Trust Your Instincts

Sometimes in life you get struck by a feeling.  Like Spidey Sense or The Force.  You can either use The Force or ignore it.  Why bother about that whole death star thing?  What’s the worst that could happen?  Oh, the empire has just blown up a planet destroying a civilisation.  Shit.  At least Princess Leia survived.

Okay, it’s unlikely that your sensory failings will lead to such a catastrophe and television isn’t life and death.  It’s less important than that.  But when you get a nagging feeling something is wrong then it’s worth doing something about it or at least checking.

There’s one terrible example of this in my early career.  I had reached the heady heights of researcher at Two Four Productions in Plymouth.  When I first arrived at Two Four a director looked at me with surprise and said he’d heard me read the news on Plymouth Sound Radio and thought I would be a tall, dark, handsome beefcake.  At least that was a compliment on my voice.  But I took that in my stride and worked on many amazing shows.  Who can forget the BBC Daytime series What Would You Do? or Westcountry Television’s Mad About Shopping?  I tried to compose theme tunes for these, but management rejected my ideas.  Trying singing these; ‘Ooh, Ooh, I’m in a stew / What Would You-oo Do?’ or ‘We’re just hopping / [BONKERS] / Mad About Shopping.’  If only they’d used my compositions then I’m convinced the shows would have been massive global hits.

After about a year I graduated onto their long running Channel 4 daytime show, Collectors’ Lot.  If you were a student or pulling a sickie in the late nineties then you may remember it being on before 15 to 1 when Watercolour Challenge wasn’t running. The researcher’s main job was to find people with interesting collections and then suggest whether they would be a good guest for an Outside Broadcast (O.B.)1 or if we should film them and create a VT2.

For logistical reasons we would find collectors to film for VTs and set up shoots in a particular area.  Now, I won’t go into what the collection was or where it was located, but I had found a potential guest from a magazine or newspaper clipping.  The photos suggested a brilliant collection that would make a fascinating item.  I chatted to the collector on the phone, something that is vital of course as you need to find out if they’ll be able to bring their obsession to life3.  This hoarder seemed lovely on the phone; friendly, helpful and he sent me more photos and information which confirmed that we would have plenty of interesting stuff to film.  It was an incredible collection and the director would come back from the shoot, pick me up, carry me on their shoulders out of the production office, through the car park of the industrial estate in Plympton and into the canteen of Chaplins Superstore for their excellent value fry-up.  As well as Chaplins, late morning every day the Ivor Dewdney pasty van would pull up and you could get a hot, greasy, Cornish pastry delicacy.  The glamour of television in the South West.  Proper job.

Sadly, it wasn’t to be.  I set up a filming date with said collector in a month’s time and left it at that.  I did try and call them a couple of times over the next few weeks, but to no avail.  This would be even more worrying now, in an age where everyone has mobile phones and emails.  However, after a few unreturned calls you would start to feel that something was up.  The problem for me was that I was becoming complacent.  Also I was about to go on holiday and would be away during the shoot.  That wouldn’t usually be an issue.  I had given the production team all the information and the crew would arrive and shoot the item.  The researcher wouldn’t normally be with them as that would be an extra cost.  But the reality was that I could sense something was wrong and I should have flagged it up as a concern.

When I returned from my holiday I discovered that the crew had turned up at the collector’s house and rung the bell, knocked several times.  They waited.  They were beginning to think it was a bit weird when a neighbour came out to reveal the horrific truth.  My lovely sounding, gentle, polite collector was in prison.  And in prison for something bad.  Really bad.  The kind of thing they would have got away with had they been a politician of yesteryear.  Worse still they had been using their collection in the course of their crimes.  Grim.

Upon my return I got a right royal bollocking from my producer.  And I thought that was fair enough, I’d made a balls up, I deserved to be told.  It’s true that after a few months on the treadmill of collection based daytime television I had become stale and disillusioned.  I was shifted off to other projects like an incompetent police officer, public official or media executive.  Sadly, I wasn’t booted upstairs with a pay rise.  I think I went on to research the classic Westcountry series On Hoof.  It was about horses in the region.  Great series.

I guess the lesson from this applies across the genres of television.  If you just assume everything is going to be okay then you can easily get caught out.  And if you get that nagging feeling something is not quite right then it really is best to act on it to ensure you get a lovely fried egg from the Chaplins canteen in your gob rather than a horrible, rotten egg splattering on your stupid face.

1 The Collectors’ Lot O.B.s involved taking over a large house which itself had some interesting collections and then essentially using it as a studio to record a week’s shows. We’d invite loads of collectors to bring their collections and display them to be interviewed by the host, Sue Cook or Debbie Thrower.

2 VT is a term used for a filmed package or report that is used within a show. It literally means video tape, so it seems a bit archaic in this modern digital world, but it is still used. And some people still use tape. I know. Get a hard drive, Grandad. Here’s a useful glossary of media terms.

3 Of course, sometimes people who are brilliant on the phone freeze on camera and others seem dull, but turn it on when the spotlight’s on them, but you at least have to get an idea of what they might be like.

I’ve Got An Idea…

Most of my ideas have, thankfully, never seen the light of day, although forthcoming appointment to view television series Britain’s Tastiest Village1 has definitely been ripped off from a proposal I sent to the Head of Daytime Twee Food Based Countryside Shows at the BBC many years ago. It’s a nest of creative blood sucking vampires out there. I guess I just didn’t have the vision to commit to the scale needed to take it from daytime to primetime without even a short toilet stop at shoulder peak. And that last sentence just proves that I have been to many commissioning briefings.

The value of the currency of ideas is something I learnt early on and TV gold is always a safe investment, even though no one has a clue which idea will transform from a scribble on the back of a fag packet into a gleaming ingot locked in the vault of Simon Cowell’s production company.

Having ideas and showing people that you can think creatively is, of course, going to help you progress in the media. But when I wrote to television companies as a young man I just thought, ‘This is a brilliant idea, they’re going to think I’m a genius and immediately make the show, stick it on the telly and this time next year I’ll be a millionaire. Or at least have paid off my student loan.’ So when I posted my letter to Chris Slade at Two Four Productions I was convinced my idea for ‘doing a programme about the Tinside Lido’ would have been brilliant even though the idea was just ‘let’s do a programme about the Tinside Lido.’ I think there were some other ideas in the letter but I can’t remember them, so they must have been even less exciting.

For those (un)fortunate enough to never have been to Plymouth, Tinside Lido is an incredible semi-circular Art Deco swimming pool that is the centre piece of the seafront. It was open when I was a kid in the seventies and eighties. I didn’t appreciate it then and just thought the water was very cold, something that didn’t seem to bother me when I snuck in with a bunch of drunken merry makers for an ill-advised midnight skinny dip when I was about 16. Happy days. Fortunately, I survived. The lido was then left to ruin until it was restored and reopened in 2005. It has been battered by the recent storms but will survive according The Evening Herald, Plymouth’s local newspaper. All very interesting, but not necessarily a great television programme without proper research or some kind of angle.

Amazingly however, Chris invited me in for a chat. Obviously I thought, ‘This is it. This is my time. We are going to make this show together, you and me Chris, and we are going to be rich,’ Chris was a television personality having presented shows in the South West for years and had co-founded a production company, Two Four, that was doing well. Turned out that it was just a chat. I guess at the time I was a bit disappointed that my life didn’t immediately change, but now I know how important those little advances are. It was just a chat, but a very encouraging one. Chris had taken the time to read my letter, invite me in, give me advice and tell me to keep in touch. Three years later I was working for Two Four.2

This was the first of many examples where sending ideas has helped me get a meeting or a foothold somewhere in the industry. There are very few of my own ideas that have been made. I did get two late night documentaries for Channel 4 commissioned – anyone see Bare & Breakfast about naturist guest houses? Hopefully not. The final shot features me running across the screen stark bollock naked. That’s what television executives might call brave, but I would like to ban use of the word brave in relation to television unless it refers to reporting from a war zone or very dangerous covert filming. My efforts just upset a friend who tuned in randomly to Channel 4 in the early hours, got excited when they heard my voice narrating this odd little documentary only to be appalled by the sight of me scurrying in my birthday suit. The reason for my exposing appearance was that it was all shot by me and I was filming an interview outside. It started raining so I had to run, turn the camera off and lug my gear inside, which seemed like an amusing way to end the film. And I was filming it naked because it was a documentary about naturism and I’m not arsed about the televisual appearance of my arse. That documentary got me through the doors of Tiger Aspect Productions where I freelanced as a producer/director regularly for a few years.

Contacting people with ideas has often lead to opportunities and I encourage you to do so. Do it with grace and research the people and companies you contact. It won’t guarantee a reply, but it will increase the chances. My current job with Channel X came about because I pitched an idea to a producer who had worked at Tiger Aspect, but was now working with Channel X.  They decided to develop it and it nearly got me a job on the television fully clothed. I’ll write about it in more detail in another post, but the salient point is that the idea lead to a relationship with Channel X which convinced them that I might be worth offering a proper job to. And the rest, as they say, is a footnote in comedy history.

1 If you don’t get the reference then watch the BBC comedy W1A.

2 Don’t worry, I wasn’t just sat on my arse for three years waiting for Chris to call again. I did other things.