Because the problems television has won't be solved by product placement.

Less than a month to go until the government ends its consultation period on whether to lift restrictions on product placement on television (consultation ends January 8th).

The junk food aspect of product placement (big companies hoping to use shows like X-Factor to push their wares to child viewers in a way that would be forbidden on shows aimed specifically for kids, for example) is something I've become increasingly concerned about - there's an article about it on Comment Is Free here

I've already stated my objections to the idea, and have now placed those objections, in writing, to the address below. I would urge anyone who agrees to do the same, if they have even the slightest concern about UK television getting even worse, while people like Peter Bazalgette find new and imaginative ways to trouser even more cash off its rotting cadaver than was ever thought possible.


Stewart Gandy
Product Placement Consultation
5th Floor
Department for Culture Media and Sport
2-4 Cockspur Street
London
SW1Y 5DH

Dear Sirs,
I am a television scriptwriter, with about ten years of experience writing for such shows as Green Wing, Bob The Builder, Shaun The Sheep, Smack The Pony and others, with a number of other projects currently in development.

Like any industry, one always hears about the Golden Age that apparently ended just moments after one entered it, but times in the television industry have become noticeably harder of late, with the drop in advertising revenue being a genuine problem.

So please don’t think I take the matter lightly when I say that loosening restrictions on product placement in british television is a terrible idea that will serve only to enrich a few individuals, at the expense of a general lessening in quality of output, which will impoverish viewer and creator alike.

Here are my central objections to loosening restrictions on product placement:

1. Product placement is a very effective way for manufacturers to get round restrictions stopping them marketing directly to young children, who would normally be protected from aggressive promotion of unhealthy items such as high-sugared drinks, or salty snacks during child-centred programming. By pushing these products on shows such as Britain’s Got Talent, or Coronation Street, which have many young children amongst their viewers, manufacturers can easily circumvent these restrictions.

2. There is currently a clear line drawn between advertising, and programming. As a scriptwriter, I am free to mention a particular brand name if I wish to do so, but neither myself or the production company will receive any financial benefit for doing so, and great care will be taken that if I mention a particular brand of chocolate bar, for example, rival brands will be depicted at other points in the program, so no bias has been shown. Without this, the lines will begin to blur, breaking the contract of trust between the creators of a program and that program’s viewers.

3. If restrictions on product placement are lifted, the amount of pressure that will be put on scriptwriters and lower-level producers to depict promoted brands as having certain values or characteristics will be immense, to the detriment of our integrity as writers and creators. In America, for example, particulars makes of car are often inserted into shows, and depicted as highly desirable items, by characters who in real life would never be able to afford such items. As a writer, it's bad enough having to run storylines and dialogue past script editors, producers, lawyers, broadcast company (or network) executives and legal departments. But having to also run them past PR departments and advertisers is a very different matter indeed.

4. There is some question as to whether the ‘extra’ income from product placement could go anywhere near making up for lost advertising revenue - bearing in mind this money would have to come from advertising budgets, which are already moving away from television altogether.

5. There appears to be no guarantee that this ‘extra’ money will actually make its way into production budgets. Without careful safeguards, there is nothing to stop producers moving this money into the production company’s (and shareholder’s) own coffers, leaving the production budget to now make up an extra shortcut, through even further cuts.
These are just some of the issues I, and many other television writers have with the idea of loosening the restrictions upon product placement in British television.

I am, of course, available for further discussion of these and other points, if the Committee feels they would value the input of someone from the creative side of the industry.*


Sincerely yours,

James Henry

*I'm worried this bit sounds either sarcastic or pompous, but there we go.

Patroclus and I have written a sitcom!

(sometimes the classic JonnyB opening is the only one that will do).

Because I don't really live in what is tiresomely known as 'the real world', I was under the impression that programmes like 'The Apprentice' and 'Dragon's Den' were an accurate, and if anything, underplayed representation of Big Business. This was until I started to realise P (who has been a professional copywriter for umpty tum years AND has set up her own business, which is doing very well, thanks for asking) would squirm in her seat while these things were on, and murmur gentle admonishments like 'THIS IS BOLLOCKS' and 'THAT'S NOT HOW BUSINESS WORKS!' &c.

Which came as a shock to me, because apart from anything else, television DOES NOT LIE. If television is ever caught lying, Ant and Dec have to come round your house to apologise, and they're busy people, so everyone works hard to make sure this doesn't happen. But apparently on this one occasion (being where it covered business, I'm lumping it all together), television had lied.

PATROCLUS: I mean, cuh, if you actually thought business worked like this and went around shouting about giving a hundred and ten per cent, and blaming everyone else whenever something went wrong, you'd just get stared at. People would think you were mad.

ME: OH TO THE EM TO THE GEE! We should write a sitcom about exactly this, using my years of comedic experience, and your knowledge of the business world, and the absurd jargon within, particularly in the IT industry, and it should be about two guys who quit a secure office job to start up their own company working on the next Facebook or Twitter or augmented reality, or whatever nebulous thing is hovering on the horizon!

P: WE SHOULD TOTALLY DO THIS!

CUT TO:

Us doing something else.

CUT TO:

A FEW MONTHS LATER

A producer I know mentions she's looking for a few lines of dialogue for a couple of actors we already know. P and I suddenly realise they would be perfect for our sitcom. Nine symbolically important months later (we both wandered off for a bit in the middle), we have finished the sitcom. It's far too late to be useful to the producer, and the characters have changed a bit, to the extent the original actors wouldn't work, so in terms of fulfilling the brief, it's something of a bust, but on the other hand: BRAND NEW SITCOM SCRIPT.

What was particularly fun about this was that though I've written as part of a team, or on my own, I've never written with one other person before. And I am married to P! Which suggested moments like this:

INT* VERANDA - EVENING

The sun goes down over Penryn harbour, yachts and bronzed millionaires frolicking in the pink dusk (note: can yachts frolic? Get script editor to research).

P and I, wearing Fifties style matching pyjamas, are on the veranda. I am sitting carelessly on a chair, next to a lovely battered old lovely old typewriter (battered). P stares carelessly out over the water, where a squadron of dolphins frolic carelessly in the lovely battered water.

P.: (carelessly) Dearest heart, I cannot but wonder if on page eighteen, line nine, we could add the phrase 'realistic pigmentation of raptor perspicacity'.

ME: (carelessly) Sweetie pumpkin, what a marvellous notion. I shall action it henceforth.

Slight pause.

ME: Let us never fight like this again.

CUT.

Actually it was a bit like that. Anyway, we finished it (it's called 'Outside The Box') and it's just now being sent off to various production companies. Woo!


* or possibly EXT, it's hard to tell with verandas, they're liminal.

Ah, how pleasant it is...

...to be at that stage of a project just after completing the first draft, but before one's agent has sent it back with comments like 'Why did you think p.27 was a good idea YOU R-TARD!?' and 'Did you forget to send me the ending?' and 'Dude, forget what I told you, hip-hop space operas about giant robots are SO out now, ABORT ABORT!'

What happened was, in September I met Agent Matt for a lovely dinner where he said he'd quite like to have a new screenplay to send out to people, and I agreed this would be nice, and then realised he meant from me. And he went on to say he wouldn't normally suggest to a lot of his clients that they tootle off and write a new screenplay on spec, but he knew it wouldn't necessarily take me that long.

This is because the mistake I'd made was in once telling Agent Matt about writing my first screenplay over a bank holiday weekend, because I'd read that Sly Stallone had written Rocky over three days, and decided this sounded like something that could fit into my busy schedule of a) sighing a lot and b re-reading old role-playing game rules systems. In fact I later found out Sly had written Rocky over the space of an entire week, looooooser, but it was too late, I'd written HERO TRIP by then, which got picked up by the Film Council for development which meant actual money, woo. And then floated off into limbo, cuh, but never mind, I'd been paid.

(Agent Matt occasionally reminds me that the end objective is to get my scripts acted out by actors and put up on a television or cinema screen at some point, but to be honest I regard this as a lofty and near-unattainable ideal that would only come to annoy me, because the FX wouldn't be as good as they were in my head, and I wouldn't be allowed to do all the voices).

But anyway, after I'd swept off all the crockery off the table and shouted 'HOW DARE YOU SUGGEST I AM ANYTHING OTHER THAN AN ARTISAN-TYPE-STYLE CRAFTSMAN WHO MUST SPEND DECADES ON HIS CRAFT HONING BUT A SOLITARY PERFECT BON MOT GOOD DAY TO YOU SIR, I SAID GOOD DAY! I remembered I'd already had an idea for a horror film, that starts off like a J-Horror type film, all ghosts of girls with long hair looking spooky, but then the story turns into something else instead, and I'd already done a ten-page outline, so I thought, cuh, if I do like two pages a day, I'll have it finished by the end of November. Which is what happened, and no-one was more surprised than me.

And in the meantime, me and Patroclus have co-written a pilot sitcom about two blokes who try to start their own software company, of which I am enormously proud.

The good thing is, these are both from outlines I had already sent out, to people who looked at them and said, but I can't see how that would work exactly, so now I can plop the spec scripts on their desks and say 'LIKE THIS, FUCKOES!' although I probably won't use exactly those words after what is now referred to by Agent Matt solely as 'The Incident'.

So, erm, yes. If you've been thinking 'cuh, if I write just two pages of script a day (and remember that scripts are mostly white space, so it's not even like proper writing) I'll have my screenplay finished in three months without feeling like it was a massive amount of effort, and might even have to keep opening the file on the laptop to look at it in a surprised sort of way because it feels like someone else wrote it and sent it to me as a present', you would be absolutely correct.

Eventually of course, I'll start to get what is know as 'feedback' on said scripts, which will make me say things like 'yes, but', and 'WELL YOU CLEARLY DON'T GET IT THEN', and so on, but at the moment it's just a nice glowy feeling, because like most writers, I actually find the actual writing thing a bit tedious, but the feeling of having written is a very special and glowy feeling indeed. Woo.

SHAUN THE SHEEP

Just had an email from Aardman:

"Hi James,
Hope all is well with you. Just to let you know we’ve finally finished your Shaun episode (playfully re-titled Frantic Romantic) and this will be going out on BBC1 at 4.20 on Tues 11 Dec, with a repeat the next day at 4.25 (plus it’ll be on BBC iplayer for a week)."

I AM SO EXCITED.

UPDATE: hmm, an independent observer (Richard) has pointed out that the 11th December is a Friday, not a Tues. AARDMAN IS MESSING WITH TIME ITSELF. I shall investigate.

I have investigated. According to Wikipedia:

"Frantic Romantic" 11 December 2009
The Farmer trying to impress his new date by cooking a romantic dinner. Unfortunately, the Farmer can't cook and Bitzer is a useless maitre d'. Can Shaun and the flock save the day when they take over the catering behind the scenes?[1]

Product Placement: More Ways To Sell Sugar To Kids

I've already nailed my colours to the mast about product placement in television (I'm against it) In fact, since I wrote that post, I've found even more reasons to be against it, not least that it's all too easy for production companies to take this 'extra' cash (which isn't necessarily extra cash at all) and... fork it over to the shareholders/executives, leaving production budgets even worse off than they were before.

But here's another reason to feel really quite uncomfortable about it.

The Childrens' Food Campaign want to improve young people’s health and well-being through better food – and food teaching – in schools and by protecting children from junk food marketing. They are supported by over 300 organisations and 12,000 members of the public, and have this to say:

"The Children’s Food Campaign is not alone in being alarmed by the recent announcement by Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Ben Bradshaw to lift the ban on product placement on British made TV shows . If this ban is reversed the result could be junk food brands appearing in programmes popular with children such as Britain’s Got Talent and Coronation Street."

So not only are loosened restrictions on product placement being aggressively pushed ahead to enrich a few people at the expense of, well, pretty much everyone else who works in, or watches television, it's also yet another means by which large corporations can peddle their deeply unhealthy wares to children.

Childrens' health is just one aspect of this deeply worrying proposal to lift the strict limitations on product placement, but an incredibly important one, and there's only eight weeks to act, so please consider taking a moment to register your objections here.

50 Worst Videogame Voice Acting Moments

This is truly astonishing stuff. I don't normally get the 'so bad it's good' thing, but after this, I'm wavering...



I want to quote them, but you really need to hear each for yourself. I do think whoever did the main voice for the first Assassin's Creed should have got in there though.

Q&A with BBC Drama script editor Joe Donaldson

I’ve been working with BBC script editor Joseph Donaldson for four or five years now, starting with my teen drama project ‘ROCK’, which sort-of-morphed into a Cornish-set crime drama series called ‘BANDIT COUNTRY’, the outline and series bible for which have just gone off to important BBC people to see if they fancy commissioning a pilot script.

Not many people know how drama script editors work (and script editing is even murkier in comedy, which get brought up below), so I thought I’d get him to do a bit of a Q&A for the blog (click on the 'sort of interviews' tag at the bottom of the post if you want to read the other ones, although I'm SURE I don't have to tell you how these things work. But just in case).

Here ‘tis:

Joe, how would you describe your job to someone who has no idea how the television industry works?

I help writers to produce the best script they can by providing them with advice and constructive criticism on their work at every stage of the writing process. I also act as a filter for the feedback which comes from the producers, executives, and commissioners, all of whom are very important and have different thoughts on what the writer is doing right and wrong – their notes must be taken into account but can be quite blunt and sometimes contradictory so it helps to have someone to collate and translate and them for the writer.

What shows have you worked on?

I worked on the first two series of Lark Rise to Candleford and on Survivors, for which we have just finished the second series. I’m also working on lots of projects in various stages of development.

The title of 'Script Editor' tends to suggest someone who comes in at the end of the process - but that's not exactly the case, is it? How do you edit a script that hasn't been written yet?

No, most shows in our department will have a script editor assigned as early as possible, usually when the idea is first being discussed.

Editing script that doesn’t exist: this can happen in two ways.

If you’re working on an existing show then you already know the characters well and should understand the sorts of stories that work best for that show and which are best avoided for whatever reason. Therefore I can talk to writers before there is a script about what direction they would like the show to go in, episode ideas, potential new characters, etc.

With a new idea, my job is to talk to writers who have a story to tell and as well as giving them the usual constructive feedback, I’ll help them figure out things they may not have considered. This might be the length and number of episodes, which channel it might go on, how much it will cost, who they might cast, what the tone of the show will be (eg serious, funny, gritty, camp, etc). Thinking about all these things informs the way the idea develops and really helps us to pitch the show to the right people in a way that gives it the best chance of getting commissioned.

What are the classic mistakes first-time writers tend to make? Or come to that, what are the classic mistakes more experienced writers tend to make?

I find the worst scripts from first-time writers read like they have just taken one long rant, about something they are clearly passionate about, and divided it between Person A and Person B without giving any consideration to who the characters are what story they are trying to tell. That shows a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of drama.

Usually a new writer will have natural ability in writing either characters, stories, or dialogue. If they are lucky they might have a knack for two out of three. If they’ve got all three then they don’t really need my advice. A first-time writer will do the things he/she is good at well, but their script may be let down because they don’t understand the other elements. If they are given good advice they can improve on their weaknesses which will allow their natural abilities to shine.

I’ve found that writers who have been doing it longer are more aware of their key strengths and confident in their ability, they are therefore comfortable discussing their weaknesses and accepting help.

How did you start out as a script editor?

I was a runner in the BBC Drama department, which meant I kept a contestant supply of tea flowing and trekked back and forth from reception collecting guests. In my spare time I read scripts for projects in the department and wrote script reports on spec. I was lucky enough to have bosses that would read them and give me advice, and ultimately promote me.

Is there a recognized career path for script editors? Do they tend to stay in the same job but work on bigger and bigger shows? Or can it be a gateway to a production role?

Some do it long term and become highly experienced and sought after. Some become producers as the job does allow you to learn a bit about that production because so many elements of program-making are connected to the script. Some will take more senior roles in development, looking after drama slates in BBC departments or independent production companies.

Do many Script Editors have any interest in writing themselves?

I think plenty of them do, yes.

Do only the BBC employ script editors? How does it work outside of the Big British Castle?

All dramas in Britain have script editors as far as I know, different genres may work differently. Do they have them in comedy James?

(Quick interruption by me: there are a lot of credited ‘script editors’ in comedy, but it’s a much looser term. It can mean someone ‘polishing’ the script by chucking a couple of extra jokes in, or pulling apart and rewriting a script altogether. Big names can be brought in to give a script a once-over as a way of getting their name on the credits too, although it’s very hard to quantify exactly what work they did. So it can range from an equivalent to ‘additional material by’ to ‘executive producer’, which makes it practically meaningless, to be honest.)

I know they don’t have them in the US because they usually have a writer’s room and therefore the editing is done by other writers and producers in big group discussions – that’s my understanding anyway.

How many shows are you working on at any one time?

Between five and ten. Usually one big one that is greenlit and will definitely be made or is being made, and several others at different stages of development.

How do you see your role in relation to the writer? And do you have pretty much the same sort of relationship with each writer, or is it different with each one?

The script editor is the person who works most closely with the writer on a production and has probably read the script more times than anyone else, this can often give us the clearest picture of what the writer is trying to achieve and what they are capable of. I try to be an ally to the writer throughout the script developing process, which can get pretty brutal the closer you get to filming when budgets, bad weather, and a million other unforeseen things can force you rewrite the whole script at a moments notice.

Relationships vary quite a bit. I hope that every writer I work with has enough respect for my judgement that they can rely on me for useful feedback on their progress, but that respect has to be earned and it is hard to work well together without it. Then it depends on the personality of the writer. Some find lots of discussion fruitful and like to have their ideas constantly challenged, some are very self-sufficient and I won’t hear from them until they deliver a new draft, some will pick up the phone whenever they are at a fork in the road or if they’ve got a risky idea they are thinking of using in the script and they want to quickly bounce it off someone to check they’re not crazy before committing to it fully. Every writer has a slightly different process and as long as the standard of their work is good then I’m usually flexible about how we work.

How does it work with a really experienced writer, like Andrew Davies- does he get assigned a script editor, or is he left to get on with it?

They all need an editor no matter how experienced. The more experienced writers will often deliver a more complete first draft and may have nailed it by the third draft but they still need someone with a different perspective to tell them where the script could be improved.

What are the warning signs that a project is going to need some serious hands-on time?

I was taught to always do my first read without a red pen in my hand, so that you are just absorbing the work at first without analysing it too much. On that first read I’ll know in my gut if something is wrong, either because I can’t follow the story, or I don’t believe the characters, or I’m just left cold by the script. If you really struggle with the first read for whatever reason then you know there is work to do. I’ll then read it several times over and start making notes on what I think the problem are – if I’ve scribbled on every page then it probably means a lot of work for me and ten times more for the writer.

What are the fun bits of the job?

Reading a first draft of anything is fun because an idea only has so much life as an outline, it is always exciting to see the characters and the world expanded. Then seeing the first footage is always thrilling because the people and the places that you have been sitting in a room chatting about for years are suddenly real. That’s a cheesy answer. My real favourite thing is seeing which actress is cast in the ‘sexy young blonde’ role and then nervously shaking that actresses hand at the read-though.