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."