nano nonsense

Nano used to be the science of small things. I've seen a lot of small things in my life, (and not all of them down a microscope) but I have now stumbled upon a nano of a different kind, this being NANO WRI MO, which is short for NATIONAL NOVEL WRITING MONTH.

The idea being that you force yourself, come hell, high water, doomesday, tsunami, natural disasters or acts of god, you WILL sit down at your computer for every day during the month of November and write some words, no matter how naff, shit and downright non-literary they are. The idea being, of course that by the end of the month you have written some, or perhaps all, of that book that was burning inside you and ready to get out all along. Their goal for you, is to write a 50,000 word novel by midnight on 30th september.

The list of authors who have been published after writing a Nanowrimo novel is reasonably long, but that said, its still only a drop in the ocean of the twenty one thousand six hundred and eighty-three who managed to write 50,000 words last year and were therefore declared "winners"!

But hell - writing can be cathartic, creative, consoling, consuming and fulfilling whether its published or not. We are all authors now. Its just that no bugger seems to be writing me a quarter of a million pound advance yet. I must be doing something wrong.

Well anyway, if you fancy writing a novel in a month (or trying to), go and sign up at http://www.nanowrimo.org and come and be my writing buddy (I am assuming this new creative obligation gives me the god-given right to stay up smoking and drinking whisky in my study til the early hours as I await the divine hand of inspiration to flow from the tip of my...Oh. keyboards don't have tips.

Hot Bloody Shots

So if there's one thing guaranteed to get me spitting, its a nepotistic love in. Oh look MEITGF
(I got the acronym wrong deliberately, pedants). But my latest, greatest source 0of ire is the one which slithers through my letterbox once a year, courtesy of my friends at Broadcast. Yes,its the arsing HOTSHOTS edition. Yes its the up and coming new stars of tomorrow.There's just one problem in order to be considered you have fulfil the following condition:

"To be considered as a Broadcast Hot Shot, each individual must be nominated by a company. Each nomination must also be accompanied by a written testimonial from a senior individual at that company."

RIIIIIGHT: So, in the very first category "business" we have "six to start". Correct me if I am wrong, but it appears they set up this company in 2007/2008 and they themselves (Dan and Adrian Hon) are the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Creative Officer themselves, which begs the question: who nominated them, or did they just nominate each other? That isn't really in the spirit of the games, I thought, or if it is, then perhaps Broadcast need to revise their rules?

Not that I have a problem with self nomination - in fact, far from it. I congratulate every one of those well-connected, Oxbridge educated smooth talking bastards that convinced their bosses to give an obsequious quote to Broadcast blowing smoke up their arses. Even more (much more) I congratulate those who got there under their own steam and are building brilliant careers working in fantastically successful companies and who will, in the not too distant future be calling the (metaphorical) shots in TV. But that leaves just one question. Which is : how many brilliant freelancers out there have been overlooked because, at the time of asking, they weren't working with a company that they could rely on to nominate them? Is it a coincidence that out of 17 Hotshots in production, only 1 was a freelancer? I suspect not.

The tyranny of blogging....

updating the damn thing every day. Well I said I'd do it, so I have.

I know. That was ten seconds of your life that you wont get back. If you ended up here and you aspire to a career in telly, I hope this makes it worthwhile. Courtesy of Charlie Brooker, whom I *heart*.

The TV working time directive

I the undersigned freelancer am prepared to bend of backwards (or should that be forwards) and allow myself to be shafted royally by the people in charge of this mismanaged, poorly strategised, cesspit of slavery we laughingly call an industry.

OK I exagerrate (nothing new there) BUT one of the things that really annoys me is that in this crazy world of TV is that the long hours accepted to be a necessity, when they are not. The BBC even tries to get most of its freelancers to sign six day contracts these days FFS!

Way back in the dim and distant past I made a progamme for a company called SPE. It was a rather bizarre company on many levels, not least, however that their working hours were 9-5 and the office was locked at 6pm. We made a series for the BBC. It was on time and on budget. I saw the 5:45 news when I got home at night (weird). I was not permanently knackered and stressed.

Apart from occasional extenuating circumstances, TV doesn't NEED to have a long hours culture. We are only manufacturing a product. There are many, many millions of products manufactured in the world - some of them every bit as complex as a TV programme with just as tight budgets and schedules, which do not rely on staff working 12 hour days (or more).

I just wish a few more people in charge would run it normally. So often its more about inherited assumptions that it *needs* to be the way it is. Like Chicken Licken, series-producers run around convinced that the sky will fall in should they or their team dare to leave the office before 7 or 8pm.

But does the fault lie with the broadcasters, who squeeze the production companies? Or the production companies who squeeze the freelancers? Or with the freelancers who work for nothing because they are desperate? Well nobody is blameless, but if you do work for nothing, you're a moron. Because the buck does stop with you. Literally. If you don't value yourself, nobody else will. Richard Branson didn't make a fortune giving away car aeriels out of the boot of his car now, so come on media graduates, don't be shy, and don;t undersell yourself, because it benefits none of us.

If it can't be done in normal hours at a decent pay then the budget is too poor, or the schedule is too tight. As that stupid smoking jacketed meerkat would say: simples.

How not to find work

A few weeks ago it dawned upon me that I would have go “over the top” and engage in trench warfare of the job-hunting kind. Now that I’m nestling in the bony, uncomfortable lap of unemployment, I feel the urge to confess that I have gone “over the top” in more ways than one. Not only have I ruthlessly hunted down every whiff of a vacancy, with what I like to think is sniper-like single-mindedness (and only a small minority of people regard as stalking), but in various application forms, I’ve made some frankly preposterous claims about myself. I started with a fairly baby-ish step outside the precincts of veracity with, “I am a great team player”. In truth, even my mother exclaimed “not even at Dominos darling, and surely I don’t have to remind you about that Trivial Pursuit incident?”. Now this column is not the place to go into the Triv incident in detail but suffice to say that those little cheeses were only ever designed to be wedged into the circular playing piece. Huge whopper The next whopper to flow from my fingertips was the excoriating “I believe in fostering a happy working environment”. Now, anyone who has had the misfortune of working with me will know that I believe in fostering a happy working environment in much the same way that Basil Fawlty was a bastion of the workers-rights movement. But I finally surpassed myself when I was called in for an interview recently and the HR plonker (and it is *always* the HR plonker) trotted out the old “and what would you say was your biggest weakness?” line. I almost choked on my Evian. My answer was hardly original, but certainly worthy of consideration for the Booker Prize for Fiction. (at very least the performance was Oscar-worthy): “My worst attribute? Well I’m just such a perfectionist!” I don’t know if I was more scared at the bollocks I was spouting or the fact that they actually appeared to believe me. Tendency to let it all out Deep down inside though, I’ve always longed to be in a situation where I was asked that question, and actually had the balls to smile sweetly and reply “my worst attribute? Well I have a terrible tendency to fanny-fart Zadok the Priest whenever a commissioning editor walks into the room, but it makes a dreadful mess if I follow-through.” Unfortunately I never have been in that situation because, by very dint of me being at the interview, I am, de facto, unemployed and, inter alia, in desperate need of cash, ergo, not only can I not afford to f*ck-up the interrogation in question, but I have inexplicably started using random latin phrases ad nauseam. I think I must need to get out of the house and seek some human interaction before I go completely stir crazy. Anyone need a dog walker? Ophelia ‘hitting rock’ Bottom. ophelia.bottom@googlemail.com

There's only one Kevin Lygo......

Mental Health is no respecter of boundaries, whether they be by riches or hierarchy. In fact, pretty much every commissioning editor I have ever come across has been quite seriously wanting in the old grey matter department in one way or another.

Sometimes its just the wrong person in the wrong job. Like the Discovery comm. ed. who insists on freeform jazz music in all his programmes. Everyone knows that the Discovery demographic is hairy, moustachioed biker-types, and generally speaking, these aren't the guys you bump into at Ronnie Scott's on a Sunday afternoon (Don't click on that link if jazz music makes you want to nail pianists fingers to the black keys by the way).

But its not just comm eds who are bonkers. Most execs are at least a couple of edits short of the full sequence, and I'm not that confident I have ever worked with a presenter who was entirely the full shilling, and I've worked with a few.

By far the most bizarre was Ashley Hames, but then anyone who is willing to have his scrotum nailed to a plank of wood in search of fame and fortune deserves everything they get. And I mean by that tetanus, necrotising fasciitis, and possibly even gangrene. (There's an article on gangrenous scrotal infections here, but I really REALLY wouldn't recommend clicking it unless you have a cast-iron stomach)

Anyway, I digress, so back to mental health being no respecter of hierarchy. Its beginning to get quite popular to be a mad celeb these days (Bi-Polar Exporers Kerry Katona and Sophie Anderton to name but two, although not everyone is convinced). Generally, however, the public are relatively sympathetic (in a "point and laugh" kind of way) but the same can't be said for footie fans. When Rangers goalkeeper Andy Goram was reportedly treated for mild schizophrenia a few years ago, the Dundee crowd came up with a variation on their popular football chant; "Two Andy Gorams, there's only two Andy Gorams ..."


..but that's Dundonians for you,

Anyhow, at least when it comes to TV execs, they are only one of a kind, I thought. Or are they?

A shuffle through the Channel 4 commissioning website with the (more than apt) page headline "What's This Channel 4?" has the worrying label "Kevin Lygo 1" under his photograph. I fear that these in these credit-crunch times they have been forced to clone him so that he can do the work of three men. Kevin Lygo 1 is their corporate bot, toeing the channel 4 line. Kevin Lygo 2 (according to Marketing Week) is battling the evil forces of Andy Duncan and Luke Johnson for the grand prize of Channel 4 Emperor, and as for Kevin Lygo 3? - well, he has been secretly masquerading as a celebrity chef, saving them a fortune on presenter fees for The F Word for years.

Have you seen these two men in the same room at the same time? Well?












Toodle pip!

job stress and chaos theory

Job Stress is more contagious than swine flu, sweeping through whole productions faster than a nasty dose of the clap. Specifically, this means at a speed affecting one new person every 2.5 days. (This statistic comes to you courtesy of a sound recordist, an AP and three researchers on a now defunct reality show for channel 5. They blamed the B&Bs bedsheets. Yeah. Right.)

What starts as a jitter in the series producer's stomach, ends three weeks later in a long wet drop on the location portaloo as half the production team shit themselves, literally, over whether their new format can sustain enough usable material to make a single programme, let alone a series.

It's like that old adage – about a butterfly flapping its wings in Central Park and causing an earthquake in China.

Just so, Kevin Lygo sends a memo down at Horseferry Rd and the next thing you know, somewhere in Manchester the director has a nervous breakdown and is found wandering along a railway embankment in her nighty, reciting nursery-rhymes, the contributors are threatening legal action due to breach of promise, and where there was a potentially award-winning new series on your CV, there is a now a big empty hole of something nobody has heard of.


Incredibly, the Series Producer, is promptly promoted and proceeds to preside over another disastrous production, but then I guess nepotism isn’t confined to the BBC.

Apparently this butterfly effect is based on chaos theory, the academic proponents of which struggled for years to gain acceptance by their peers. If only they'd used television production as their working model – they could have had their nobel prize sewn up quicker than you can say "you'll never work for this company again."

The Wonderful World of Ophelia Bottom - week one

Producer/director Ophelia Bottom has worked at all the super-indies at one point or another and has 37 flight cases and a Portabrace bag-full of dirt to dish. In her first adventure she relives the TV chaos theory. I remember when I first decided to “turn freelance”, my father recoiling in abject horror. Why do that when I had such a fine job at the BBC? Well aside from the fact that I had already shagged the boss and made life predictably difficult for myself (I spared my father this particular nugget of information), I was very frankly fed up with it. Its full of the worst kind of nepotism, which is fine if you’re a BBC “type,” but if you’re not, forget it. Believe me, the only person who ever made it to the top lying on their back was Michaelangelo and that was just the top of the Sistine Chapel. Apparently he was given to saying "However rich I may have been, I have always lived as a poor man." Which is ironic, because according to my bank manager, however poor I have been, I've always lived as a rich woman. I told him that I don’t even think I have a particularly extravagant lifestyle, what with coke down to forty quid a whack now, but even then he refused to extend my overdraft, the callous bastard. I mean who is he to judge me? ophelia.bottom@googlemail.com