tellymole.com

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

 Just look at them! These urchins, with their skinny jeans and floppy, wild hair - are the future of television. Runners are easy to spot; They take their fashion cues from the cast of Hollyoaks, annoyingly haven’t hit that level of unfitness that you put down to ‘metabolism’, and still gallop around the office unaware of glass ceilings, two-faced industry politics and the fact that freelancer rates haven’t even increased with inflation in the past 10 years.

But we all have days when we’re very pleased that there’s a runner around to help, whether its a coffee at the right moment, release forms being sorted, talent being attended to, etc etc - a good runner is often a blessing. But I have a theory about runners that I want to share with you. I think they’re going to save the industry. I think they’re going to take it over and revolutionise the bastard. I think a change is coming and I think we’re all going to benefit, they’re coming and they’re shouting “Yes we can. YES WE CAN!!”  Ahem…

For those who are wondering what the frig I’m talking about, I’ll expand a little on my theory of televisual evolution that I believe will one day benefit us all…

Firstly, I started in the industry as a runner. I can’t imagine ever looking as alien or freakish as the ones depicted at the top of this post, I’m pretty sure I was a little better turned out than these fools. Nevertheless, I was inducted into the TV industry at the bottom of the food-chain, eager to work my way to the top - yet not really knowing what the top was or how I was going to get there.

There were plenty of observations that I made in my new environment as I entered the business. First off, I was made fully aware of my status. Before I could even be a runner, I must start my life as a kind of primordial slime puddle, slowly oozing my way into paid employment. This was work experience, and it lasted for fucking months. Initially I was working for an indie making a BBC daytime programme, working for the princely sum of £2.50 a day towards my travelcard. £2.50 a day was almost worse than getting paid nothing, because it acknowledged that I was having to buy a travelcard (the pre-Oyster equivalent of being to ride on the tube for a day) yet refused to even cover half of the daily cost of one. I looked on it affectionately as kind of a daily “Fuck you, worm.” from the indie.

But the single most disturbing thing that I began to notice throughout my time as ‘work experience person’ and later, runner.. was the number of people in the upper echelons of the TV hierarchy that had never done the job I was currently doing. How was this possible? I’d been told at every turn that there was only one way to get into telly; the hard way. Was I to now assume that the dog-shit ridden path that I was currently treading was in fact a meandering trek to the dole queue, rather than the fast-track to becoming a TV deity as I’d once thought? Bollocks.

A few more months into the industry and I’d made more discoveries. I started spotting certain similarities between the arseholes in the industry. (Let me point out quickly, that I think I’ve been quite lucky. I’ve experienced a relatively low number of arseholes in the industry, compared to non-arseholes.) The majority of arseholes were either parasites who were able to hold out for non-runner type jobs because of a rich Mummy and Daddy and/or a pre-existing London base which allowed them to live in the Big Smoke rent-free, or, people who had ‘proper degrees’ from red-brick universities who had either been BBC trained and nurtured or had stepped into the industry sideways from journalism. Either way, if I ever met a really disgustingly pompous wanker (or wankerette) they’d be from one of these backgrounds. 

The problem for these arseholes, is the rise in popularity of Media Studies degrees. They don’t like the idea at all. They see them as ‘Mickey Mouse’ qualifications, easily completed and of no academic worth whatsoever. The result? Thousands of classless oafs leaving crap universities and looking for glamourous jobs in TV. The reality is, a large number of those looking for a ‘Mickey Mouse’ degree, don’t follow through with looking for a job in TV after getting their media degree and of those that do, they’re put off by processes involved in making it into the TV industry and give up after a few months when the rejection emails are too much to bear or the credit card reaches its limit.

The truth behind the matter is this - only the most talented or determined young people are making it into the industry now. Being a runner is the initiation test. 

I’m pleased to say those ‘upper echelons’ of TV are changing now. Many of the elitist, pompous, ex-BBC idiots that held the positions as exec, creative director, head of development and used to mock the ‘Mickey Mouse’ degree posse are now being replaced by the very same group that they used to lambast. As I’ve grown into the industry I’m seeing more and more people who have trudged the modern path of runner to become directors, producers, execs, series producers. The people who will shape the future of television are now the people who came up through the media studies degrees of the mid-to-late nineties and onwards. I’m glad there’s more ‘real’ people in positions of power now. The new generation of producers/directors is more humble, more personable, more reasonable and it’s because they’ve had to endure things that many of the previous generation skipped. 

Many of the people I work with now say they’d never dream of raising their voice to a runner or sending them on pointless runs to ‘Pret’ just because they can’t be arsed to go and pick up a crayfish sandwich by themselves. Thank God there are also people like Benetta Adamson around who are willing to speak up about pay and conditions for people breaking into the industry now, which is also making things easier. I’m not saying that everyone that comes through a modern media degree and makes their way into TV through being a runner will be brilliant, I’m just glad that the ones that are, are now being given a chance to shine and the ‘old boy network’ of TV appears to be dissipating.

Be nice to your runners. Please.