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."