Category: TV Page 12 of 14

Press Release: To All UK Tabloid Newspapers

On 12/11/2008

In Fish In A Barrel, Link, TV, Uncategorized

From: PR Office, ITV Productions
Subject: I’m A Celebrity… 2008

Dear All,

By now, you should have received yesterday’s press release confirming the details of this year’s line-up for I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, and we’re sure you’re just as excited about the new series as we are! (If, for some reason, you didn’t get the press release, you can download it, and the rest of the press pack, by clicking here).

All the information you need to run coverage of this year’s show is in there, so you should be able to get a good two or three pages’ worth out of each episode. And whilst we try to answer all questions you might ask about the show as soon as possible, we realise that, what with there being three blonde women in the show this year, it does mean that some of you are quite rightly asking “Which woman are we supposed to write about when she takes a shower on day two this year?”

As we can’t predict which of our three lovely ladies will provide you with some bikini-based cheesecake, we hope the following template will cover all possible eventualities (delete as appropriate to create the paragraph to accompany the picture, which should be at least two-thirds of a page, as in previous years):

Headline:
IT’S CARLY ZUCK-AHHH / DANI BARE / NICOLA Mc-CLEAN !

Text:
Saucy Carly Zucker / Dani Behr / Nicola McLean sent temperatures sky-high yesterday in I’m A Celebrity as she stripped down to a skimpy bikini to take a shower!

The sexy WAG / TV Presenter / WAG took the cold shower to cool off, but instead steamed up the camera lenses with her antics! A show insider said “She’s a sexy girl, and when she just stripped off and started showering, the boys in the camp – and the crew – could hardly believe their eyes!”

Carly / Dani / Nicola ‘s partner is a footballer / restaurant owner / footballer, so she probably can’t wait to get home to their mansion / eat some proper food / their mansion, but in the meantime it looks as if she’s getting used to life in the jungle. Experts say she’s tipped to be in the top four, but we’d say she’s in the top Phwoar!

Hope this helps!

Best

ITV Productions

PS – If you want to take a more alternative angle, you can find one of the contestants pictured after a rather different kind of shower here

“But Surely,” He Said, “The ‘X Factor’ Is A Simpleton’s Way Of Referring To Einstein’s Cosmological Constant?”*

By John

On 10/11/2008

In Fish In A Barrel, TV, Uncategorized

Anyway, let’s take a look at the previous couple of winners of ITV’s song-based talent contest:

2006 Winner: LEONA Lewis
2007 Winner: LEON Jackson

It’s 2008, and the final draws nigh (so I gather – I’m not following it). Is there an entrant called Leo this year? If so, worth a tenner at the betting shop, surely?

*Yes, yes, I know it’s lamda, but if Albert can fudge his equations, I can do the same with my post titles.

The Multiplying Natures Of Villainy*

By John

On 07/11/2008

In TV, Uncategorized, Writing

To my mind, one of the few disappointments in all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original Sherlock Holmes tales is the introduction of his nemesis Professor Moriarty.

Professor James Moriarty first appears in The Adventure Of The Final Problem, in which Holmes is revealed to have been thwarting the plots of ‘the Napoleon of Crime’ for some time. Holmes and Watson flee England to escape retribution from Moriarty and his men. The two of them travel to Switzerland, and whilst walking near the Reichenbach Falls, Watson is called back to their hotel to assist someone who’s been taken ill. This is a ruse, and when Watson realises and returns to the mountain path, he finds a note from Holmes saying as much, and that he expects both he and Moriarty will fight to the death. Watson sees signs of a struggle on the path, and concludes that Holmes and Moriarty, whilst fighting, have fallen to their deaths.

I’m summarising it there (and inevitably losing a lot of the original tale’s skill and charm; if you haven’t read it, I urge you to do so), but that’s the general gist. It’s not a bad story in and of itself, and it’s pretty well-known that Doyle was trying to kill off Holmes in an impressive way so he could write other things, Holmes having become a millstone, albeit one which was a nice earner. The main problem – as opposed to the Final Problem – I have with it is that the introduction of Moriarty as Holmes’s polar opposite, and his demise at Reichenbach, all occur within the one story. Whilst Holmes is portrayed as having been aware of Moriarty’s nefarious ways for some time, the reader hasn’t really had much chance to sense that an arch-foe is on the move, and though later stories build the mythology of Moriarty’s wicked ways, we can only take Holmes’s word for it. Well, Holmes’s comments as reported via Watson through Doyle, but you know what I mean.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this recently because the novel I’m currently working on (more in my head than on the page at the moment, granted) The Body Orchard, features a return match between a deeply villainous chap and the detective who caught him last time. Part of the problem I’ve been mentally wrestling with has been that of establishing the stakes involved, and the backstory. I’m taking my cue somewhat from Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, wherein the reader hears much about Hannibal Lecter from his opposite number, Will Graham; Graham’s portrayed as an intelligent if troubled man, whose references to Lecter make it very clear that he’s a man who should never be underestimated or trusted, even for a moment. In much the same way as Holmes tells us that Moriarty’s a baddie of the highest order, we learn about the villain from a character who we’ve already started to root for or empathise with. Granted, Holmes is less human than Graham, but I think that the comparison’s a reasonable one. And there are other examples of characters, or events, being made portentous by more virtuous characters – Yoda’s line “You will be” in The Empire Strikes Back, and the Doctor’s look of panic at the end of the Doctor Who episode Turn Left, spring to mind, and I’m sure you can think of others.

So anyway, this is something that I’ve been mulling over recently – the challenge of making it clear that a villain is someone to be reckoned with, without having to show them running over blind orphans with a combine harvester. I’m feeling fairly comfortable with the solutions I’ve come up with, but now I have another question: since my villain is supposed to be so very clever indeed, how do I demonstrate that in a fashion that doesn’t look token or unconvincing? Holmes and Moriarty were only ever as smart as Doyle, and Will Graham and Lecter as intelligent as Thomas Harris (and in the book Hannibal, Lecter appears to have lost a lot of his intelligence, but I was ferociously disappointed with that book, and I won’t get into that now).

In exactly the same way, my characters always have the disadvantage of only ever being as clever as me, which – as is abundantly clear to anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis – means that if I portray them as, say, walking upright or using tools, they’re already pushing at the boundaries of my knowledge.

*With apologies to Bill Shaky (Macbeth Act 1, Scene 2)

Sometimes I Read Things That Make Me Want To Shout “Yes!”

By John

On 05/11/2008

In Link, TV, Uncategorized, Writing

…This is one such thing.

In an interview for the Writer’s Guild Magazine, writer James Moran aims a well-deserved kick at the groin of one of the most irritating and pervasive cliches about Doctor Who:

Question: Was it the old cliché of hiding behind the sofa as a kid?
Moran: […] while I did get scared a lot, I never hid behind the sofa (it was impossible, because our sofa was against the wall.) I don’t know how all these people claim to have hidden behind their sofas as kids, unless they all lived in massive, Friends-style apartments with the sofa in the middle of the room. I suspect many of them didn’t actually watch the show and are retconning their own childhood to jump on the bandwagon.

Mr Moran, I salute you.

What with this, and the fact that it’s now known by an audience of millions that Daleks can go upstairs, it must be a hell of a challenge for a lot of journalists to write about Who nowadays, eh?

Sometimes I Read Things That Make Me Want To Shout “Yes!”

By John

On 05/11/2008

In Link, TV, Uncategorized, Writing

…This is one such thing.

In an interview for the Writer’s Guild Magazine, writer James Moran aims a well-deserved kick at the groin of one of the most irritating and pervasive cliches about Doctor Who:

Question: Was it the old cliché of hiding behind the sofa as a kid?

Moran: […] while I did get scared a lot, I never hid behind the sofa (it was impossible, because our sofa was against the wall.) I don’t know how all these people claim to have hidden behind their sofas as kids, unless they all lived in massive, Friends-style apartments with the sofa in the middle of the room. I suspect many of them didn’t actually watch the show and are retconning their own childhood to jump on the bandwagon.

Mr Moran, I salute you.

What with this, and the fact that it’s now known by an audience of millions that Daleks can go upstairs, it must be a hell of a challenge for a lot of journalists to write about Who nowadays, eh?

The IT Crowd: Watching The Defectives

By John

On 03/11/2008

In Link, Personal, TV, Uncategorized, Writing

As m’chum Steve has already recounted, on Friday night he and I went to see a filming of the Channel 4 comedy The IT Crowd. His post says a lot about the shows, so this is my more self-absorbed version of events (ahem).

It was a lot of fun, and the first time I’d seen a studio sitcom recorded in… hmm, come to think about it maybe it’s the first time ever, so it was fascinating to see how it was all done. It was filmed at Pinewood Studios, and it was startling – in the best way – to see how the offices and other rooms in the show look in reality and on screen.

Steve and I were the guests of my friend Sean, who’s IT Consultant for the show, so after Sean and the other cast and crew members had done the hard work, Steve and I stepped onto the set to help Sean with de-rigging, as it was the last show of the series. This felt kind of odd in itself – I’ve followed the show since it began, and so to be crawling round on the floor behind Roy and Moss’s desks and helping pull cables through the wall made me feel like I wasn’t quite in the real world any more (I felt like Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit when he goes into Toontown).

Anyway, after we’d helped Sean do what was necessary, we were taken into the green room, where various members of the cast and crew were having a well-earned drink. Just inside the door, and looking surprisingly relaxed, was the writer-director Graham Linehan, who Sean kindly introduced me to, and explained to Graham that I’d contributed to one of the show’s websites.

Graham – and I’m going to call him by his first name because he’s a friendly chap and I don’t think he’d take offence – asked us if we’d had a good night, and specifically what we’d thought of a particular scene in the last episode, and it was very interesting to see that he’d thought of an angle on it which I hadn’t; very much a case of the creator being so in control of the material that he’s able to see things which someone who’s less steeped in it (me on this occasion) would miss. But he was friendly about it, and it was a genuine shame that I had to leg it early to get the last train home, as it would have been good to chat more.

I’ve barely touched on how funny the shows were – mainly because Steve’s covered them in more detail, and also for spoiler-related reasons – but they were very strong episodes, and all in all it made for a cracking night out, and I’m mega-grateful to Sean for getting us on the guest list.

If nothing else, looking at the size of the sets, all the lighting overhead, the cameras and mics pointing at the cast, and the number of people who were hard at work, it made me even more keen to continue with writing, given that everything in that studio was there because once, Graham Linehan sat down and typed ‘INT. OFFICE – DAY’…

Dead Set On e4 Last Night: Initial Reaction

By John

On 28/10/2008

In Link, TV, Uncategorized

Did you watch the first episode of Dead Set last night? I did, lured in by the fact it was written by Charlie Brooker.

And I enjoyed it – more drama than comedy, but I thought it worked, and the high production values certainly helped. But…

But was I alone in thinking that the scenes of the infected people running amok in the production office corridors looked like a blood-soaked version of the recent promos for Channel 4’s Generation Next talent search (the ones which featured young people bursting into meetings at C4 HQ, onto the set of the news with Jon Snow, that sort of thing)?

Small Actions, Big Stage

By John

On 02/09/2008

In Link, TV, Uncategorized, Writing

There’s an interesting writing competition run by Channel 4 and Amnesty International here – with quite an impressive prize.

All you have to do is write a pitch for a sketch, in no more than 160 characters, on the theme of ‘Small Actions’. They then take the winning idea and expand it into a full sketch which will be – and this strikes me as the good bit – performed at the Amnesty International ‘Secret Policeman’s Ball’ Concert which is taking place in London in October.

The ultimate winner will see their sketch performed on the night (and they get another ticket so they can take along a friend), and also receive a copy of the DVD of the show. Ten runners-up will receive copies of the DVD (though it should be noted that the small print does stress they can’t guarantee that the winning sketch will necessarily be on the DVD, or in the TV broadcast of the concert).

The last time they ran a competition like this, the winning sketch was performed by Chevy Chase and Seth Green, so it certainly seems worth entering.

To my mind, the challenge is the fact that you can only submit up to 160 characters in your pitch (pretty much the length of the previous paragraph) – and the deadline is only a week away: Noon on Tuesday 9th September.

So you have to be both brief and swift, but in all honesty I know those are traits which I could certainly stand to develop in my writing (and, I suspect, in other areas of my life), so I think it’s worth a go.

Submit your pitch-ette via this page – and if you do enter, let me know, eh ? When you go on to win and writerly stardom* beckons, I’d like to be able to claim I traded virtual conversation with you “way back when”…

*Yes, I’m all too aware that, with a few notable exceptions, “writers” and “stardom” tend to go together about as frequently as skateboards and olives. But I’m sure you know what I mean.

And Soon You Will Find There Comes A Time, For Making Your World Up

By John

On 27/08/2008

In Link, TV, Uncategorized, Writing

So, I’m currently working on my entry for this year’s Red Planet Writing Competition.

As my series pilot has an element of the supernatural about it (to my own surprise, to be honest), I’ve had to do some research, but I also get to invent things. One element of the story is that of people talking to ghosts in the style of Doris Stokes or Derek Acorah, but having done a bit of reading about apparent communication between the dead and the living, I found that there seems to be a lot of variation as to how the dead speak, and in itself this is a good thing for me, and within the context of the series pilot that leaves me a lot of latitude to decide how communication with spirits actually happens. Which I like, because it means I get to make it up.

Underlying most TV shows is what is often called the ‘mythology’ of the show, and those which have some kind of paranormal, fantasy or science-fiction basis often have to make it more explicit than those which are based in what we call reality – I guess this is because the greater suspension of belief, or lack of frame of reference, has to be compensated for by a greater explanation of the environment. To give an obvious example, the viewer needs to be told that The Doctor is (at least ostensibly) the last of a race of people who travel through space and time, which is why he does so; but we don’t need to be told that Stacey from EastEnders is a member of the Walford Market Trader’s Association, which is why she has a permit to run a stall in Albert Square (I made up that Association name, as those of you who know more Albert Square mythology than I will have immediately spotted). I rather suspect the reason for this is because we’ve all seen market stalls (even if they’re only on cutting-edge documentaries like EastEnders and Albion Market ), and thus they need less explanation.

In a way, it seems like an extension of the principle of Occam’s razor, that the more complicated and otherworldly a situation is presented as being, the greater the explanation required of the mechanics of that situation; there are differing degrees of explanation, though, and the creators’ intent plays a big part in it – I’ve never made it past Chapter 5 of the first book of Tolkein’s Lord Of The Rings because of the frequent diversions off into world-building (genealogies and songs in particularly), and the folks behind the Star Trek franchise seem pretty happy to detail almost every stage between the present day and the universe of Kirk, Picard, et al, whereas things such as the scientific backdrop to the Star Wars films are (as far as I know) pretty thin on the ground – and indeed, when Lucas started to provide pseudo-explanations for the mystical elements, most folks I know were unimpressed. Midichlorians, indeed.

Whilst I’m thinking about the underlying ideas of my series proposal in detail ahead of time, it’s not always the case that TV series have everything worked out in advance; Doctor Who didn’t come fully-formed with aspects such as the regeneration built in, many elements of (my favourite TV show ever) Twin Peaks were pretty much made up as the writers went along, and I think it’s fair to say that The X-Files put many of us off in its latter years by being pretty obviously weighed down by an increasingly complicated and contradictory mythology – one which it’s very hard to imagine was the result of careful planning.

At the moment, however, I’m rather enjoying my little bit of world-building, though the time will soon come to stop messing about with the backdrop and to concentrate on the drama which has to unfold in front of it; that’s fine, and I’m well aware that research and preparation can just end up being procrastination, but I’m trying to balance the competition’s requirement for a series outline with the need to work out what happens in the first hour of the projected series, and – for want of a better word – playing at being a demiurge is proving a lot of fun.

There’s a fine line between obsessing over the details of how your main character is Borin the seventh son of Colin, and establishing the way that your world works, I guess, but – at least for now – I hope I’m staying on the right side of the line.

From My Virtual Postbag

By John

On 29/07/2008

In TV, Uncategorized

It’s not all spam offering me the chance to buy some V1@gra – here’s a genuine e-mail I received today:

“We thought that you might be interested to know that tickets are now available for a brand new entertainment show taping at The ITV Studios, Waterloo this Sunday! As with all of our shows, the tickets are FREE!

MY LITTLE SOLDIER – hosted by Bradley Walsh

My Little Soldier is a brand new entertainment show for Saturday nights, which will be recorded this Sunday, where children are the stars of the show, but without realising it! Children are given a task by their parents and we follow their hilarious antics on a hidden camera. The children will then be surprised in the studio by our host, Bradley Walsh.

If you would like to join us in the studio, then apply now!

The show will be recorded at The ITV London Studios, Waterloo on Sunday 3rd August 2008 at 1.30pm.

Booking is now open and you may apply online via our website at http://www.sroaudiences.com or by replying to this email”

…No, I shan’t be going to watch the filming. To be honest, I doubt I’ll be watching the finished product either, as … well, let’s just say that it doesn’t really sound like my kind of thing.

The words ‘ITV’ and ‘entertainment show for Saturday nights’ made me sceptical, and then they mentioned Bradley Walsh was hosting it.

Besides, I’ve seen ‘Child’s Play’ and ‘Hider In The House’ (the TV shows, not the films of the same names), and I think that’s probably enough of that sort of thing for me.