Yesterday was a bad day for watching others work at the coalface of comedy

Yesterday, comedian Janey Godley (of whom more later) said to me about the superfluous ‘tasks’ in the first episode of ITV1’s Show Me the Funny: “Finding someone called Michelle in a street in Liverpool does not mean you are a good comedian; it takes no comedy talent.”

Bloody right.

What on earth is the point of this show?

For no logical or demonstrable reason (apart from copying a not-very-good old TV format where comics performed in front of ‘difficult’ audiences) this week our mis-used nine comics had to perform five minutes of new material to soldiers at Catterick army camp.

Four minutes into the show, the scripted voice-over said pseudo-dramatically – “They’ll be a tough audience to please.”

Maybe. But it was not until 29 minutes into the show that the comedians actually started to perform to the audience.

Why oh why oh why do they not just Show Me The Funny?

Perhaps next year, when television screens the 100 metre race at the Olympics, the race itself will be preceded by 30 minutes of watching the athletes learn how to juggle fruit… and we will only be allowed to see glimpses of the race itself.

In this show, where the format involves writing five minutes of new material, we only get glimpses of the acts performing that material. The longest any of them got was two minutes; most got significantly less than one minute; the shortest appeared to get around 4 seconds.

Last week, I said the problem with this show was that the producers could not see the wood for the trees. We are now into another week, another simile. It is now clear they are just barking up the wrong tree.

The producers are so busy showing us irrelevant production values that they do not have any time left to show us the funny. And, because they have chopped the comedians to pieces in the edit, the person who actually comes across strongest is judge Kate Copstick whose tongue is as sharp as her Scotsman reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe. La Copstick has clearly been chopped-to-hell in the edit as well, but she still shines forth a beacon of light in her Cruella de Vil world.

Perhaps I am just becoming a grumpy old man.

A least Show Me The Funny showed us glimpses of what we were supposed to be seeing.

Yesterday, I was invited along by Sky TV to what they called a PR “junket” – which my dictionary defines as “an extravagant trip or celebration”.

Sky say that, by 2014, they will be spending £600 million on British programming and that “original British comedy provides cornerstone of Sky1 HD autumn schedule” this year.

Well, all I can say is they’d better hurry up and get their publicity act together.

I was one of six mostly-mystified people with an online presence – I think we were each supposed to be highly influential in our blogs and websites – and we were invited to “round-table interviews” with some of the talent involved in the new Sky comedy shows.

What a disastrous bit of PR. Are companies just suicidal nowadays?

“What shall we do today?”

“Oh, I know, we will see how we can damage our own brand image.”

Four months ago, I blogged about the disastrous recording session for IKEA’s ‘comedy/Friends’ commercials – it is an old blog which still gets a few hits every day or so.

IKEA promised to ply their Family Card holders with plentiful food and drink if they attended the endlessly unfunny recording of their TV ads. The food and drink which was not supplied made Southern Sudan seem like a land of milk and honey.

Sky did not promise any food or drink, so I can’t complain about the small bottles of water which were probably supplied by the excellently-run hotel where the junket took place and not by Sky.

But I can bitch about the lack of any discernible organisation.

The story was that they would screen clips from possibly four shows, then there would be these “round table interviews” with the talent. Presumably the idea was that, from these glimpses of the shows and sparkling quotes from the talent, we would write glowing online pieces which would spread the word on how good the ‘products’ are.

This was supposed to happen 5.30-7.00pm – “arrive at 5.15pm” we were told. The very efficient hotel staff showed us into a padded room. I should have started to worry at this point.

Around 5.45pm, the first appearance was made by a Sky person – a head popped round the door to say “We’re running a little late” and then disappeared.

The first ‘talent’ came into the room accompanied by a PR lady just after 6.00pm, we turned to the TV screen but there were no clips.

Perhaps later, I foolishly thought.

So we rather awkwardly asked questions of the talent who brilliantly plugged their unseen show. This was repeated with three more different groups of talent being ushered into the room (with large gaps of emptiness between) each with a different, mostly mute, PR lady. We had four bunches of talent from three new Sky series; the talent from the fourth show seemed to have wisely done a runner.

It was a magical mystery guess as to who would come through the door next. Sometimes, as they entered, we were told which show they were on; sometimes we had to guess from their faces and the single sheet press releases we had on each show.

For the record, the shows were The Cafe, Mount Pleasant and Trollied. The billed people from the Spys sitcom must have gone on an undercover mission elsewhere. It was only when we asked at the end that we discovered they were not turning up.

The show people were all rushed through to a tight deadline because, having started half an hour late, the Sky PR machine did not want to end late because they had other things to do. Poor Jane Horrocks and Jason Watkins had to try and ‘sell’ their show Trollied (set in a supermarket) in seven minutes, which they did brilliantly. But what do you ask about a show you haven’t seen which is set in a supermarket?

I asked if, because they were used to performing in studios, it was more difficult to act in the ‘real’ supermarket which Sky had built for the series.

Jane Horrocks said she had done so many ads for Tesco she felt at home in a supermarket.

I like Jane Horrocks.

But quite what we were talking about no-one really knew. Which brings us back to Janey Godley, who was one of the six influential online people invited to the junket and who said to me (I paraphrase extensively):

“You have to see clips to know what the tone is. You can shoot one idea in any number of ways. You can have a great idea badly done and it’s crap. You can have a bad idea brilliantly done and it’s wonderful.”

No clips meant we had no idea what we are supposed to be helping Sky TV promote.

I felt like asking if any of the talent had had their phones hacked by News International.

The “junket” lasted under an hour; one of us had come all the way from Devon to attend.

It all ended with a brief head popping round the door again to thank us for coming. Someone asked: “Are there any DVDs so we can see the shows?”

“Oh,” the surprised PR replied: “Send us an e-mail if you want one.”

I think a basic rule-of-thumb should be… if you are trying to kick-start good word-of-mouth in hopefully influential online sites and blogs… then show us the product.

Show Me The Funny fell at the first hurdle because it failed to Show Me The Funny.

Sky TV, trying to promote their TV shows, fell at the first hurdle because they wanted good word-of-mouth but failed to show us anything at all of the programmes.

And whatever happened to outright bribes of canapés, knick-knacks or, at the very least, an inflatable Jane Horrocks doll?

Word-of-mouth works both ways.

I will listen with interest to Janey Godley’s weekly podcast this Wednesday – after only a year, it gets over 100,000 downloads per week via multiple sites – having built on the success of her blog which, since 2004, had built up to over 500,000 hits per week on multiple sites.

I left the excellent central London hotel hosting the Sky junket – the Corinthia Hotel in Whitehall Place – I recommend it highly – thinking the highly-trained if rather overly-smiley hotel staff should have been arranging the PR.

Then I thought:

“Shall I slag off this shindig or not? If I do, they will never invite me to another one.”

Big decision.

“What have I really got to lose?”

The answer was obvious:

“A bottle of still water but no knick-knacks or inflatable Jane Horrocks doll.”

Lackaday! Lackaday!

Do the words Brinsley Schwarz mean nothing nowadays?

(Janey Godley’s weekly podcast also talked about this Sky junket – 10 mins 20 seconds in)

“Show Me The Funny” – produced by people who never read their own title

Exactly a week ago, I wrote a blog rather piously advising comedians how to get to grips with structuring their hour-long Edinburgh Fringe shows.

It basically said they should follow the rule of The Elevator Pitch and constantly make sure everything within the show was relevant to a core 10 or 12 word description of what the show was about.

Obviously, the producers of last night’s new ITV1 series Show Me The Funny did not read and did not take the advice of this wise and admirably-written blog.

Their main problem, though, appears to be that they did not take the advice of their own title:

Show Me The Funny

If you broadcast a show about football matches, I think my best advice is that viewers should be able to see people playing football. The producers of Show Me The Funny failed to grasp this simple concept.

In Show Me The Funny, we had a show about comedians in which the producers appeared to be trying increasingly desperate ways to avoid showing the comedians actually performing comedy.

The show was overproduced. Lots of travelogue stuff. Lots of background (most of it irrelevant). Lots of snippets of other shows’ formats. It took 13 minutes before any comic actually stood up and did any comedy. And that lasted something like 30 seconds.

I imagine Herbert’s Hair Salon and “Liverpool’s highest bar” were very appreciative for being given network television exposure but what has a comic helping out in a hair salon for a few seconds of screentime got to do with a comedy talent show? It was a mindless cobbling-on of other reality TV formats. It was a sign of a production with no confidence in its own format.

I am sure the producers justified the waffle and overwhelming visual, verbal and conceptual padding to themselves and to their ITV commissioning editor as “adding production value to the concept” but the effect was they lost all sight of what their selling point was.

All the producers had to do was what it says on their own label – Show Me The Funny

KIS KIS – Keep it simple; keep it simple.

It does not matter how much it costs, how long it takes or how glossy it looks… If a two-minute item destroys the pace of a one-hour show, cut it.

In this case, the first 30-minutes destroyed the one-hour show.

The two female comedians had to arrange a blind date between two strangers in the street for a 3-minute section of the show. Why? Two of the men were sent off to find Liverpool landmarks for two minutes. Why? The other two men had to find women called Michelle in the street. At this point I thought I was watching a bad showreel for several even worse would-be TV reality formats.

Hellfire!… just Show Me The Funny!

Show Me The Funny gave glimpses of about 15 other show formats, none of them relevant to the title of the actual show and none of them gelling into a single whole.

I lost all interest in trite and cliché analysis of why Liverpudlians are inherently funny when I was about 13. This show managed to dumb down to lower-than-an-11-year-old level. It tried to be all things to all viewers and ended up being nothing to anyone.

After 23 minutes, there was some brief chat about how to write comedy material, but it lasted about 30 or 40 seconds.

27 minutes into the hour-long show, the first real stand-up performance started. And then they cut away from the routines, trying and failing to build-up the tension.

In the first 30 minutes, viewers must have been falling asleep, switching off or jumping out of windows like tsunamis of lemmings.

There is no shortage of good stand-ups out there. There does, however, seem to be a shortage of talent behind the camera.

I had wondered why there was no producer’s name credited in Radio Times.

Now I know – it was (probably) not because no-one wanted to take the blame but because, in the actual end credits of the show, there were producers credited all over the place. There were more producer credits in there than at the end of a $100 million Hollywood blockbuster. And, having read those end credits carefully, I still do not know who actually produced the show.

It was a classic case of too many cooks – a show created by a committee of the uncommitted.

The real problem is TV producers wanting to have total control over exactly what happens, rather than sitting back with a good concept you believe in and, if necessary, tweaking the resultant drama. If it becomes a car crash disaster, that is not a problem. A car crash is just as entertaining as a tight race. But don’t try to over-control.

Just as important as the production is the pre-production. The concept, the format, the careful choice of the participants. If you have the right people, sit back and trust the talent.

There are two big things in TV production.

The first is decision-making.

Show Me The Funny had no idea what its own format was and could not even decide which of 15 other formats to nick.

The second important thing in TV production is delegation. And that includes performers. You choose the right performers and then have faith in your own decision.

If an act dies, then it dies. That’s the game.

Show Me the Funny looked like a show where everyone behind the camera was covering their own asses and where so many production elements and so many producers were involved that, ultimately, it would be impossible to blame any one person if – as happened – it went arse-over-tit.

When they actually got down to the nitty-gritty in the second-half of the one-hour show and viewers half-saw comedians performing comedy then being criticised by audience members and by three well-chosen judges – critic Kate Copstick, comedian/actor Alan Davies and, in this first episode, comic Jimmy Tarbuck – the programme was at least watchable, if still a mess.

As she is a judge on the Malcolm Hardee Awards, which I organise, it is a relief to be able to say Kate Copstick was well cast as the bastard daughter of Simon Cowell and Cruella de Vil.

But the three judges were as savagely cut about in the editing as the acts.

The one thing you don’t do with 5-minute comedy spots – like magic – is cut away. You show the funny.

These are professional comedians.

Comedy = timing.

Leave the timing to the comic. Don’t cut. Especially if you have comedians doing 5-minute spots. Don’t just show 30 seconds or 70 seconds of the act, which is what happened. Comedy is about build-up and timing.

I have wondered for ages why no-one has tried to do an X-Factor for comedy. Great idea. Good young-ish audience profile. I am still wondering because this is not that show.

Great prize – £100,000 in cash, a UK tour and a DVD out before Christmas. Pity about the format (if you can even call this dog’s dinner that).

Show Me The Funny

The clue is in the name. They should have read their own title and made THAT show not this shapeless showreel for the massed ranks of indecisive producers involved. They do not seem to even know if it is a talent show or a reality show. It ends up being neither. It fails to be the X-Factor and fails in a bizarrely misguided attempt to be The Apprentice or MasterChef.

Too many behind-the-camera cooks.

No broth.

Is comedy more or less important than sewage management?

Years ago, I was on a BBC shorthand writing course and one of the other guys on the course was a BBC News Trainee and Cambridge University graduate called Peter Bazalgette; there was something interesting about his eyes – a creative inquisitiveness – that made me think he had immense talent.

But he never got anywhere in BBC News.

He ended up as a researcher on Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life! and, from there, he became producer on one of the most unimaginatively-titled BBC TV shows ever: Food and Drink. 

He made a big success of that and in doing so, it is often said, he created the new concept of celebrity chefs. He then started his own company, making Changing Rooms, Ground Force and  Ready, Steady Cook amongst others.

His company ended up as part of Endemol and it is Bazalgette who is credited with making the Dutch TV format Big Brother such a big success in the UK and worldwide. By 2007, he was on Endemol’s global board with a salary of £4.6 million.

Last year, I saw another Cambridge University graduate perform at the Edinburgh Fringe – Dec Munro – and he had a creative inquisitiveness in his eyes similar to Peter Bazalgette’s.

Dec currently runs the monthly Test Tube Comedy show at the Canal Cafe Theatre in London’s Little Venice. I saw the show for the first time last night and he is an exceptionally good compere.

I always think it is more difficult to be a good compere than a good comedian and, very often, I have seen good comedians make bad comperes.

Ivor Dembina and Janey Godley – both, perhaps not coincidentally, storytellers rather than pure gag-based comics – are that rare thing: good comedians AND good comperes.

The late Malcolm Hardee – with the best will in the world – was not a particularly good comedian in a normal stand-up spot on a comedy bill – he really did survive for about 25 years on around six gags – but he was a brilliant, vastly underestimated compere as well as a club owner and spotter of raw talent and, as was often said, his greatest comedy act was actually his life off-stage.

Dec Munro has strong on-stage charisma and, judging by last night’s show, a good eye for putting together a bill, combining the more adventurous parts of the circuit – George Ryegold and Doctor Brown last night – with new acts who are very likely to have a big future – the very impressive musical act Rachel Parris

Of course, if they read this, I could have just destroyed Dec Munro’s and Rachel Parris’ careers. There is nothing worse than reading good mentions of your performance and believing them.

And I don’t know where either will end up.

In three years, Rachel Parris has the ability to be a major TV comedy performer. And Dec Munro should be a TV producer. But broadcast television is yesterday’s medium even with Simon Cowell’s successful mega shows. And no-one knows what the replacement is.

Perhaps Dec Munro and Rachel Parris will ride the crest of an upcoming wave; perhaps they will fade away. Showbiz is a dangerously random business. But, then, so is everything in life.

Peter Bazalgette is the great-great-grandson of sewer pioneer Sir Joseph Bazalgette who created central London’s sewer network which was instrumental in stopping the city’s cholera epidemics.

Sometimes handling shit in a better way can be more important than being a successful showbiz performer or producer.

You can create your own punchline to that.

How thinking up a good TV format can make you a millionaire or screw you with a horrendous court case

Last weekend I posted a blog about Mr Methane phoning me from Manchester Airport on his way home from recording a TV show in Denmark. It turned out he wasn’t on his way home. He is still away on his professional travels – farting around the world, some might call it – but he has given me more details of the Danish show he appeared in.

He was brought on stage as Mr Methane and farted in the face of a man whom he had to make laugh within 60 seconds. Mr Methane tells me:

“The show comes out in Denmark in the autumn and is called My Man Can: the ladies bet on what their man will be able to achieve and he has fuck-all idea what’s going on because he is in a glass cylinder listening to Take That or some other shite music that’s being piped in. It’s a bit like a modern day Mr & Mrs with a slightly different twist so Derek Batey doesn’t see them in court.”

It does sound a bit like that to me too and I also thought Derek Batey created the TV gameshow Mr and Mrs but, in fact, it was created by the legendary Canadian TV quiz show uber-creater Roy Ward Dickson

TV formats are big business. I remember the ATV series Blockbusters hosted by Bob Holness (the request “Give me a pee, Bob” was oft-quoted by fans).

It was based on a US format and, in the UK, was networked on ITV from 1983 to 1993. In one period, I think in the late 1980s, it ran every day around teatime Monday to Friday. From memory (and I may be wrong on details) at that time the format creators were getting £5,000 per show and the show was transmitted for six months every year – I think they transmitted for three months, then had three months off air, then transmitted for another three months and so on.

That is serious money in the late 1980s. To save you the calculation, 26 x 6 x £5,000 = £780,000 per year for a format thought up several years before; and the format was also running on US TV and in several other countries around the world and, for all I know, could still be running in several countries around the world 25 years later.

That is why format ownership and copyright is so important. If you have an idea, it can maintain your millionaire status 25 years down the line. Ripping-off formats is an extraordinary phenomenon. You would think, given the amount of money involved, that there would be some workable law against it, but there isn’t. One factor, of course, is that you cannot copyright an idea; you can only copyright a format and there lies the rub that will probably stop you and me becoming millionaires.

My Man Can, for example, is most definitely not a rip-off of Mr and Mrs. The format of My Man Can is that “four women gamble with the abilities their partners possess – and put the men’s courage and skills to the test. She sits at a gambling table and bets her rivals that her man can accomplish certain tasks. He waits helplessly in a soundproof cubicle, waiting to hear the task his wife has accepted on his behalf. Each of the women is given 100 gambling chips which she uses to bet on her partner’s performance in each round of the game.”

The most definitive horror story I know about formats is the scandalous failure of Hughie Green to get the courts’ protection over the format to his Opportunity Knocks talent show.

Green first started Opportunity Knocks as a radio show in 1949. As a TV series, it ran from 1956 to 1978 and was later revived with Bob Monkhouse and Les Dawson presenting 1987-1990.

Hughie Green invented a thing called “the clap-o-meter” which measured the decibel volume of clapping by the studio audience after an act had performed. But the acts were voted-on by viewers and Green’s several catch-phrases included “Tonight, Opportunity Knocks for…” and “Don’t forget to vote-vote-vote. Cos your vote counts.”

The way I remember the copyright problem is that, one day in the 1980s, Hughie Green got a letter from the Inland Revenue asking why, on his tax return, he had not declared his royalties from the New Zealand version of Opportunity Knocks in 1975 and 1978. This was the first time he knew there was a New Zealand version.

It turned out the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation had transmitted a TV talent show series which not only ran along the same lines as Hughie Green’s show but which was actually titled Opportunity Knocks, had a clap-o-meter to measure audience clapping and used the catchphrases “Tonight, Opportunity Knocks for…” and “Don’t forget to vote-vote-vote. Cos your vote counts.”

Not surprisingly, in 1989, Green sued the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation for copyright infringement. He lost. He appealed. He lost. My memory is that it ultimately reached the House of Lords in London, sitting as the highest court of appeal in the Commonwealth. He lost. Because all the courts decided that a largely unscripted show which was different every week (which is what a talent show is) with “a loose format defined by catchphrases and accessories” (such as the clap-o-meter) was not copyrightable and “there were no formal scripts and no ‘format bible’ to express the unique elements that made up the show”.

In 2005, Simon Fuller sued Simon Cowell claiming that Cowell’s The X-Factor was a rip-off of Fuller’s own Pop Idol. The case was quickly adjourned and settled out of court within a month. Copyright disputes are not something you want to take to court.

Once upon two times, I interviewed separately the former friends Brian Clemens (main creative force behind The Avengers TV series) and Terry Nation (who created the Daleks for Doctor Who). BBC TV had transmitted a series called Survivors 1975-1977 which Terry Nation had created. Or so he said. Brian Clemens claimed he had told Terry Nation the detailed idea for Survivors several years before and Nation had ripped him off. It destroyed their friendship.

As I say, I interviewed both separately.

I can tell you that both of them absolutely, totally believed they were in the right.

Brian Clemens absolutely 100% believed he had told Terry Nation the format and had been intentionally ripped-off.

Terry Nation absolutely 100% believed that Survivors was his idea.

They fought a case in the High Court in London and, eventually, both abandoned the case because of the astronomically-mounting costs. Neither could afford to fight the case.

There’s a lesson in legal systems here.

Basically, even if you are fairly wealthy, you cannot afford to defend your own copyright. If you are fighting as individuals, the legal fees will crucify you. If  you are foolish enough to fight any large company, they have more money to stretch out legal cases longer with better lawyers than you. They will win. In the case of Hughie Green, even if you are rich and famous, you may be no different from a man who is wearing a blindfold and who, when he takes it off, finds someone is farting in his face.

When BBC TV remade Survivors in 2008, it was said to be “not a remake of the original BBC television series” but “loosely based on the novel of the same name that Nation wrote following the first season of the original series.”

Guess why.

The return of Mr Methane and a Danish TV format which puts “Britain’s Got Talent” into the shade

So Mr Methane, the world’s only professional performing flatulist, phoned me unexpectedly yesterday afternoon. He was at Manchester Airport, on his way back home from Denmark.

He had been flown over to Copenhagen by Danish TV to take part in a show. He had to dress in his green superhero costume and lie on a hospital trolley. He was then wheeled in to the studio so that his green-costume-clad bottom was next to a blindfolded man’s face. As the man’s blindfold was being removed, he farted talcum powder in the man’s face and then had to try to make the guy laugh within 60 seconds.

“That’s quite difficult,” he told me, “because, if you open your eyes and someone you don’t know is farting talcum powder in your face, then you’re not really being put into the sort of relaxed state of mind where you are going to be prone to laugh…you tend not to see the funny side of life immediately… So he didn’t laugh. But it all ended up OK… He won the show because he didn’t laugh and then he was filmed proposing to his girlfriend who said Yes and everybody was happy… At least it was better than doing a Friday night gig at a student union with everyone drunk and shouting…”

When I get phone calls like this, I think I may have led too sheltered a life and I should get out more.

___________

You can see Mr Methane performing on Britain’s Got Talent here.