Chewing gum for the eyes

"One step up from porn"

2007-03-09T13:09:00.000Z

‘Participation TV’ is what we in the 'industry' call those interminable quizzes that ITV and others run overnight to swindle viewers out of cash. You know, the onces presented by perma-tanned grinning morons weilding big red 'phones. At first, they seem like harmless fun, and strangley addictive viewing. But watch carefully and you soon realise the cunning and dishonesty hat lies at their core. They are nothing short of theft, and specifically target the poor and stupid who are least able to afford them.

It is true that nobody is forcing viewers to ring up. But they may as well be. Over the last few weeks, it has been revealed publicly that producers, phone operators, and broadcasters have used a variety of dishonest and misleading techniques to convince people to take part. They've urged viewers to call in and influence a proagramme that has already been recorded(Saturday Kitchen); they've suggested viewers enter a draw to play a game, when that day's player has already been chosen (Richard and Judy); they've got members of their own production team to fake calls and pretend to be winners (Brainteaser); and they've simply overcharged viewers for their 'participation' (The X Factor, which made £200,000 by overcharging red-button voters on the Sky platform). So while nobody has been forced to phone up, we can hardly claim that they gave informed consent when they decided to do so. They based their decision on incorrect and misleading information, and often gave their money thinking that they stood a chance of winning more, when they absolutely did not.

Premium rate phone numbers have made their way into all sorts of programmes, and represent a great way for programme makers and broadcasters to generate extra revenue. Those of us who work in development know how important it is to think up ways to weave them into our ideas, especially in this era of ‘360 degree’ programming (that's what we call it when we rip you off on the web, on the phone, and on screen at the same time. And afterwards we'll try and rip you off in a podcast, just as soon as we've caught up and figured out what taht is).

But within the last couple of years, an altogether more serious kind of programme has been born: no longer is the premium rate cash grab an add-on to an already entertaining programme, it has instead become the main and sole purpose of the programme. Presenters unlike any we had seen before are suddenly on our screens for hours at a time, urging, begging, pleading with us to phone in. This is big business, with programme makers raking cash in--over a million per week in some cases.

So now channels are pulling their participation shows left right and centre, apparently scandalised by the ‘irregularities’ in their operation. In truth, they’ve all known about it for ages. There’s simply been an unspoken deal between the producers, the broadcasters, and the telecoms operators that as long as the money is flooding in, it doesn’t matter how dodgy the programme is. Because they've always known exactly what is going on. One leading head of a production company I worked for commented when she got a huge commission for this style of programming that it was 'only one step up from porn'.

Once again, the TV business has reacted like a small child caught with his hand in the biscuit tin: it has more or less universally denied any knowledge of wrongdoing, blaming technical issues, or misunderstandings. Everyone has blamed someone else, with the channels now trying to keep their own reputations untarnished by immediately stopping the broadcast f all competitions and games relying on premium rate phone numbers. They wouldn’t be doing this unless they strongly suspected (or knew) that there was far more dirt to come in a huge range of programmes. This is damage limitation.

The list so far of programmes and companies that have ripped people off is long, and growing daily. How damaged could these ‘brands’ be by this news? We’re talking Endemol, ITV, the BBC, and Cactus, not some unknown phone operator with nothing to lose. And what about the reputations of some of the nation’s much loved programmes themselves? Ricahrd & Judy, The X Factor, Saturday Kitchen, Quizmania, Brainteaser… will anyone ever trust them fully again?

Suddenly TV is being revealed not just to be a trusted educator, babysitter, and entertainer sitting in the corner of all of our living rooms, but also a dodgy, quick-talking, lying conman and thief, to be treated with great suspicion. No wonder people in the TV world are panicking. The truth is finally out.

TV causes cancer, Alzheimers, and autism, claims psychologist

2007-02-22T09:34:00.000Z

A report from Dr Aric Sigman in science journal Biologist lists 15 health problems that can be attributed to excessive TV viewing in childhood including childhood obesity, eyesight problems, diabetes and hormonal changes. It is apparently based on Sigman's analysis of 35 separate scientific studies, in response to which he writes: "Given the evidence, it would be prudent to cordon off the early years of child development as a time when screen media is excluded and then introduced judiciously as the child matures."

Here are his key claims:

- The average six-year-old in Britain has spent one full year watching TV, and more than half of three-year-olds have a set in their bedrooms

- The risk of developing Alzheimer's increases with each extra daily hour of television viewing among people aged 20 to 60

- Watching TV is linked with obesity, lower immunity, premature puberty, poor concentration, reading difficulties, raised cholesterol and type 2 diabetes

Now, not much of this is new. We've seen it all before in various studies. And while some might think that Sigman is pushing things a bit far in claiming that TV is as bad as all that, there is a mounting body of evidence that suggests that it can in fact contribute to all of the problems he mentions.

The TV industry is, naturally, up in arms about such research, and makes every effort to rubbish it. The timing could not be worse: just as funding for children's programming in the UK is being slashed, and junk-food advertising bans are being imposed during children's programmes, we're now being told that maybe our kids shouldn't be watching so much TV anyway, because it might actually be causing them to reach puberty much earlier, as well as increase their chances of developing cancer or dementia in later life.

If the industry took a more responsible position, we could perhaps allow it a place in the debate about how to proceed from here. I don't doubt that TV can be useful for educating children in some very particular circumstances. But while the official line of those that make it is to argue that advertising junk food to children does not contribute to childhood obesity, I have no respect for them at all. If the adverts didn't influence children's eating habits, why would advertisers spend so much money on trying to do just that? They are not motivated by a desire to see children's programming budgets increasing , and why should they be? Their business is selling habitually addictive fats and sugars to children. So when it comes to research that suggests actual physical hard caused by television on young bodies, the TV industry would do well to react more responsibly by engaging with the new revelations, rather than attacking them as invalid.

I wonder if one day we will look at TV the same way we look at smoking today. My generation grew up laughing at the idea that not long before we were alive, people apparently had no idea that inhaling the smoke of burning tobacco might actually be bad for the body. How absurd might it have seemed back then to suggest that cancer was a risk for smokers? But now we find it totally unsurprising that this is the case: of course it's harmful to smoke. Maybe one day claims like these about TV won't seem so alarmist, and we'll look back at today's news with much less surprise than Five's director of children's programmes, Nick Wilson, who rubbished the news as no more than "a good headline ... [to be] forgotten in two months' time".

Crap on TV

2007-02-11T20:23:00.000Z

If you've been reading the previous entries in this blog, you might, like me, have noticed a disturbing new trend in British TV: there's been a definite increase in the amount of crap on TV. And I don't mean that in a metaphorical sense, I mean actual crap--the brown, smelly, stuff that comes out of your bottom.

I'm not sure why there's so much shit on television. It would seem that as we start the 21st Century, TV viewers are actually regressing to some sort of retarded anal phase. Here's a short list of some copraphilic shows that have found their way onto mainstream TV. Feel free to add any you can think of, as I'm sure there are more:

You Are What You Eat
in which Gillian McKeith inspects punters' turds.

Little Miss Nicky
in which a reality TV punter does unpleasant jobs, usually involving turds.

Little Britain
in which 'Anne' gives some children a picture made by smearing a turd on a canvas.

Colin and Justin on the Estate
in which C&J get all upset about pigeon turds (see entry below)

Glade Touch N Spray commercial
in which a small child bemoans the scent of his own turd (didn't we used to avoid actually mentioning excrement in bathroom product ads?)

[amusingly, the spell check suggested 'Colon & Justin']

Child Genius (C4)

2007-02-09T09:36:00.000Z

Last night's Child Genius on Channel 4 promised to be the first part of a series that will revisit 10 'gifted' children every two years to monitor their progress in life--a sort of Seven Up! for the 21st Century. And with extremely intelligent children. But the programme stood up well as a one-off documentary showing what life is like for these children and their parents, despite it's hour and a half running time. No irritating pre ad break trails of what was to come, nor reminders of what you'd just seen three minutes ago. This was how all documentaries should be made. It was modern, clear, and insightful. Totally unpatronising to both audience and participants, Child Geniuswas such a refreshing thing to see on TV, especially on the increasingly tabloid Channel 4.

It would be so easy to hate the kids featured in the programme. They're freaks. They can do things many adults will never be able to do, and that can make people jealous. But the beauty of Wall to Wall's film was that it avoided the temptaion to portray them as mere robots, or the product of overly pushy parents. The parents were pushy, it's true, but you couldn't blame most of them. What else could they do you do but encourage and stimulate their children when they discovered they had amazing abilities to do maths, play the piano, cook, write, etc? Anything other approach would risk condemning them to years of boredome and frustration.

The film introduced us to a variety of gifted children, each with a very different personality and set of skills. The participants ranged from the completely freakish family whose hothousing of all of their offspring looked nothing short of child abuse (the mother had decided it was her duty to produce doctors for the world. Tha father was barely allowed to speak at all), to the charmingly endearing parents who were totally uninterested in their son's IQ score, but instead wanted to know how to help him live a happy life despite his heavy burden of being a wonderful thinker with an extraordinary outlook on the world. This child, Dante, perhaps provided the most touching moments of the programme. His depression seemed totally understandable, and we shared his frustration with having the mental abilities of a very sensitive adult whilst being trapped in the reality of being a child. He strived for perfection in a world where perfection is impossible--a summary of the human condition that most adults on TV would have difficulty expressing as clearly and simply as he did.

At no time did the programme makers give in to the pressure to make any of the parents look better or worse than they probably were. They were real people in a state of genuine confusion over how to react to their unusual children. They were caring, harsh, encouraging, and flawed, all at the same time, and it is no easy thing to put that accross in a film. Only the Addams Family-like doctor and spiritual leader breeders came over as cruel and insane, and it was hard to see that as anyone's fault but their own. The programme was brave to show their peculiarities in full, too.

If there were more challenging, intelligently made programmes like this one on our screens, perhaps TV would be helping to bring up a generation of thinkers and doers like those we saw in Child Genius. Instead we seem to be breeding overweight, lazy, superstitious drones to be future participants for Big Brother, Deal or No Deal, and Fat Club. Lazy, rubbish programmes help make lazy rubbish children.

Link to Child Genius promo

A glimpse of the future

2007-01-31T09:50:00.000Z

Now we can get a 360 degree view of our TVs. Thank you, Toshiba.

Links to The Raw Feed and to the The video.

8.15pm, Tuesday night

2007-01-16T20:15:00.000Z

Channel surfing. A snapshot:

BBC 1: A televised remedial class for third rate actors. Dreadful script, dreadful direction, dreadful acting, dreadful production values (Holby City).

BBC 2: A woman teaching you how to drink water, inspecting measuring jugs of urine. Surely mankind cannot now be so stupid as to need lessons on how to drink and piss. This programme also appears to feature a punter named 'Gronya' (Dr Alice Roberts: Don't Die Young).

ITV1: Random idiotic members of the public begging on national television for cash handed out by five 'millionaires' who dole out perfunctory insults. It's the televisual equivalent of swearing at beggars on the street (Fortune: Million Pound Giveaway).

Channel 4: A sour faced old bitch inspecting human shit to detect what is wrong with the diet of the 18 stone fat bastards who produced it. And they have to stay in her (show)house. Surely mankind cannot now be so stupid as to need lessons on how to eat and shit (You Are What You Eat: Gillian Moves In).

five: Something about the Titanic. Yawn. This is a documentary which actually just introduced it's thesis with the words "they may not have found any evidence, but..." (Titanic's Final Moments: The True Story).

Colin and Justin on the Estate, Five

2007-01-12T12:09:00.000Z

This programme looks like it was designed to highlight the total idiocy of the ridiculous features that modern TV requires are built in to any 'factual entertainment' series. One can fully understand how this dross made it to our screens. It ticks all the right boxes on a commissioning editor's imaginary list. In fact, I'm not sure that the list is even imaginary. I wouldn't be surprised if the controllers of today's TV channels had pads printed up with lists of moronic tricks that programmes had to serve up. It'd certainly make their lives easier.

So here's how it goes. The commissioner, probably Ben Frow, was sitting in his office in Covent Garden, weeping quietly to himself about how much money he'd committed to elevating Colin and Justin -- two televisual non-entites -- to the staus of official 'faces' of five. He'd been lured there himself from a decent enough job at C4 where he'd enjoyed some success, only to discover that nobody watches Channel Five whatever you put on it. And now he'd done the same to the property poofs, who'd become even less interesting than they had been on the BBC. It turns out nobody cares about Channel Five. Nobody even cares that it's not called 'Channel' Five any more. They hadn't noticed. They were too busy rotting their brains over on ITV.

Anyway, Mr Comissioner is in his office crying one day, when a proposal arrives in his inbox. He's about to delete it and go for lunch at the Ivy (again) when he decides he may as well read this one first, seeing as its first three words have caught his attention: "Colin and Justin..."

Three minutes later, after he's read the proposal through twice, in his head he's already bough the series. It'll be wonderful: two homos, interior decorators no less, on a council estate in Glasgow. What a culture clash, eh? Moreover, it's regional, it's gritty, there'll be fights, tears, laughter, and soft furnishings. Fucking brilliant. Channel 4 managed to make that fat-tongued loser into a national 'hero' by getting him to whine about school lunches, so maybe five can turn around the fortunes of TV's least interesting cushion plumpers with a rip-off series. Yes! Fianlly, they'll make a difference. Everyone will love this, because it's not just a makeover show, it's a social action programme. It's PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING!

The premise is simple. Colin and Justin, known for their camp but totally unendearing manner, are despatched to some rough-arsed estate in Glasgow to make everything better for the poor peasants who have to put up with the nasty flats and a £50 per room budget to redecorate. The estate is troubled by drugs, litter, decomposing pigeons, crime, gangs, and general poverty. And ColinandJustin (which is which, nobody cares) are going to improve these people's lives through the medium of interior decorating. They're Scottish and gay, and the housing estate is Scottish and repulsive, so it should be a match made in hell (ideal for TV), and they'll even understand each others' accents. It'll "punch above it's weight" and get the channel column inches. Yes... it's a factual TV gem that'll revive the channel's pathetic viewing figures.

Except it's not. It teaches nothing. It is not entertaining. It is predictable. It is dull. It trundles through a formulaic set of format points in such an obvious manner that even the handful of catatonic five viewers who noticed that it had started and the last programme had finished, could see that it was nothing more than the worst kind of TV-making-by-numbers.

So how did Colin and Justin deal with the problem of vandalism and graffiti in the stairwells? They painted them blue. Fucking genius. Why had nobody thought of that before? And when the thugs on the estate came in to rip the heads off the three £2.99 pot plants placed on the window sills and shit on the 'community notice board', you could almost hear the producers creaming themselves as they tittered the word 'conflict' to one another just off-camera. In fact, they'd probably forced a runner to take twice the recommended adult dose of ex-lax so he could crap all over the place for them, and then rip down the charming Ikea window blind (who needs a fucking window blind on a council estate stairwell anyway?).

And how did the interior-decorating faries deal with the disgusting, uninhabitable state of their would-be 'show-flat'? Simple, they shouted at a council official (more conflict) and then knocked down a wall, calling in decorators and plasterers. There was even a hissy fit about the economy biscuits they had to eat. But hang on. Wasn't calling in professionals simply cheating? What of the limited budget that the other residents had to stick to? How could their show-flat be seen as representitive of what a normal resident could manage, asked the council man, dressed in a suit and nerd-specs. Perfect... more conflict, all caught on camera. They even swore. But no actual answer or excuse was given for that one. They just moved on. But hey, it's TV guys!

What everyone making this turd of a programme failed to notice was that we wouldn't care at all. There was no conflict. Instead, there were set-piece TV situations so familiar that five minutes in we were already scrolling through the EPG to find something -- anything -- less irritating to watch than these scotch upholstery experts wretching every time they saw some pigeon poo or a bit of litter.

Pathetic.

Brain Switch-off

2006-12-22T10:47:00.000Z

Owing to a seasonal bout of depression on my part, and the synchronicity of a few other disappointments in my life, I've been doing a lot of nothing recently. In real terms, this has taken the form of me watching a lot more television, and I'm disappointed to say that it's only confirmed my worst opinions of the 'medium' (so called, according to the American Comic Fred Allen, because anything well done is rare).

I've spent the last few days catching up on the tail end of The X Factor, a programme I had until now easily avoided, as it is endless repeated on the various ITV channels. While it leaves me largely unmoved, I can see the skill that has gone into making this slick, highly polished entertainment format. It's transparent, and I imagine even the millions who watch it religiously can feel themselves being easily manipulated, fooled, and strung along. But that makes it a more honest programme, in my opinion, as it's unpretentious. People want to be swept along by it, and they are happy to be taken in for the ride. It never claims to be doing anything more than it is--entertaining them with bright lights, the almost instant manufacturing of new 'celebrities', and some old recycled tunes. Every dial has been tuned up to the max, and then some, pushing things off the usual scale, and that's why the ratings have done the same.

I've also caught up on occasional repeats of Princess Nikki, a heavily over-scripted, highly artificial manipulated-reality-observational-documentary featuring a former Big Brother contestant who apparently has no interesting characteristics of any kind at all. I can't understand for a second where the interest lies in such a programme. The premise is that Nikki, a spoilt princess, is sent to do work experience for a day or two in a series of jobs usually involving cleaning up shit. One day she's on a farm, the next in a dog kennel, etc. She has tantrums like a 2 year old whenever necessary, and refuses to do what's asked of her. It's a bit like a British version of The Simple Life, but even lower grade. The problem is that Nikki is such a non entity that even the Heat Magazine reading retards who might be interested in her life, must surely be totally un-impressed by her performance. There's no hint of reality to this programme, with everything so heavily manipulated that it can't be fooling anybody. The girl herself is boring, the jobs are boring, the people she meets are boring. In short, the format is boring in every possible way. And that's why the programme falls flat. It seems that the mentally deficient Nikki's own refusal each episode to wade through shit or scrape it up off the floor puts her one step up from the producers of this moronic programme, who seem perfectly happy to roll up their sleeves and get stuck into the job of churning out endless amounts of televisual manure.

And finally to The Jeremy Kyle Show. Whatever time of day you might turn on your TV, it's sure to be on one of the ITV channels. And it's totally unwatchable. Is anyone at all still interested in this kind of human zoo? This sub Springer, sub Trisha, sub just about every other programme where we watch the dregs of society attacking each other, is so unoriginal is defies belief. Kyle is one dimensional (though that is a requirement for a host of this kind of programme), the guests are uninteresting , and the 'dilemmas' have all been seen and done before. Kyle's 'thing' seems to be rudeness, but even that's not new. I met the man before this programme was even thought of, and while he's clearly limited, he undoubtedly has the popular touch. 'Ordinary' people will talk to him. And he'll readily bark in their faces that they're 'scum' or idiots. But somehow that's not enough any more. These people don't care whose name is attached to the show--they'll talk to anybody with a studio audience and a microphone. Who even cares for watching plebs degrade themselves any more? In an age when nothing on TV is surprising, and everyone from politicians to musicians, to feminist academics will knowingly humiliate themselves on screen in return for cash, why is anybody still watching Jeremy Kyle and his circus of trolls?

Time Saving

2006-11-28T10:02:00.000Z

There's an advert on TV at the moment in which Ainsley Harriot looks mockingly at an 'old fashioned' dishwasher detergent tablet which has been put in a glass case as if to suggest it's some sort of historical curio. Meanwhile he sings the praises of a new kind of detergent tablet that has no wrapper. This apparently saves you time when using it.

It's only an advert, I know, but I think in a small way it shows just how absurd things have become. Apparently we're all so impatient now that we can't even spare the 2 seconds it takes to remove a wrapper from a dishawasher pill.

Job For Life

2006-11-16T10:36:00.000Z

"Less than one in five people working in the broadcast sector think the industry offers them a "job for life"... and more than 10% of respondents work six or seven days per week."
Broadcast (TV industry newspaper) lifestyle survey, 16 November 2006

When I was at university I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do for a living. I had a few areas of interest which I thought might make good careers--advertising, music production, theatre, broadcasting--but no way of deciding between them. I'd done some work in each of them, and they'd all been pretty enjoyable for a few weeks during the summer break between school or university terms. And why wouldn't they? All of them had a hint of glamour to them, and certainly seemed a lot less like the 'real work' I'd seen my siblings and contemporaries doing (accountancy, medicine, law, etc).

As my finals approached, I felt a sense of panic. Who didn't? What would I do afterwards, I asked myself, especially as I was about to fail. So I half heartedly wrote to three potential employers, desperate to secure employment while I still looked promising. Two were TV companies and one an advertising agency. I ended up accepting a place on a graduate 'training' scheme at a trendy TV company. As fate had it I did alright in my exams, but the job seemed decent enough, and I'd hardly had to look very hard for it. So that's what I did when the time came for me to start earning.

A few years down the line, and a few more contracts served at different TV companies, and I can tell you this: as my holiday jobs had confirmed, TV is great fun to work in. But that fun only lasts for a few weeks or months at a time. Before you know it, you have to move on. Find a new job, find a new company, find a new niche. Working in TV as an adult is shit for exactly the same reasons it's such fun as a kid: projects and engagements last a short, limited amount of time. The pay is decent enough considering you don't have to do much. Having even slightly-above-average intelligence puts you well above most of the other people you are competing with in the workplace. Limited knowledge is no barrier to getting far.

But who wants to work for merely decent pay? Who wants to work in an industry that's scared of committing to you? Who wants to work with morons? Is that a career worth pursuing? Imagine the TV business as a potential partner and you might get what i mean: medium to low earner, afraid of long term committment, below average intelligence, bullshitter, lazy... Not someone you'd want to spend your life with, even if they are fun for a brief fling.

So is it any wonder that people working in television can't imagine themselves doing it for life? I can't wait to find something challenging, interesting, and important to do with myself. Yes, it's fun for a bit. And sometimes it's enjoyable. But it's of so little importance and worth that it can't be a serious long term life plan. No, TV is fluff. That's true for viewers and those who make it alike. Just like chewing gum, it might taste OK for a while, but it gives no nourishment, and ends up flavourless and bland if you stay with it too long.

Television is a drug

2006-11-10T01:22:00.000Z

According to a report in The Times the other day, psychologists discovered that children aged 6 to 8 respond to the image of a television as alcoholics do to pictures of drink. Alcoholics are addicted to drink. So you might reasonably take this to mean that children between the ages of 6 and 8 are addicted to television.

It's worse than it sounds, though. In a series of experiments conducted in primary schools, children were put in front of a computer screen where images would be flashed up in front of them, side by side. Their reaction would be monitored to see which images attracted the most attention. Alarmingly, an image of a blank television screen proved more appealing than that of a smiling face, with most children looking at the picture of a TV as soon as it was flashed up. The article explains that babies have a natural 'face bias', and will opt for the image of the face over any other. But these 6 to 8 year olds did not. So somewhere between birth and 6 years old, children are learning to favour TV screens to human faces,

Regardless of what children are actually watching on television (or adults, for that matter), something has gone wrong when they instinctively prefer to look at a TV instead of a face. They could be watching University Challenge for all I care. It'd still be a problem. It would seem that we could end the debate on teachers wearing veils altogether, if we just replaced teachers with televisions. Who cares if kids can fully respond to their teachers without seeing their facial expressions? Put a TV in the room and they won't even be looking her way to see if she's wearing a Burkha or a Bikini.

Things will only get worse. Nobody believes that TV's doing the harm it actually is. Sure, we might all watch more than we should, or rely on it to take the edge off our boredom, but it's not that bad, right? It's not having as negative effect on us a cigarettes or junk food, surely?

The cold facts might change your mind: by the age of 18, the average child has sat through 16,000 murders, and 200,000 assorted acts of violence. Most couples have more contact with TV characters than with one another. By the age of 75, we will each have spent more than twelve full years watching TV. The average Briton now spends over four hours a day watching TV. That's more time over a lifetime than he or she spends doing paid work. 86% of children aged six and below watch up to six hours of TV a day.

As this piece from the Observer a year or so ago explains, TV changes each of us in ways we just don't realise: "the more a person watches TV, the poorer they believe themselves to be, the less happy they think they are compared to others and the more they feel compelled to spend -- on one estimate, £2 extra for every hour spent watching TV. Children who watch a lot of television are more likely to be violent, to be bullies and to be fat and unfit in later life." Scary stuff. But none of this is really news to anyone, least of all those of us who make the programmes. It's all common sense.

TV distorts people's ideas of what is normal, what is healthy, what is enough. When we make programmes that are 'aspirational' (a word much used by programme commissioners), we know that the millions we hope will watch them, will feel worse when they turn off the box. They'll think they should build a new life in the country, redecorate their neighbour's front room, or abandon their children in the wilderness to teach them manners. But in reality, none of them will. Instead, they'll feel like slightly worse people for not being as exciting and proactive as everyone they see on their screens.

Factual Entertainment

2006-11-07T12:16:00.000Z

"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.

Here's the science bit...

2006-11-01T15:06:00.000Z

The TV industry (for that's all it is--it's certainly not a profession) has developed a whole new set of meanings for commonly used English words. And because everyone watches TV, these new meanings take root in every day language with startling ease. Take for example the word 'science', which you might have thought, were it not for TV, has something to do with the acquiring of knowledge through continual testing, re-testing, and analysing of results; something to do with demonstrable, provable facts; something to do with curing cancer, making spaceships fly, or developing new kinds of vacuum cleaners.

But to us TV folk science means something else. It means cascading mists of dry ice, men with thick rimmed glasses, and lots of dickens about with dangerous or brightly colored fluids. Enter Heston Blumenthal and his program's on BBC last night, "In Search of Perfection". From the title, you might be forgiven for thinking the program's was some sort of neo Nazi documentary about eugenics. But to do so you'd have to have missed the tie in free promotional DVD and write ups in The Times which in fact would have told you that Heston (how come I've never met a man called Hesten in real life?) is a cook. Or a chef, if you're into the hierarchy of the kitchen. Or a Scientist, if you are a TV person.

This guy is famous for his 'scientific' approach to cooking (cheffing?). But because this is TV, all that really means is that he uses beakers and glass rods instead of pans and wooden spoons. Oh, and rather than pop something in the fridge, he'll get out a thermos of liquid nitrogen, which creates a visually appealing curtain of heavy, cold mist, instantly turning him into a gastronomic alchemist or something.

While the programme was mildly fun for a few minutes, and only when PVRed to allow one to forward through the dull location bits where he met the pigs he was about to turn into sausages (how very postmodern and trendy), all it really did was confirm to anyone who mightn't have known already that TV cookery programmes have fuck all to do with cooking. Anyone who harps on about how you can't follow a recipe off the TV and make it in your home any more has clearly been in a coma for the last 10 years, and has missed the fact that food TV is simply very low grade porn for a nation that's now more obsessed with getting fat than getting laid.

We watched as Heston sought out the best kind of treacle for making treacle tart, even going so far as to boil up his own. Scientifically. How annoying, then, that he discovered that nothing worked quite as well as simple, shop bought golden syrup. I was only surprised he didn't run some tests to see how much gold there actually was in the stuff, and maybe make a jar of his own by melting down his wife's wedding ring. Before that, he made the 'perfect' bangers and mash by actually creating sausages from scratch (using an actual pig), then poaching them and pan frying them to brown them off. In all this, he somehow missed the crucial point that nobody else would consider his recipe perfect simply because it involves two lab assistants, dirtying every pan you own (and some you'd have to borrow from a school chemistry lab), and about three days work. Hardly convenience food. Let's not even discuss the icecream recipe that contained no eggs but plenty of dry ice (at minmus 180 degrees), smashed up with a huge rolling pin and several towels (why keep your mess in the kitchen? Get the bathroom all messed up too!).

For TV people, science is simply a way to make what we say True and Right. There's no need to merely suggest it or actually explain it, because instead we can assert its truth simply by getting a man in a white coat and boffin glasses to say it, while he pours chemicals from one tube into another. In an ideal world, we'll light the wall behind him with a green or blue wash (green is for evil-science, blue is for cold and simple fact-science. There is no good science as such, so there's no colour for it). But that's only if there's the money in the budget for specialist lighting, or if the runner could find a gel to put over the lights he blagged from the facilities department on the day of the shoot.