry’s widespread abandonment of decent production values over the past few years, a signal that we no longer give a shit about the quality of programmes we’re churning out.. it’s the foreman in the television sausage factory and it has a lot to answer for.

Sony created this contraption, I suppose as a halfway house between the affluent amateur and low-cost broadcasting markets. The problem is, the industry has now adopted this, the runt of the camera world, as its own little baby. It’s easy to use, it’s light, it’s small, it looks fairly impressive with it’s black finish and little blue light which fools the unsuspecting operator into thinking it means business. The truth is, I’m being a little harsh.. it’s not a bad camera - it achieves what it sets out to do, it’s just that what it sets out to do is not good enough for broadcast.

“Can you shoot?” is becoming an increasingly used phrase in the informal world of ‘telly’ interviews, where everyone from the junior researcher to the producer/director is expected to be a master cinematographer. The response to this question is often so laced with bullshit that it really should never be asked at all. In place of it should be; “let me see your showreel so I can check you can do more than point a Z1 at someone and press record.”

Here lies the core of the problem. Because now, more than ever, the view seems to be that TV can be made cheaply and still look good. To a certain extend true, it can, if you’re very very careful about who you’re hiring.  But these days it seems that those basic initial inspections on a person’s skill set either aren’t being made or are being completely ignored. The result? Shit telly. Researchers and Assistant Producers are being sent out to film with their trusty Z1’s and returning to the production office with some shocking looking rushes. Producers then scratch their heads; “I don’t understand, he’s done a ‘DV Talent’ course”… Behave yourselves. I could go on a Manchester United course, it wouldn’t make me Cristiano Ronaldo.

Who am I aiming this rant at? Who can be my scapegoat, other than the poor old Sony Z1? Is it the execs and MD’s who are pitching programme ideas with using the Z1 and under-qualified AP’s in mind? Is it the commissioners who seem rub their chins for two seconds before saying “And you’re shooting this on Z1?…”  before a wry smile spreads across their greedy fat lips and the realisation that they’ll have to fork over thousands less in budget for this potential ratings-winner to be made, activates a million pleasure receptors in their ratings-driven brains? Probably both.

Questions from the same egotistical commissioning editors arise when they skip merrily down to their trusty Indie to have their first viewing in the edit. “Why is it so shaky?” “Why does the light from those windows look so blue?” “Is that focus soft?” “I’m not sure about that eye-line” “Didn’t you get cutaways? “  ..and many more. The answer is, and surely has to have always been, YOU GET WHAT YOU FUCKING-WELL PAY FOR!

In America for example, take a bog-standard ‘Factual Entertainment’ series. First and foremost, it’ll be shot on HD. No questions asked. I’m talking; all singing, all dancing, 1080p - big, bold, looks amazing - HIGH DEFINITION. It’ll be shot by numerous seasoned camera-operators. they’ll have at least one camera assistant. There will be a sound recordist - he’ll have an assistant. You’ll also find a producer AND a director, not a diluted version of the two, squashed into one floundering body. PA’s, AP’s, runners, drivers, grips, caterers… you get my point.

Yes, I know, I know, I can hear you all squealing already, “But all of that costs money!” I know it does and I realise that my little example above illustrates the other end of the scale, how the other half live. But we must actually be getting laughed at. I’ve worked all over the world and had foreign TV crews scratching their heads looking at our kit and crew, asking pretty much “What the fuck?”  And I’m right there with them. We need to change our attitudes to making TV. I’m aware that not all TV in this country is made cheaply and nastily, but too much of it is. Why should it just be a handful of primetime shows that look anywhere near decent?

Why the hell can’t we just raise the bar a little bit and take some pride in our work? There needs to be an effort from both producers and commissioners. First and foremost, can we all agree NOT to use the Sony Z1 any more? There’s no point in your production manager gleefully bounding up to you in the last week of post proclaiming; “We’re going to come in £6k under!”  if what you’ve just churned out looks like it’s been shot by a drunk adolescent on a HandyCam. Let’s start thinking about production values again - surely it wasn’t that long since people cared about what our programmes looked like. It makes SUCH a difference. And while I know that we don’t have the commercial prowess of the US networks, which boast $1million per episode on programmes like Wifeswap and Hell’s Kitchen, but we can at least try our best and give our audiences something decent to watch.

Make sure your shooters can actually shoot. Make sure they’ve got a decent camera in their hands while they’re doing it. Tracks, jibs, lights, grades and decent onlines are all things you shouldn’t be doing without.

First rant over.

The Mole