Save us from Media Studies students!

I was on the train on the way up to Manchester this morning - on the next table along were four undergraduates on the way to the BBC for a recruitment day out and clearly part of their day was to propose potential new programme formats. Well - they spoke very loudly and earnestly about their ideas for radical new television shows and all made notes in their moleskin notebooks. Their ideas were so derivative and tired it made me chuck and I made a note of some of them;

1. "Darts players - wives & girlfriends" - a reality show investigating the love lives of darts players. @bendavison tells me it's been done already, sigh.
2. A series of documentaries that challenge racism by featuring the apparently growing Bollywood porn industry...!
3. "Strictly come prancing"- reality show for jockeys.
4. "Blaggers with attitude"; documentary series following people around the festivals who manage to score free stuff; t-shirts etc.
5. "Bankrupt celeb finance boot-camp"; broke Z-listers learning how to manage the money they get from Heat Magazine.
6. "Boyle Baron" - singer Susan Boyle learns the ins and outs of the oil industry.
7. "The Grapes of Hoff"- David Hasselhoff becomes a vintner.
8. "Frankie goes to Bollywood" - ex. members of the 80s band learn Indian dance moves; they also discussed if it should be for Comic Relief(!)
9. "The Yids are alright" - Pete Townsend explores Jewish culture.
10. "Train of thought"- a gameshow set on the West Coast Mainline. Different stations would signal different rounds. Would suit Alan Titchmarsh?

So - BBC, stop employing media-studies graduates and instead give English/History/Classics students a shot at making some original TV.

If you see any of these formats on BBC3 in eighteen months time you read it here first!

Celebrities - just like the rest (or worst!) of us.

I was working in an edit suite recently and overheard a well known TV personality making a call to book train tickets. They wanted to go to Glasgow first class (hey, if you've got the cash why not travel in comfort?) but booking four tickets (around the same table) so that...

...I don't have to sit next to any common people

Now, this person has a column in The Independent and presents themselves as fair-minded, liberal, person-of-the-people in their writing/TV presenting!

One celeb I've got a bit of experience of is Jeremy Paxman - In the late eighties I was working as a maintenance engineer in BBC Television News and was doing the late shift one night (essentially what was the Nine O'clock News and then Newsnight) and was on the studio floor in Studio Two, BBC Television Centre trying to fix Paxman's 'cought-cut' (a button on a long cable that the newsreader keeps to hand to momentarily mute his microphone if he has a coughing fit). Not really noticing the time and my brain having long blanked out the seemingly unending re-cueing of the theme music over the studio's monitors I didn't realise that while scrabbling about under the programme desk the Studio Manager had counted the crew down for the live transmission. As I emerged from under the desk by Paxman's legs he put a gentle yet very firm hand on my head and pushed me back under the table-top and as he finished delivering his piece to camera introducing the first report on video tape he let go and said with a broad grin "you didn't know we were on the air, did you?" - what a gentleman! Not at all like the media-types I have to deal with nowadays.

Paxman anecdote no.2

One of the guys who was an engineer on my team used to do a monthly comic strip featuring the adventures of "Paxman" - a caped crusader who always won the day with his hard-questioning of politicians(!) - The strip would get photo-copied and put up on staff noticeboards around the building (the days before the web!) - eventually the weight of 'stop abusing the noticeboards' emails meant my colleague stopped the cartoon. One day a few months later another colleague had to go and fix the vt100 terminal in Paxman's office and noticed the complete set of cartoons on his pinboard.

Annoyances

I've had a busy few weeks (which is good!) but I've had a few small run-ins with customers.

• I had to go and investigate a suite where all the laybacks (to BetaSP!) had visual disturbances. The issue had supposedly only started after we'd changed the video i/o card in a workstation. When I got to look at some of the tapes it was clear that the fault was either RF or tape damage. When I parked the deck on the offending frames and opened the tape you could see the scratch running the length of the lower edge. If memory serves it is TG2 and TG5 that guide the lower edge of an SP tape and so clearly the fault with mechanical and definitely located in the record VTR. I showed this to the editor who was adamant that it couldn't be the case and that it was us having done something when we fitted the new video i/o card - ¨Coincidence, I think not¨!
  His colleague realised the silliness of his position and apologised, but because I wasn't willing to back down I left under a bit of a cloud.


• Colour balancing monitors - I got booked to go and calibrate a monitor for a grading session that was about to start. When I got there (colour probe in hand) I found an industrial JVC display - NTSC-phosphored tube and no tweaks on the outside. I explained this to the editor and left. The next day they called to say how unprofessional I'd been and why hadn't I set up the monitor. Well - as a freebie - I'd set the black and white levels but they wouldn't accept that the display was un-calibrat'able (made up word). Why people believe they can make a £1,500 monitor look like an £11k grading display is beyond me. Also - did they think I was lying or stupid (it must have been one or the other).

I'm wondering if other industries have such huge egos? Someone knows they're wrong, the person they're shouting at knows they're wrong, they know that the person they're shouting at knows they're wrong BUT to smile, apologise and walk away with everyone's dignity intact ain't an option.......