Catching The Next Wave

This post first appeared on mipblog

I am very interested to see where the next big wave of creative talent is going to come from. Very interested. Where is the next Charlie Parsons (creator of Club X, The Word, Survivor (and therefore all of modern reality television)) going to emerge from? Or the next wave of animation talent such as graduated from the UK’s NFTS in the 80’s like Nick Park, Alison Snowden and David Fine, Mark Baker, Tony Collingwood (who between them created or co-created Wallace & Gromit, Ricky Sprocket, Peppa Pig, The Secret Show)..

For me, today’s creative climate is starting to feel a little bit like the music scene in the early 70's – if you don’t remember it or weren’t alive then it was all ‘Yes’ and ‘Genesis’ and concept albums and epic, over-produced sound-bilge and flared trousers and stacked shoes, all of which I owned.

In 1977 I was working in a factory in Germany (another story), I went to some dive-of-a-venue to see a band called ‘The Stranglers’. A fight broke out every 10 minutes between an audience member and a band member (usually Jean-Jacques Burnel) but it was the ‘Rattus Norvegicus’ tour and it was great and it was obvious that something new and big and sensational was happening to music which would never be the same again and I want the same thing to happen in TV, like now.

As the workforce in TV decreases in size, as training budgets are cut and young people move away from watching traditional broadcast television and opt instead to consume their stories on-demand, we may be in danger of deterring new young creative talent from thinking of the television business as a career opportunity. For my generation it was impossibly glamorous, it isn’t any more.

We should expect new talent to be saying ‘no thanks’ more and more frequently to our old media overtures. They seem more likely to be giving us the finger and starting a creative revolution on digital platforms. A proper, counter-culture, rebellious, offensive and challenging creative revolution that a large part of the mainstream is going to abhor.

We all remember ‘proper’ musicians saying of the Sex Pistols ‘they can’t play, they can’t write and they sing out of tune’ and only today we were looking at the 27m YouTube views that asdfmovie has got for one of its ‘shows’ and someone (who shall remain nameless but wasn’t me) said ‘I don’t like it, they can’t animate there’s no story and ….’

Yeah, whatevs grandad.

But just as The Stranglers and even the Pistols got record deals, so we too can provide a home for the new wave of talent once they’re done with smashing the system and staking out their creative territory.

Provided we don’t just try and defend the old way of doing things and provided we can be bold and open and can embrace whatever comes out of the next big thing we can survive and prosper. We may be selling new shows shows to Netflix, Amazon and YouTube and they may not look like ‘shows’ as we currently understand the term but even anarchists ultimately need deal makers and salesmen to earn a crust.

We can still be part of the new wave, it’ll just be on slightly different creative terms.

I hope so anyway, I was listening to The Sex Pistols just the other day …

The Word: it was twenty years ago ... more or less ... this week

Back home after the party to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the first series of The Word  on Channel 4 and I have to reflect (without any particular originality) on what a landmark show that was both in TV terms but also in personal terms - everyone remembers it and it was the show that threw every production challenge at me that you care to name and dared me to ‘overcome’.

Watching clips on the party screens of the music, the grotesque stunts, the shameless exploitation of punters wanting their 5 minutes of fame (I’ll do anything to get onto TV’) it reminded me how prescient Charlie Parsons (Editor-In-Chief) was and how that show set the tone for the kind of celebrity-schlock tabloid titillation culture of which we still don’t seem to be tiring.

I worked on Series 1 which was tame compared to what came afterwards but it still introduced to TV the concept of the pointless celebrity (Amanda de Cadanet) and the idea that it was cool to be thick (Terry Christian put on the thick act well) but the music was live, the guests were often dangerous and the look on the Channel 4 lawyers faces as libel after obscenity flowed from the screen was a joy to behold. This sort of groveling apology made the whole thing worthwhile.

You couldn’t make that show now on Terrestrial TV. Charlie said that he saw more health and Safety people at the studio when he was arranging the party than he saw during the production of all 5 series of the show. And the decency balance has temporarily (I hope) tipped in favour of the Daily Mail - it used to be our ambition to outrage them - it was an easy way of getting press. Then the gnomes of Westminster and the TV management  droids started to think that what the Daily Mail printed actually mattered. Fear now stalks the corridors of TV Land.

Like many people on the team I was made to work unreasonably hard for that show but it was worth it. It’s my Vietnam - when people stumble weeping into my office with the production equivalent of a stubbed toe I smile knowingly; until you’ve been face down in the Charlie Parsons production mud dodging legal and financial cluster bombs with your buddies wandering around looking for their dismembered limbs then please - shut the fuck up about your stupid toe.

Everyone should have a job like that on their CV - one where you take yourself to the edge, working under incredible pressure for excessive hours and little financial reward. The trick is not to get stuck there but to take what you need and move on. You have to do it in your 20’s when you have the energy and before things like work-life balance start to become an issue and you have to make sure that you are working for a bona fide genius so that you learn from the best.

Charlie Parsons (editor-in-chief of The Word) is just such a genius. He has an incredible instinct for what makes talked-about TV, from ‘The Word’ to ‘The Big Breakfast’ to ‘Survivor’ he has been a much copied, genuine innovator. I actually can’t watch that type of TV myself - not because its beneath me but because I find it too embarrassing and uncomfortable to be enjoyable. But I admire the best of the producers of populist TV and am aware that millions lap it up and that it has kept tabloid journalism alive a well for the past couple of decades.

Charlie is a true child of modern TV - when I worked on the Word I soon realised that I could never be him - I had never watched an episode of a soap all the way through in my life (and still haven’t) - he watched Corrie religiously, he was in touch and in love with popular TV - you can’t fake that level of enthusiasm for the cause.

My favourite take-away form the party; Waheed Alli’s answer to the yearbook question ‘What did you do after The Word?” His answer “Made millions and became a Lord’. Brilliant.