Factual Entertainment

"I love it when people say I'm making shit TV."
Natalka Znak, controller of factual entertainment at Granada

I develop programme ideas for new TV shows. That's my job. It sounds interesting when I describe it to people at parties. They think I'm bragging, but I'm not. It's just what I do. In actual fact, I hate it.

It's true that I don't hate it as much as a whole load of other jobs I could be doing instead, and that's why I still do it. I'd hate being an accountant more, I imagine. The day to day of it is quite nice. I hang around with interesting people, and I don't have to do much. I get in late, and leave early, and go for long lunches with wine, sometimes. The stupid ideas that come into my head from time to time are considered decent enough to ensure that just by sharing them with others, I stay in employment. But that's accidental more than anything else. To me, it's like breathing. Bob Dylan once said that about touring as an explanation of why he did it--he said he was driven to do it, like breathing. I don't mean it like that. I simply mean that it's something I do without even thinking about it. It just happens. And it's not something I can switch off. "I try not to congratulate myself for it too much. Sure, it seems I'm doing OK at it, and I do work at it sometimes. But in truth, it's just there whether I like it or not. And some people happen to pay me for it. It'd be there even if they didn't.

One of the stupidest things about working in TV is the way many people build it up. They like to sound like experts. They devote their lives to it, and specialise in a particular style or genre. So usually they can't understand how someone might have worked in factual programming one year, and entertainment programming the next. Even 'factual entertainment' is a category of its own, separate from either of its constituent genres. Yet nobody can properly tell you what factual actually is, or what entertainment is. These words have come to mean nothing. For example, it might amuse you to know that I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here is produced by the factual department of the company that makes it.

More depressing, though, it the lack of concern among those of us who make television. I know I make shit TV. And it certainly does bother me. Can you imagine a surgeon saying, "I love it when people say I'm doing shit heart bypasses"? Or a teacher congratulating himself on teaching rubbish to children?

There's certainly an appetite for shit TV. Viewers lap it up. That's why nobody's heard of anything on BBC4 and everybody's heard of (Celebrity) Love Island. How we can change that, I just don't know. But I don't love the situation as it is.