Weekend's TV reviewed: Ray Mears Goes Walkabout; Greek; The Inspector Lynley Mysteries
Ray Mears Goes Walkabout begins with a wonderfully ludicrous title sequence, in which honeyed shots of the presenter eating bits of bark and setting fire to twigs are decorated with printed imperatives, fading in and out on screen. "Journey," the words say, "Reveal... Encourage... Search... Inform... Learn... Understand... Engage... Enlighten." Dearie me, I thought, give us a break, Ray, just get on with it and bite the head off a witchetty grub. Still, it's not his fault, I imagine, but that of some bright spark on the production team, who presumably thought that quoting at length from the commissioning editor's latest pitching brief would be a good way of showing how zealously on-message the series is. Whoever came up with the idea, the result is ridiculous, conspicuously failing to grasp that Ray Mears is not loved by the public as a guru in khaki shorts but as a comedy act of delicious understatement. I suppose you could watch him in earnest he does nothing himself to prevent you but I would have serious doubts about your sense of humour if you never cracked a smile at all.
Maybe that's the secret behind the intergenerational, cross-demographic magic of Mears. Obviously, it helps that most people have an interest in survival techniques. We'd all like to believe that, come the Apocalypse, we'd be the ones knocking up bivouacs and skinning newts, rather than, as is more likely, incomprehendingly screaming “My BROADBAND has gone DOWN!” as feral zombie children gnaw our arms. Additionally, when first turning on Mears's shows, it momentarily appears that you are watching the former Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy wandering around in a wood, wearing an Indiana Jones hat and licking twigs. The resemblance is, I must say, quite uncanny.
Over my Mears Years, then, I have had many favourite Ray Moments. In many ways the episode in which - surviving in the middle of a Romanian forest - Ray rolls out some pastry, using a stick as a rolling-pin, to make a quiche, is the quintessential Ray Moment. A combination of absolutely unquestionable survival “chops”, and a great fondness for pies, as clearly indicated by his enviable status as the “cuddliest” survivalist on the block. Ray's Survival Quiche is Ray in a nutshell - a nutshell he had gathered, boiled, crushed, sieved, put in a muslin bag, left to rinse in a stream for 48 hours, and then fashioned into a small, fundamentally unappealing grey lump, to be burnt at the end of a stick.
But then, I could also argue for the inclusion of an anecdote by Ray's posh on-off survival chum, Gordon “The Prof” Hillman, as well. In the last series Hillman recalled the moment when, as a Cambridge undergraduate, he realised he had inadvertently eaten a fatally poisonous mushroom, and was already becoming paralysed. Unable to talk, he simply wrote the Latin name of the mushroom he had eaten on a Post-It note, stuck it to his own chest, and then passed out in a bar. That's the kind of people with whom Ray rolls. People who can even survive in Latin, in a bar.
Given all this then, who would not rejoice at the advent of Ray Mears Goes Walkabout? A series of hour-long shows wherein Ray, to use the current vernacular of young people, totally “pwnz” the Australian Outback (verb meaning to beat in an activity), using only a cup, a knife and a sheet of polythene. In the opening show, he attempts - well, does more than attempts - he TOTALLY SUCCEEDS, because he's RAY FREAKIN' MEARS - to recreate the epic journey of John McDouall Stuart, an early explorer who successfully crossed the continent from south to north, opening the centre up for the telegraph and trade. Where other explorers set out with the full paraphernalia of Victorian society (Burke and Wills even took a wooden dining table with them on their fatal expedition), Stuart travelled light and fast, letting the land draw out his route in a dot-to-dot of reliable waterholes. By 1862 he had become the first European to traverse the country and return alive. Admittedly, having a Land Rover made it a bit easier for Mears to follow in Stuart’s footsteps. Nonetheless, we got a powerful sense both of Stuart’s bravery and of just how unimaginably inhospitable the Australian interior proved to be.
First, we saw Mears driving along the Stuart Highway. The terrain might have been chosen to advertise the car. Mears parked and laid out his maps, which he had numbered. Numbering the maps, he told us, is important. It might save you a bit of confusion during the journey. He's full of this kind of stuff. It's partly the fact that no tip is too trivial that makes you warm to him. One of the first things he did, having got out of the car, was to put a net over his head, in case of flies. Of course, the outback is probably much more dangerous than it looks; that's because it looks great on TV, with the big sky and the reddish-yellow hue of the ground. For all I know, the place might be full of killer flies. But still. Mears looked a little eccentric in the net, but he knows what he's doing.
He went to a museum to look at Stuart's 19th-century equipment. It was a lot lighter than his own. But, as he pointed out, Stuart didn't have a Range Rover; he had to rely on horses. Mears, who is slightly chubby, looked with amazement at Stuart's belt. "I would barely get that round my thigh," he said. Mears then ventured into the desert. "It still has teeth," he told us. It made him very happy. That's the difference between him and Grylls: Grylls always looks as if he's desperate to get away from wherever he is. Mears wants to sit around, being contemplative. He showed us his solar firestarter, a shiny, curved disc with a pointy bit in the middle. You spear kangaroo dung on the pointy bit, and reflect the sun on to it. "The fibrous texture of kangaroo dung is particularly good for lighting fires," said Mears. “That'll smoulder away quite nicely now”. It was a lovely scene: simple, instructive, deeply comforting. The programme was worth watching for this moment alone.
We saw how Stuart had navigated the outback: by looking through a telescope for signs of greenery and birdlife in the distance. These indicate water and that's where he would head, to make camp. But why had Stuart wanted to explore the outback? What had been in it for him? He was lonely and friendless. So, in the desert, he was no worse off. In the past, exploring was about getting away from people. These days, as Mears demonstrates, it's about communicating with them. Watching Mears tell this story isn't the funny bit. I was engaged. I was enlightened. And his enthusiasm for the landscape and its surprises is rather endearing. But it's the superfluous bubble of survival information that makes me giggle, offered in a way that suggests he's addressing members of an imminently departing expedition, rather than a random group of couch potatoes who want a bit of proxy adventure.
As he travels, Mears shares with us the diverting fact that, while out on desert missions, the Australian Army discovered that a dehydrated man can buy more time on God's Earth by sucking the liquid out of a live lizard's bladder. In the hands of a flashier survivalist - obviously I'm thinking of Bear “SURVIVAL! FUCK YEH!” Grylls here - this would have been the cue for an almost unbearable level of survival brio. Grylls (on who Mears recently launched a surprisingly full-throated attack for faking some of his adventures) would probably have got a runner to assemble a whole trunk full of ready-to-urinate lizards, and seen how many he could suck dry, against the clock, while the readers of Nuts and Zoo sent in live text messages such as “Bare UR da shnizz haha LOL”. But Ray merely points to the lizard, tells us the fact, and then gets on with the more humdrum, but oddly soothing business of telling us how he has a calibrated tin mug, and how this is a very “personal” object to him.
At one point, Mears carefully took time out to give us a little tip about how to attach the shackle to your 4x4 when it gets bogged down in desert sand (“Here’s a little tip: When you’re winching and you tie your shackle on…”). He very nearly drew a diagram, so concerned was he that we would get the details right, and there was the same misplaced concern for our future safety when he showed us how to extract water from a desert eucalyptus with a large plastic bag. This, as always, was done in the apparently genuine, and certainly flattering, belief that one day we might actually use such knowledge. We also learn how to turn the salty water of the Outback’s mound springs into something drinkable. (Basically, very slowly.) In the sure and certain knowledge that information doesn't weigh anything at all, there's no harm in tucking it away just in case.
You look at Mears, in his jungle or desert, and you imagine him as a boy in a Surrey garden, dreaming of jungles and deserts. He brings an oddly suburban, almost Pooterish, extremely English attitude to his world-class survival chops. I loved the way he rigged up a sheet in the branches of a tree. Within a couple of minutes, it had the air of an awning. Then he lit a fire and baked a loaf of bread. When the Apocalypse comes, he'll be standing in a wood somewhere, drinking a cup of tea from his personal, calibrated mug, saying: “I'm the last human being alive. Gosh. Sorry about that.”
Greek, a new series on BBC3, also showed us an explorer venturing into hostile terrain with very little in the way of equipment and resources. It is a new US series about college fraternities and sororities. It's another example of how different the Americans are from us. We imagine students as slackers and drifters. Over there, they have complex formal social networks. In Greek, it's not enough just to get into a good college. You have to qualify for a fraternity or sorority, or you're a nobody. At first, I was sickened. The girls were all skinny and bitchy, hungry for status and power, and the guys were chiselled hunks. They looked like the people you see in those catalogues that come through the door. The hero, Rusty Cartwright, is one of a small number of people who looks normal. But against this background of buff bodies and nose-jobs, he looked like a bug-eyed freak. And Rusty had a problem: to get on in life, he must either become an off-the-peg hunk, or take on the whole system.
Rusty is a freshman at Cyprus-Rhodes University, arriving to find that he was rooming with a born-again Southern Christian whose first act was to lay out his bible and tack a Confederate flag to the dorm wall. This wasn't what Rusty was hoping for from college life and the engineering course's freshers' party was a considerable letdown, too, a giant stack of Red Bull cans and people playing robot wars. So Rusty decided to go in for Rush week, where prospective members eyed up various frat houses in the hope of being invited to join. Rusty's socially ambitious sister is a member of Zeta Beta and is going out with the head of Omega Chi, the most desirable fraternity, which gave the otherwise hopelessly geeky Rusty an outside chance of a place. But romantic complications meant that he also had an in at Kappa Tau, which clearly regards the film Animal House as holy scripture.
It is, I suppose, what US TV executives like to call dramedy, though there isn't a lot to justify the second half of that ugly hybrid, since it is distinctly timid about sinking the knife into America's gilded youth. The tubby Christian redneck got a pounding because, presumably, the execs calculated his demographic wouldn't be watching anyway. But the pretty characters are treated much more gently, and we're clearly expected to care about their emotional dilemmas. It has the essential dynamic of Scrubs an innocent at sea in a society that requires a meticulous knowledge of the done thing but none of Scrubs' Indian-burn relish for making its characters yelp.
Finally, the last ever series of The Inspector Lynley Mysteries (BBC1, Sun) began with the man still sunk in alcoholic grief after the death of his wife six months before. For most TV coppers, this would mean waking up in a tatty flat covered with as many empty pizza boxes and beer cans as the props department could rustle up. Being an earl, though, Lynley (Nathaniel Parker) was in his plush riverside apartment surrounded by a few decorously arranged bottles of superior whisky and a sadly neglected cafetière. He was roused from this rather civilised torpor by the discovery of the body of a young boy, who’d disappeared from a house party Lynley attended 12 years earlier. Since then too, the boy’s sister Julia (Georgina Rylance) had become estranged from her parents and was living in Rome – which meant Lynley’s first job was to persuade her to return home for the funeral. This he duly achieved by talking to her in front of a kaleidoscope of Rome’s most famous buildings.
For her part, Julia proved, if anything, even posher than him, with her Celia Johnson accent and languid aphorisms. (“‘What if’ are the deadliest words in the English language.”) Luckily for Lynley, she was also a goer – and back in London they shared a night of passion during which a photograph of his late wife fell symbolically to the floor. The next morning Julia’s lifeless body was found on the street five floors below his balcony. Lynley was then arrested for her murder by the weirdly vindictive Michelle Tate (Geraldine Somerville), whose questioning included the sensitive enquiry, “Your wife was shot dead right in front of you, wasn’t she?”
All of which soon led to the familiar tale of a policeman operating outside the rules, as Lynley set out to find the Real Killer: a process to which the programme took a somewhat unhurried approach, carefully crossing out the list of suspects one by one. In traditional whodunit style, the list also turned out to be a close-knit affair with the same people doubling as suspects, policemen, family lawyers and victims. The result was a perfectly serviceable way of passing the time. Even so, I can’t imagine too many viewers being sunk in alcoholic grief themselves when Inspector Lynley finally heads off into the television sunset (or UKTV as it’s also known).
Monday, 26 May 2008
Saturday, 24 May 2008
Censor sensibility
Julie Walters, who plays Mary Whitehouse this week on BBC2, tells Michael Deacon that there was more to the campaigner than angry rants...
We can never know what Mary Whitehouse would have made of the news that Julie Walters is to play her in a film of her life. But we can take a reasonable guess. “I’m sure she would have disapproved of some things I’ve done,” says Walters. “The Wife of Bath, Personal Services… Someone in America said, ‘There’s something there to offend the whole family.’”
Personal Services was a 1987 film in which Walters starred as the madam of a brothel – not exactly Whitehouse’s cup of tea. And you could say that about more than a few things on television. From 1963 until her death in 2001, the Nuneaton-born teacher-turned-campaigner protested against what she saw as British television’s flouting of decent moral standards.
As BBC2’s new one-off drama, Filth: the Mary Whitehouse Story, shows, she fired off endless letters of complaint to broadcasters and gave impassioned public speeches. Televised discussions of premarital sex, swearing in Till Death Us Do Part, the wanton disregard for authority displayed by the children’s puppets Pinky and Perky… All were contributing, Whitehouse believed, to a collapse in morality in British society. To fight back, she famously launched the Clean Up TV Campaign and formed the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (now known as Mediawatch UK).
When Walters was young, however, she thought Whitehouse was merely a killjoy. “She figured highly in my teens and twenties,” she says. “To my generation, she represented our parents. It felt like she was spoiling the fun.” Unsurprisingly, a lot of people who made television weren’t too keen on Whitehouse either. Walters recalls seeing her “cruelly lampooned” by ITV’s Eighties puppet satire Spitting Image.
But Filth, says the star of Educating Rita and Billy Elliot, doesn’t mock Whitehouse. If that had been the aim, she says, she wouldn’t have taken the part. “I was sent another script about her, but it was having a lot of fun at her expense,” she says. “This one was different – it was very balanced. It explains who she was, where she was coming from. It’s easy to take the piss out of someone like her.” No, that’s not an expression Whitehouse would have cared for. But Walters is right: Filth is, a lot of the time, sympathetic to the tireless campaigner (although some scenes make her seem a little dotty, or short-tempered).
It starts by showing what prompted Whitehouse to launch her protests, then her efforts to form a pressure group made up of like-minded West Midlands women. But the central story is about Whitehouse’s long and fiery battle with the BBC’s Director General from 1960-68, Sir Hugh Carlton Greene, played as a crude, sneering bully by Hugh Bonneville. Time and again he refuses to meet her – but she devises plenty of other ploys to get his attention.
Researching and playing the part changed Walters’s opinion of Whitehouse, she says: “I was surprised by her compassion, and she was a good mum. In retrospect, she had a point. There’s a watershed because of her. Children shouldn’t view things that they’re not emotionally developed enough to deal with. I don’t have a Mary Whitehouse attitude, but I do believe in the watershed.” After all, Walters is a mother herself. When her daughter Maisie was a child, they were watching a drama (Walters can’t remember its title) that contained a scene of a nature Walters hadn’t bargained for. “Mum,” said Maisie, “why has that woman taken her knickers off?” Walters said, “I think it’s by accident…”
She didn’t feel the need to shield Maisie from every programme that Whitehouse disapproved of, though – soaps in particular. “I couldn’t stop that because of my own addictions,” she says. “When she was born, we came home from the hospital and we were sitting on the sofa and the EastEnders theme tune came on. Her little head looked straight at the telly.”
Of late, Walters has been working on plenty of family-friendly entertainment, with the exception of Filth (which inevitably contains swearing). She’ll be Ron Weasley’s mum again in the fifth Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (out before Christmas), and will play Aunt Betsey in a new film version of David Copperfield (which should be out next year). In July she appears in Mamma Mia!, an Abba-inspired romantic comedy film.
At 58, Walters is one of Britain’s best-loved actresses, and this year she was made CBE for services to drama. She’s recently been writing her autobiography. She seems so pleasant in person that it’s hard to imagine the book containing many Whitehouse-style tirades. Still, she says, there are things that make her angry: “Rudeness, racism, snobbery, tiredness, Cellophane things you can’t open…”
Swearing and sex scenes on television, though, aren’t among them. Indeed, Walters confesses to being a fan of one modern-day show that would surely have horrified Mary Whitehouse more than any from the past. “I was glued to Celebrity Big Brother,” she says. “It was grubby stuff, but I couldn’t switch it off.”
Filth: the Mary Whitehouse Story is on BBC2 on Wednesday at 9.00pm
We can never know what Mary Whitehouse would have made of the news that Julie Walters is to play her in a film of her life. But we can take a reasonable guess. “I’m sure she would have disapproved of some things I’ve done,” says Walters. “The Wife of Bath, Personal Services… Someone in America said, ‘There’s something there to offend the whole family.’”
Personal Services was a 1987 film in which Walters starred as the madam of a brothel – not exactly Whitehouse’s cup of tea. And you could say that about more than a few things on television. From 1963 until her death in 2001, the Nuneaton-born teacher-turned-campaigner protested against what she saw as British television’s flouting of decent moral standards.
As BBC2’s new one-off drama, Filth: the Mary Whitehouse Story, shows, she fired off endless letters of complaint to broadcasters and gave impassioned public speeches. Televised discussions of premarital sex, swearing in Till Death Us Do Part, the wanton disregard for authority displayed by the children’s puppets Pinky and Perky… All were contributing, Whitehouse believed, to a collapse in morality in British society. To fight back, she famously launched the Clean Up TV Campaign and formed the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (now known as Mediawatch UK).
When Walters was young, however, she thought Whitehouse was merely a killjoy. “She figured highly in my teens and twenties,” she says. “To my generation, she represented our parents. It felt like she was spoiling the fun.” Unsurprisingly, a lot of people who made television weren’t too keen on Whitehouse either. Walters recalls seeing her “cruelly lampooned” by ITV’s Eighties puppet satire Spitting Image.
But Filth, says the star of Educating Rita and Billy Elliot, doesn’t mock Whitehouse. If that had been the aim, she says, she wouldn’t have taken the part. “I was sent another script about her, but it was having a lot of fun at her expense,” she says. “This one was different – it was very balanced. It explains who she was, where she was coming from. It’s easy to take the piss out of someone like her.” No, that’s not an expression Whitehouse would have cared for. But Walters is right: Filth is, a lot of the time, sympathetic to the tireless campaigner (although some scenes make her seem a little dotty, or short-tempered).
It starts by showing what prompted Whitehouse to launch her protests, then her efforts to form a pressure group made up of like-minded West Midlands women. But the central story is about Whitehouse’s long and fiery battle with the BBC’s Director General from 1960-68, Sir Hugh Carlton Greene, played as a crude, sneering bully by Hugh Bonneville. Time and again he refuses to meet her – but she devises plenty of other ploys to get his attention.
Researching and playing the part changed Walters’s opinion of Whitehouse, she says: “I was surprised by her compassion, and she was a good mum. In retrospect, she had a point. There’s a watershed because of her. Children shouldn’t view things that they’re not emotionally developed enough to deal with. I don’t have a Mary Whitehouse attitude, but I do believe in the watershed.” After all, Walters is a mother herself. When her daughter Maisie was a child, they were watching a drama (Walters can’t remember its title) that contained a scene of a nature Walters hadn’t bargained for. “Mum,” said Maisie, “why has that woman taken her knickers off?” Walters said, “I think it’s by accident…”
She didn’t feel the need to shield Maisie from every programme that Whitehouse disapproved of, though – soaps in particular. “I couldn’t stop that because of my own addictions,” she says. “When she was born, we came home from the hospital and we were sitting on the sofa and the EastEnders theme tune came on. Her little head looked straight at the telly.”
Of late, Walters has been working on plenty of family-friendly entertainment, with the exception of Filth (which inevitably contains swearing). She’ll be Ron Weasley’s mum again in the fifth Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (out before Christmas), and will play Aunt Betsey in a new film version of David Copperfield (which should be out next year). In July she appears in Mamma Mia!, an Abba-inspired romantic comedy film.
At 58, Walters is one of Britain’s best-loved actresses, and this year she was made CBE for services to drama. She’s recently been writing her autobiography. She seems so pleasant in person that it’s hard to imagine the book containing many Whitehouse-style tirades. Still, she says, there are things that make her angry: “Rudeness, racism, snobbery, tiredness, Cellophane things you can’t open…”
Swearing and sex scenes on television, though, aren’t among them. Indeed, Walters confesses to being a fan of one modern-day show that would surely have horrified Mary Whitehouse more than any from the past. “I was glued to Celebrity Big Brother,” she says. “It was grubby stuff, but I couldn’t switch it off.”
Filth: the Mary Whitehouse Story is on BBC2 on Wednesday at 9.00pm
Friday, 23 May 2008
British TV mogul Simon Fuller is the real winner of American Idol
Standing beside a swimming pool overlooking the Los Angeles skyline, the British TV mogul Simon Fuller congratulated the latest American Idol at a private party on Wednesday night — but the real winner was undoubtedly Mr Fuller who, for seven years, has dominated America's TV ratings and made himself a dollar billionaire.
At the end of a celebrity-filled two-hour show, this year's winner was revealed to be David Cook, a soulful Missouri rocker who built up a fanbase by performing grunge versions of Lionel Richie's Hello and Michael Jackson's Billie Jean. Mr Cook, 26, prevailed in spite of what many regarded as a superior finals night performance by his more wholesome rival David Archuleta, 17. The numbers spoke for themselves: a record 97.5 million votes were cast by viewers of the singing contest — with Mr Cook getting approximately the same number of votes that President Bush received in the 2004 general election.
“We're still a goliath,” Mr Fuller told The Times, referring to the status of the show — a spin-off from Britain's Pop Idol — as the most-watched show in the US. “We're still bigger than anything else, and now David Cook is going to sell millions of records for us.”
With ratings declining and criticism of American Idol mounting — including accusations of vote rigging — many are asking how Mr Fuller and his British executives can continue to make such spectacular amounts of money out of an ageing franchise. The genius of the show is that Mr Fuller makes money out of the talent-scouting process and cashes in again if the stars of the show sell millions of records — as has happened with Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Chris Daughtry, Jennifer Hudson (who also won an Oscar) and others.
The show — which is broadcast on the Fox network, part of News Corporation, parent company of The Times — is thought to earn at least $500 million (£253 million) a year from advertising and sponsorship deals, with 30-second slots during the final selling for $780,0000 each. The show also makes money from the text message and telephone voting, a post-season tour, CDs, merchandise and — as of this year — live, on-the-night performances sold via the Apple iTunes store. The magazine Advertising Age valued the entire franchise recently at $2.5 billion.
Although the show has made a celebrity out of Simon Cowell, thanks largely to his willingness to put unflinching criticism ahead of the feelings of contestants, few Americans are aware that the production is an entirely British creation. Apart from Mr Fuller and Mr Cowell, the co-executive producers are Ken Warwick and Nigel Lythgoe, also Britons. Even the director, Bruce Gower, is British.
But the expats have a difficult job ahead of them for next season. For most of the show's run this year ratings were off by about 10 per cent. This was blamed on the aftermath of the writers' strike, which drove viewers away from television, and results from the Democratic Party's primary race, which came in on Tuesday nights at the same time that American Idol was on the air.
Critics complained of being bored with the format and Paula Abdul, one of the judges, made a gaffe when she gave her verdict on a contestant before he sang, revealing that her notes had been scripted in advance. The show staged a recovery for the finals. On Tuesday, when the contestants gave their last performances, ratings were up 7 per cent on 2007, to 27 million. The following night, when the results were revealed, the ratings were up 4.5 per cent, to 26.5 million, according to preliminary data. But executives were clearly rattled.
At the party on Wednesday Mr Fuller promised radical changes for next season, with rumours suggesting that a fourth judge would be hired to join Mr Cowell, Ms Abdul and Randy Jackson. “There's going to be a big shake-up,” confirmed Mr Cowell, who spent most of Wednesday evening with the $12.5 million-a-year host of Idol, Ryan Seacrest. “You'll see.”
At the end of a celebrity-filled two-hour show, this year's winner was revealed to be David Cook, a soulful Missouri rocker who built up a fanbase by performing grunge versions of Lionel Richie's Hello and Michael Jackson's Billie Jean. Mr Cook, 26, prevailed in spite of what many regarded as a superior finals night performance by his more wholesome rival David Archuleta, 17. The numbers spoke for themselves: a record 97.5 million votes were cast by viewers of the singing contest — with Mr Cook getting approximately the same number of votes that President Bush received in the 2004 general election.
“We're still a goliath,” Mr Fuller told The Times, referring to the status of the show — a spin-off from Britain's Pop Idol — as the most-watched show in the US. “We're still bigger than anything else, and now David Cook is going to sell millions of records for us.”
With ratings declining and criticism of American Idol mounting — including accusations of vote rigging — many are asking how Mr Fuller and his British executives can continue to make such spectacular amounts of money out of an ageing franchise. The genius of the show is that Mr Fuller makes money out of the talent-scouting process and cashes in again if the stars of the show sell millions of records — as has happened with Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Chris Daughtry, Jennifer Hudson (who also won an Oscar) and others.
The show — which is broadcast on the Fox network, part of News Corporation, parent company of The Times — is thought to earn at least $500 million (£253 million) a year from advertising and sponsorship deals, with 30-second slots during the final selling for $780,0000 each. The show also makes money from the text message and telephone voting, a post-season tour, CDs, merchandise and — as of this year — live, on-the-night performances sold via the Apple iTunes store. The magazine Advertising Age valued the entire franchise recently at $2.5 billion.
Although the show has made a celebrity out of Simon Cowell, thanks largely to his willingness to put unflinching criticism ahead of the feelings of contestants, few Americans are aware that the production is an entirely British creation. Apart from Mr Fuller and Mr Cowell, the co-executive producers are Ken Warwick and Nigel Lythgoe, also Britons. Even the director, Bruce Gower, is British.
But the expats have a difficult job ahead of them for next season. For most of the show's run this year ratings were off by about 10 per cent. This was blamed on the aftermath of the writers' strike, which drove viewers away from television, and results from the Democratic Party's primary race, which came in on Tuesday nights at the same time that American Idol was on the air.
Critics complained of being bored with the format and Paula Abdul, one of the judges, made a gaffe when she gave her verdict on a contestant before he sang, revealing that her notes had been scripted in advance. The show staged a recovery for the finals. On Tuesday, when the contestants gave their last performances, ratings were up 7 per cent on 2007, to 27 million. The following night, when the results were revealed, the ratings were up 4.5 per cent, to 26.5 million, according to preliminary data. But executives were clearly rattled.
At the party on Wednesday Mr Fuller promised radical changes for next season, with rumours suggesting that a fourth judge would be hired to join Mr Cowell, Ms Abdul and Randy Jackson. “There's going to be a big shake-up,” confirmed Mr Cowell, who spent most of Wednesday evening with the $12.5 million-a-year host of Idol, Ryan Seacrest. “You'll see.”
TV starlet ain't half hot mum
The Australian Defence Department is investigating allegations that television celebrity Tania Zaetta had sex with special forces soldiers during a recent tour of war-ravaged Afghanistan. The high-level document says that Zaetta had relations with troops at the Australian base in Tarin Kowt, the capital of Oruzgan province, last month. Pictures and a video were said to have been taken. It was revealed that the unsubstantiated claim was made by veteran rock singer Angry Anderson. Zaetta and Anderson were the two headline acts on a 17-day tour of the Middle East that staged concerts for Australian soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.The department has been severely embarrassed after admitting it broke privacy rules by naming Zaetta - who has denied the allegation - in a briefing document to the Minister for Defence Joel Fitzgibbon. Australia’s military was in retreat last night, apologising to Zaetta for the leak, and ordering an immediate inquiry into how the document — officially referred to as a “hot issues brief” — became public. The federal Opposition demanded Mr Fitzgibbon apologise for the "gross" and "extraordinary" invasion of the TV star's privacy. Spokesman Nick Minchin, who travelled on a transport aircraft with Zaetta and Anderson during the tour, has demanded an explanation from Mr Fitzgibbon. "This is a gross invasion of her privacy," he said on Fairfax radio today. "It is very unfortunate and I think Mr Fitzgibbon, as the Defence Minister, should come out today and explain exactly how this has occurred. He should apologise publicly to her. This is an extraordinary invasion of her privacy. He has got some answers to provide."
Zaetta, who has appeared on Baywatch and Mission Implausible, a British pay-TV show, strenuously denied the allegations and said there had been little opportunity to be alone with any soldier, even if she had wanted to be. She described the claim as "hurtful". "That is the absolute first I've heard of it. That is the most ridiculous story I've ever heard about my life - and I've heard plenty over the years in this industry," she said. "It takes the cake. I've just done this most amazing life-changing experience, been to the most unbelievable places and for this to be said, it's very hurtful."
Zaetta was the co-host of 1990s television stunt show Who Dares Wins, which is also the motto of the Australian SAS. She is also a popular film actress in India; starring recently in Charlie’s Angels-style hit, Mr. Black, Mr. White. “How does a supposed document . . . that I don’t know about get leaked in the first place — that’s a little bit concerning about the security of the country,” she said. “It’s complete lies . . . apart from being hurtful, it’s damaging to a woman’s career, to her reputation.” The Government now faces a potential compensation payout after she sought legal advice over the claims.
Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister, reluctantly commented on the scandal, which drew criticism from the opposition conservative Liberal Party over invasion of privacy. “These matters are under investigation within the Defence Department and I will leave it for that investigation to reach its own conclusions,” Mr Rudd said.
Artists on the tour - dubbed "Tour de Force - Middle East 9" were warned they would breach Defence Force regulations if they fraternised with troops. Another performer confirmed the entertainers had been told that they would breach regulations if they consorted with the troops. “I have heard of quickies but I have never heard of anything that quick . . . a tour like that is hard work,” John Clinton, of the country rock band the Wolverines, said.
Anderson, lead singer of rock band Rose Tattoo, told The Daily Telegraph he had no knowledge of any complaint. But the document says the secretary of the Defence force's entertainment division "was informed yesterday by Mr Anderson that he had been told by SF special forces troops whilst at Tarin Kowt that Ms Zaetta had sex with them and they had the photos and video to prove it."
"The issue was not raised by Mr Anderson during the tour. The tour CO commanding officer was aware that Mr Anderson did not think highly of Ms Zaetta, often criticising her," the document says. A Department of Defence spokesman confirmed that an investigation into the allegations was underway and that statements would be taken from those who participated on the tour.
Anderson, who said he is a member of the Forces Advisory Committee on Entertainment, said he had not made a complaint about Zaetta. "I don't know where that came from. I don't get into personal or petty dislikes, particularly when it could hamper or have a detrimental effect on a tour," he said. "I don't know Tania very well. As far as I could tell she conducted herself in a very professional manner. It's two weeks away, it's pretty intense and I pretty much kept myself to myself." Anderson said he had formed a friendship with a male comedian during the tour. "I guess I could be accused of being homosexual. I was often seen in his company."
The document says all personnel on the tour were briefed on Defence force policy on fraternising with troops 10 days before they flew to the Middle East. Under a heading "Talking Points" - briefing notes given to ministers as suggestions for handling controversial issues in public - the document suggests the minister say: "I'm aware of the allegation and understand that an investigation is currently being conducted.
In interviews given to publicise the tour, which was filmed by the ABC's Australian Story and aired over the past two weeks, Zaetta said: "I'm single and there has been a lot of teasing that I am going into a place where they haven't seen girls for a long time." Just before the tour left, she said about touring the Middle East: "If you can't get a date out of there then you've got no hope."
Commanding Officer of the tour Lieutenant Colonel Greg McCauley said he could not comment and referred inquiries to the Department of Defence's public affairs division. Sources on the tour said they had no knowledge of any Defence investigation and were surprised that an allegation had been made by Angry Anderson.
The Street gets third BBC series
A third series of Jimmy McGovern's award-winning drama The Street has been commissioned by BBC Fiction boss Jane Tranter. The new series will air on BBC1 in 2009 and further explore the "darker side of human nature", according to the corporation.
Made by ITV Productions, McGovern will once again work on the six-part series with new writers. Casting for the new series has yet to be agreed. Previous cast members include David Thewlis, Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent, Gina McKee, Jane Horrocks and Sue Johnston. McGovern – whose credits include Cracker, The Lakes and Hillsborough – co-created The Street with Sita Williams and they will both be executive producers the third series.
Williams said: "It is a great credit to Jimmy McGovern that we have won the most prized drama awards for two consecutive years." BBC Independent Drama commissioning editor Polly Hill said: "I am delighted that The Street will return for a third series. Jimmy's compelling storytelling and the wonderful cast it attracts continues to deliver powerful drama about ordinary folk. We are delighted it's captured the audience's imagination and are thrilled to see it receive an RTS and BAFTA for the second year running."
The Street has also won an International Emmy for Jim Broadbent's performance.
Made by ITV Productions, McGovern will once again work on the six-part series with new writers. Casting for the new series has yet to be agreed. Previous cast members include David Thewlis, Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent, Gina McKee, Jane Horrocks and Sue Johnston. McGovern – whose credits include Cracker, The Lakes and Hillsborough – co-created The Street with Sita Williams and they will both be executive producers the third series.
Williams said: "It is a great credit to Jimmy McGovern that we have won the most prized drama awards for two consecutive years." BBC Independent Drama commissioning editor Polly Hill said: "I am delighted that The Street will return for a third series. Jimmy's compelling storytelling and the wonderful cast it attracts continues to deliver powerful drama about ordinary folk. We are delighted it's captured the audience's imagination and are thrilled to see it receive an RTS and BAFTA for the second year running."
The Street has also won an International Emmy for Jim Broadbent's performance.
Monty Don recovers from stroke
The television presenter and gardening writer Monty Don is stepping down from Gardeners' World after suffering a minor stroke, the BBC said yesterday. The 52-year-old has been absent from the screen for the past six weeks following the stroke and now intends to take "gardening leave" over the summer while he makes a full recovery.
A spokesman for the BBC said: "Monty Don has decided to stand down as the main presenter of Gardeners' World. Monty has presented the series for the past five years but has been off our screens for the past six weeks as a result of a minor stroke. "Although he is making a good recovery he feels unable to commit to regular filming for a while." The spokesman added that Don would be "sorely missed by viewers and the production team".
Don has appeared on Gardeners' World for five years, and this year also presented Around the World in 80 Gardens, a horticultural odyssey which took 18 months to film. Don and his crew visited locations from the Arctic to Australia, to profile gardens - and their creators - on every continent.
In a statement yesterday, Don said: "I am proud to have led Gardeners' World for the past five years and have enjoyed every minute of sharing my passion with the programme's viewers. I intend to take some gardening leave for the rest of the summer to make a full recovery and so that I am ready to tackle new projects."
A self-taught horticulturalist, Don also wrote a long-running column for the Observer, often straying beyond gardening to discuss personal issues such as his own experiences with depression and seasonal affective disorder. He is the author of a number of popular gardening books including 'The Sensuous Garden' and 'The Complete Gardener'.
He began his television career as the resident gardener on This Morning before going to present a string of Channel 4 series including Don Roaming and Lost Gardens. He lives with his wife and three children in Herefordshire.
A spokesman for the BBC said: "Monty Don has decided to stand down as the main presenter of Gardeners' World. Monty has presented the series for the past five years but has been off our screens for the past six weeks as a result of a minor stroke. "Although he is making a good recovery he feels unable to commit to regular filming for a while." The spokesman added that Don would be "sorely missed by viewers and the production team".
Don has appeared on Gardeners' World for five years, and this year also presented Around the World in 80 Gardens, a horticultural odyssey which took 18 months to film. Don and his crew visited locations from the Arctic to Australia, to profile gardens - and their creators - on every continent.
In a statement yesterday, Don said: "I am proud to have led Gardeners' World for the past five years and have enjoyed every minute of sharing my passion with the programme's viewers. I intend to take some gardening leave for the rest of the summer to make a full recovery and so that I am ready to tackle new projects."
A self-taught horticulturalist, Don also wrote a long-running column for the Observer, often straying beyond gardening to discuss personal issues such as his own experiences with depression and seasonal affective disorder. He is the author of a number of popular gardening books including 'The Sensuous Garden' and 'The Complete Gardener'.
He began his television career as the resident gardener on This Morning before going to present a string of Channel 4 series including Don Roaming and Lost Gardens. He lives with his wife and three children in Herefordshire.
ITV's Fincham wants more of The Fixer
The new ITV director of television, Peter Fincham, has made his first commissioning decision since starting his job - ordering another series of ITV1 drama The Fixer. Fincham has given the thumbs-up to a second run of the drama, which stars Party Animals actor Andrew Buchan, Tamzin Outhwaite (left), former Shameless actor Jody Latham and Peter Mullan.The Fixer premiered on ITV1 with an audience of 6.3 million viewers and overall the six-part series averaged just under 5 million, making it the network's highest rating new drama this year. Fincham promised the drama about a soldier who becomes a paid assassin targeting people who have escaped the law will be even "bigger and better" when it returns. "The Fixer was a gripping first series that had an unmistakable touch of class. I'm delighted that it's coming back - it'll be bigger and better than ever," he said.
Jane Featherstone, the joint managing director of Kudos, which makes The Fixer, and the show's executive producer, added: "We're thrilled to be bringing The Fixer back and look forward to more fun and action from our unique team of renegade crime fighters."
It is understood that the new series will contain more action, while keeping the tense, claustrophobic atmosphere of the first run. An ITV insider said the second series was also likely to include cameo roles by some star names.
Ex-BBC1 controller Fincham began his job at ITV last Monday, May 12, and is said to be keen to bolster ITV's drama department, which suffered a disappointing reaction to new shows such as The Palace and Rock Rivals earlier this year.
The Fixer was commissioned by Laura Mackie, the ITV director of drama. It was created by Spooks and Party Animals writer Ben Richards and is produced by Faith Penhale and joint executive produced by Simon Crawford Collins.
Sir Trevor McDonald may quit News at Ten
Talks are taking place between ITV News and Sir Trevor McDonald over him stepping down from presenting News at Ten at the end of the year. Sources familiar with the situation said Sir Trevor was looking to leave the relaunched ITV bulletin on a high after the US presidential election, which takes place on November 4.
After intense lobbying by ITV and its executive chairman, Michael Grade, the veteran broadcaster came out of retirement to front News at Ten with Julie Etchingham when it returned to ITV1 in January. ITV has refused to reveal how long his contract is but it is thought to finish at the end of the year. One source said: "Trevor feels like he's done what he set out to do."
Another insider added: "If Trevor went after the US elections that would take him to almost the end of the year and he could leave on a high. He's come back to relaunch News at Ten but does feel a bit that times have changed."
Behind-the-scenes discussions are understood to be taking place as to Sir Trevor's commitments over the next few months. He is due to take three weeks holiday off over the summer and is also understood to be covering the Democratic convention in August.
After a shaky few months, News at Ten's ratings have rallied somewhat, though ITV sources conceded that the figures are still below those hoped for by the broadcaster before it returned. The new-look News at Ten premiered on January 14 with a scoop interview with Princess Diana's former lover Hasnat Khan and an audience of 3.8 million viewers. But figures hit a low of 1.7million viewers in March and analysis showed that over the first three months, BBC1's 10pm bulletin has won more than double the audience of its ITV counterpart when the two shows were head to head. Recently News at Ten's ratings have rallied and it has been averaging more than 2.5million viewers.
Sir Trevor's natural successor is seen to be Mark Austin. When News at Ten returned Austin moved to a roving anchor role, presenting on location for big foreign stories. Since then he has reported from around the world, including from Zimbabwe, in addition to co-hosting ITV's higher-rated early-evening news bulletin.
When he returned to News at Ten Sir Trevor said "We're not in this to lose", but declined to say how long he would stick with the bulletin, adding only: "I want to be in for some time." It is expected that after he steps down he would retain a commitment with ITV for other programmes such as Tonight or factual shows such as his recent Britain's Favourite View.
An ITV spokesman said: "We don't discuss confidential contracts."
After intense lobbying by ITV and its executive chairman, Michael Grade, the veteran broadcaster came out of retirement to front News at Ten with Julie Etchingham when it returned to ITV1 in January. ITV has refused to reveal how long his contract is but it is thought to finish at the end of the year. One source said: "Trevor feels like he's done what he set out to do."
Another insider added: "If Trevor went after the US elections that would take him to almost the end of the year and he could leave on a high. He's come back to relaunch News at Ten but does feel a bit that times have changed."
Behind-the-scenes discussions are understood to be taking place as to Sir Trevor's commitments over the next few months. He is due to take three weeks holiday off over the summer and is also understood to be covering the Democratic convention in August.
After a shaky few months, News at Ten's ratings have rallied somewhat, though ITV sources conceded that the figures are still below those hoped for by the broadcaster before it returned. The new-look News at Ten premiered on January 14 with a scoop interview with Princess Diana's former lover Hasnat Khan and an audience of 3.8 million viewers. But figures hit a low of 1.7million viewers in March and analysis showed that over the first three months, BBC1's 10pm bulletin has won more than double the audience of its ITV counterpart when the two shows were head to head. Recently News at Ten's ratings have rallied and it has been averaging more than 2.5million viewers.
Sir Trevor's natural successor is seen to be Mark Austin. When News at Ten returned Austin moved to a roving anchor role, presenting on location for big foreign stories. Since then he has reported from around the world, including from Zimbabwe, in addition to co-hosting ITV's higher-rated early-evening news bulletin.
When he returned to News at Ten Sir Trevor said "We're not in this to lose", but declined to say how long he would stick with the bulletin, adding only: "I want to be in for some time." It is expected that after he steps down he would retain a commitment with ITV for other programmes such as Tonight or factual shows such as his recent Britain's Favourite View.
An ITV spokesman said: "We don't discuss confidential contracts."
Holding tight, letting it go
Last night's TV reviewed: Hold Me Tight Let Me Go; 13 Kids and Wanting More; Hidden Lives: Wedding Addicts; Midnight Man
The Mulberry Bush school in Oxfordshire is a boarding school where children are sent when other institutions have given up hope of being able to contain them or understand their extreme emotional trauma. It has 40 children and 108 staff, a ratio that seems generous until you see what the staff have to put up with. In the course of Kim Longinotto's marvellous film, Hold Me Tight Let Me Go (BBC Four), members of staff at the Mulberry Bush were spat on, slapped, kicked, sworn at with a concentrated viciousness that would make a Scorsese film sound maidenly, and had their clothes soaked in urine. They bore all this with a patience that would seem saintly if it weren't dressed up in the modern secular jargon of reconciliation ("I want you to think about what you've done..."). The children are damaged. They swear, they’re rude, and when they are being horrible, the staff do not tell them off, they don’t ignore them. They tell the children that they have upset them and address them as adults – if they want to be treated properly, they have to treat others properly is the message.
And from time to time, they are rewarded with eruptions of spontaneous affection, need and longing: children flinging their arms around their teachers' necks, throwing themselves on their knees to propose marriage with mock fervour, howling at the prospect of leaving the school behind. The children slammed from one emotional extreme to another, and the viewer was left to trail limply in their wake, wondering how long anybody could keep up this pitch of feeling. These documentaries are supposed to be uplifting, but it looked like thankless, horrible work. In a typical lesson, a teacher would be spat at, called a “fucking cunt” a few times, hit, and disrespected. One child’s abusive misbehaviour set off a chair-throwing chain reaction among the others. Yet, slowly their stories peeled away: like the boy who had lost his father. The staff persisted in drawing them out, the children responded. One went home happier, another said he wanted to marry his teacher, but she told him he was too old.
A neat summation of the film's moodiness came with the introduction of Charlie, aged around nine, who was warned that while he was at the school he would see lots of things that would make him think, "Goodness, what's going on?" Shortly afterwards, Charlie was seen standing on a desk, then waving a chair over his head while kicking out at a teacher. Goodness, you thought, what's going on? Here and elsewhere, the film seemed to show almost overwhelming surges of feeling, expressed with a boundless physicality, so that the teachers had to restrain the children in ways that, in other contexts, might be disturbing; but despite the strain visible on their faces, none of the teachers ever became overtly angry. As the title suggested, restraint and embrace can be hard to tell apart. The strange, recurring motif was the move the teachers used to becalm the abusive children; it was a very firm hug, a hug that stopped them harming others, but also taught them about being held and possibly – their very first acquaintance with love and safety.
One of the great things about the film was its reluctance to offer simple diagnoses or to shrug blame on to the parents; though in the cases that were lingered over, a sense of having been abandoned, either physically or emotionally, seemed important. Calming down after an outburst, Ben told one of the staff that his mother had said she was "bored" with him. He hated himself, hated his life, he said, but then temporised – he didn't want to say why in front of the cameras. His interlocutor pushed him to go on – perhaps other children who felt the same would like to hear him talk. Ben said: "'Cos my mum stabbed my dad."
That exchange was important because it answered in part one of the anxieties such films inevitably raise: how far were the children acting up for the cameras? Here we were offered a reassurance that nobody was being fooled into pretending the cameras weren't there; and reassurance, too, that we weren't just being voyeurs. But the exchange mattered, as well, because of what followed, when Ben's mother came to visit on one of the six days a year that she is allowed to spend with him at the school. As she played with him in the garden, and then stroked his head as it lay in her lap, Ben for once at peace, the idea that she was nothing more than an uncaring or neglectful parent was happily scotched. What was going on here was far more complicated, far more touching than Ben's account made room for. Similarly, we saw another mother explaining to the school's family liaison officer how hard she found it to talk to her son on the phone, how guilty she felt when she saw him, and that saying goodbye didn't feel as bad as she knew it should. Every parent must have felt some shadow of those feelings: the sense that you can never be a good enough parent, never love your child enough.
This was not a doubt that afflicted the parents presented in 13 Kids and Wanting More. As Karan Johnstone explained, "I'm brilliant at being a mum. I'm probably the best mum I know." I envied her that level of self-assurance, while wondering whether more self-analysis might have been in order. On her 12th pregnancy, Karan was gloating over the prospect of once more having "that baby smell" around the house, the excitement of buying more baby clothes. You did wonder whether a Tiny Tears and a few tubs of talcum powder wouldn't give her the same thrill.
Now I've seen a lot of freak shows on TV recently - programmes about people who are incredibly fat, or incredibly tall, or who appear outlandish in some other way, like being posh but poor, or obsessed with washing their hands. People on screen are becoming more freakish in general - a response, I'm sure, to the proliferation in channels. Weird stuff always catches the eye, and after that it's an arms race. So I thought I knew what to expect when I switched on this documentary about couples who carry on having children way beyond the norm. I thought these people would play the role of the incredibly fat or tall people, or the man who couldn't tidy his house. In these instances, the narrator just needed to speak in a normal-sounding voice while the camera focused on the subject, resulting in a huge, tragi-comic contrast. But this was different. This was not a freakshow at all. It looked weirdly normal. I kept thinking: what went wrong?
There were three couples. One couple had 13 children, and wanted another. Another couple had 10 children, with one on the way. The third couple had 12 children and wanted a 13th. I think I've got this right; the story kept switching around. Two of the couples looked absolutely normal. One woman joked that she was "pram mad". That was about as mad as it got. One of the husbands, Mohammed, liked to play the fool. He was twinkly, with a moustache and a mostly bald head. He said of his wife, "She finds me tempting and irresistible!"
Mohammed's wife Noreen wasn’t so much tired as exhausted. “No more,” she gasped as she lay in bed having just given birth to her 11th child at the age of 35. Her husband Mohammed was having none of it. “She says that every time,” he chortled. “It’s Allah’s will. It is up to him.” The health visitor, rather like us, watched incredulously as he cheerfully banged on about God deciding how many children he should have, seemingly utterly ignorant of Noreen in total agony. “God has chosen the female body to deliver offspring in his image,” he said. Mohammed dismissed concerns about Noreen’s health and likened multiple pregnancy to football training – the more you train the muscles the better they become, he intimated.
Deborah was in the health food store looking for unicorn root extract. “It’s supposed to tone up your uterus if it’s tired,” she said. “And after 13 children I’m sure mine is very tired.” Not tired enough to deter her from having another baby though, as the title of this documentary affirmed. Hubby Derek had just slipped a multipack of Siberian ginseng into his basket. “It helps with man things,” he said with a coy smile. Elsewhere, Karan insisted she just loved having babies. “There’s no other feeling like it,” she said cooing over baby clothes in the run up to bearing her 12th. Asked if she thought having so many children was selfish she merely replied: “We put our heart and soul into the kids.”
And they obviously did. In fact the joyful chaos of large families was nothing if not obvious in this thoroughly enjoyable, occasionally jaw-dropping film. What wasn’t so clear, though, was how any of them could afford it. For a question that will have baffled many viewers, it was skated over with an almost Victorian delicacy. “We do our bit, we go out and work,” said Karan’s husband Ellis. And that was it, apart from some fleeting references to his efforts to convert the adjoining pair of council houses the family occupy into one. As for Derek and Deborah, nothing at all was said of their finances – although their outgoings on wild yak cream and pregnancy test kits alone might have challenged the average purse.
Only Mohammed’s fiscal position was laid bare. A former maths teacher, he put his unemployment down to discrimination. “Nobody will give me a job because I am a Muslim,” he said. A claim put into perspective when a fellow Rochdale resident gruffly pointed out the high proportion of gainfully employed Muslims in the town. Mohammed seemed to be enjoying his reputation as tabloid bogeyman of Rochdale. He went to the town centre and had merry scraps with locals who thought he was a benefits scrounger. In what looked like a set-up, a man collared Mohammed and ranted at him for a while about how irresponsible it was to have so many children. But the man looked like an idiot; we sided with Mohammed. Meanwhile a trip to the local cash and carry made big-family sums more graspable: five gallons of milk every two days, 75 nappies a week, and so on. “Three to four hundred a week goes nowhere,” tutted Mohammed.
Mostly, what the camera captured was these perfectly pleasant people, with a few children in tow. Sometimes there were group shots, but these just looked like happy people going on a school trip. There seemed to be no way of capturing the extraordinary nature of the subject matter. Two questions were asked at the start. Why did these people want so many children? And what was it like to be in such a big family? The answers we got were: they have lots of children because they love them. And big families are great fun, but hectic. Ultimately, this film didn't stop to examine what was going on in its subjects' heads in any depth; but the impression you were left with was of people who did not know when to say enough's enough. I'm like that with chocolate biscuits myself. In the end, some things are just very hard to film in a light that is not positive. Giving birth successfully and happy families are two of them. We were left with a documentary about some essentially decent people who looked, at best, harmlessly eccentric. Which seems a pity, because, when you think about it, having 13 children seems pretty damn freakish.
If the 36 children borne by these three couples seemed excessive, it was as nothing compared to the 40 marriages clocked up by the six individuals featured in Hidden Lives: Wedding Addicts (Five). There was rather more of a veneer of psychology applied here, compliments of psychotherapist Phillip Hodson, who trotted out a long list of reasons for this particular obsession, from immaturity to over-romanticism and straight forward attention-seeking. But the emphasis was definitely on fun.
Ron, currently on wife number eight, happily admitted his nuptial compulsion was an addiction. Martin blamed the collapse of seven marriages on his passion for Liverpool FC. The “Liz Taylor of Clydebank”, Sandra, who’s totted up seven big days, is still looking for Mr Right. Anyone who doubted the efficacy of this approach could always look to convicted bigamist Pam, who’s been up the aisle 10 times, though only six of those were legal. “It took me 10 times to find my Mr Right, but I found him,” said Pam, with a definite air of triumph.
Finally, the Government, secret services and a badly named defence policy think-tank were still bumping off people for not entirely plausible reasons in the final episode of Midnight Man (ITV1). The conspiracy drama ended with madness intact. James Nesbitt, as the ruffled hero Max, got used to sunlight and took off his silly hat. His cyber-literate daughter managed to bring down the fascistic Western industrial complex by downloading a vital video. The lady from the right-wing defence policy organisation betrayed Max.
Reece Dinsdale shot about 20 people in the back of the head, his hair shiny with black shoe polish. Nesbitt’s editor was also a criminal. Alan Dale lathered up his Ugly Betty American accent until it was so Yankee Doodle Dandy it made Boss Hogg look Home Counties. A blackhearted ending, with Nesbitt framed by the baddies as a murderous, light-phobic lunatic, beckoned but he was reunited with his daughter and all wrongs righted. Another police procedural with him as a decent though flawed hangdog hero is surely imminent.
The Mulberry Bush school in Oxfordshire is a boarding school where children are sent when other institutions have given up hope of being able to contain them or understand their extreme emotional trauma. It has 40 children and 108 staff, a ratio that seems generous until you see what the staff have to put up with. In the course of Kim Longinotto's marvellous film, Hold Me Tight Let Me Go (BBC Four), members of staff at the Mulberry Bush were spat on, slapped, kicked, sworn at with a concentrated viciousness that would make a Scorsese film sound maidenly, and had their clothes soaked in urine. They bore all this with a patience that would seem saintly if it weren't dressed up in the modern secular jargon of reconciliation ("I want you to think about what you've done..."). The children are damaged. They swear, they’re rude, and when they are being horrible, the staff do not tell them off, they don’t ignore them. They tell the children that they have upset them and address them as adults – if they want to be treated properly, they have to treat others properly is the message.
And from time to time, they are rewarded with eruptions of spontaneous affection, need and longing: children flinging their arms around their teachers' necks, throwing themselves on their knees to propose marriage with mock fervour, howling at the prospect of leaving the school behind. The children slammed from one emotional extreme to another, and the viewer was left to trail limply in their wake, wondering how long anybody could keep up this pitch of feeling. These documentaries are supposed to be uplifting, but it looked like thankless, horrible work. In a typical lesson, a teacher would be spat at, called a “fucking cunt” a few times, hit, and disrespected. One child’s abusive misbehaviour set off a chair-throwing chain reaction among the others. Yet, slowly their stories peeled away: like the boy who had lost his father. The staff persisted in drawing them out, the children responded. One went home happier, another said he wanted to marry his teacher, but she told him he was too old.
A neat summation of the film's moodiness came with the introduction of Charlie, aged around nine, who was warned that while he was at the school he would see lots of things that would make him think, "Goodness, what's going on?" Shortly afterwards, Charlie was seen standing on a desk, then waving a chair over his head while kicking out at a teacher. Goodness, you thought, what's going on? Here and elsewhere, the film seemed to show almost overwhelming surges of feeling, expressed with a boundless physicality, so that the teachers had to restrain the children in ways that, in other contexts, might be disturbing; but despite the strain visible on their faces, none of the teachers ever became overtly angry. As the title suggested, restraint and embrace can be hard to tell apart. The strange, recurring motif was the move the teachers used to becalm the abusive children; it was a very firm hug, a hug that stopped them harming others, but also taught them about being held and possibly – their very first acquaintance with love and safety.
One of the great things about the film was its reluctance to offer simple diagnoses or to shrug blame on to the parents; though in the cases that were lingered over, a sense of having been abandoned, either physically or emotionally, seemed important. Calming down after an outburst, Ben told one of the staff that his mother had said she was "bored" with him. He hated himself, hated his life, he said, but then temporised – he didn't want to say why in front of the cameras. His interlocutor pushed him to go on – perhaps other children who felt the same would like to hear him talk. Ben said: "'Cos my mum stabbed my dad."
That exchange was important because it answered in part one of the anxieties such films inevitably raise: how far were the children acting up for the cameras? Here we were offered a reassurance that nobody was being fooled into pretending the cameras weren't there; and reassurance, too, that we weren't just being voyeurs. But the exchange mattered, as well, because of what followed, when Ben's mother came to visit on one of the six days a year that she is allowed to spend with him at the school. As she played with him in the garden, and then stroked his head as it lay in her lap, Ben for once at peace, the idea that she was nothing more than an uncaring or neglectful parent was happily scotched. What was going on here was far more complicated, far more touching than Ben's account made room for. Similarly, we saw another mother explaining to the school's family liaison officer how hard she found it to talk to her son on the phone, how guilty she felt when she saw him, and that saying goodbye didn't feel as bad as she knew it should. Every parent must have felt some shadow of those feelings: the sense that you can never be a good enough parent, never love your child enough.
This was not a doubt that afflicted the parents presented in 13 Kids and Wanting More. As Karan Johnstone explained, "I'm brilliant at being a mum. I'm probably the best mum I know." I envied her that level of self-assurance, while wondering whether more self-analysis might have been in order. On her 12th pregnancy, Karan was gloating over the prospect of once more having "that baby smell" around the house, the excitement of buying more baby clothes. You did wonder whether a Tiny Tears and a few tubs of talcum powder wouldn't give her the same thrill.
Now I've seen a lot of freak shows on TV recently - programmes about people who are incredibly fat, or incredibly tall, or who appear outlandish in some other way, like being posh but poor, or obsessed with washing their hands. People on screen are becoming more freakish in general - a response, I'm sure, to the proliferation in channels. Weird stuff always catches the eye, and after that it's an arms race. So I thought I knew what to expect when I switched on this documentary about couples who carry on having children way beyond the norm. I thought these people would play the role of the incredibly fat or tall people, or the man who couldn't tidy his house. In these instances, the narrator just needed to speak in a normal-sounding voice while the camera focused on the subject, resulting in a huge, tragi-comic contrast. But this was different. This was not a freakshow at all. It looked weirdly normal. I kept thinking: what went wrong?
There were three couples. One couple had 13 children, and wanted another. Another couple had 10 children, with one on the way. The third couple had 12 children and wanted a 13th. I think I've got this right; the story kept switching around. Two of the couples looked absolutely normal. One woman joked that she was "pram mad". That was about as mad as it got. One of the husbands, Mohammed, liked to play the fool. He was twinkly, with a moustache and a mostly bald head. He said of his wife, "She finds me tempting and irresistible!"
Mohammed's wife Noreen wasn’t so much tired as exhausted. “No more,” she gasped as she lay in bed having just given birth to her 11th child at the age of 35. Her husband Mohammed was having none of it. “She says that every time,” he chortled. “It’s Allah’s will. It is up to him.” The health visitor, rather like us, watched incredulously as he cheerfully banged on about God deciding how many children he should have, seemingly utterly ignorant of Noreen in total agony. “God has chosen the female body to deliver offspring in his image,” he said. Mohammed dismissed concerns about Noreen’s health and likened multiple pregnancy to football training – the more you train the muscles the better they become, he intimated.
Deborah was in the health food store looking for unicorn root extract. “It’s supposed to tone up your uterus if it’s tired,” she said. “And after 13 children I’m sure mine is very tired.” Not tired enough to deter her from having another baby though, as the title of this documentary affirmed. Hubby Derek had just slipped a multipack of Siberian ginseng into his basket. “It helps with man things,” he said with a coy smile. Elsewhere, Karan insisted she just loved having babies. “There’s no other feeling like it,” she said cooing over baby clothes in the run up to bearing her 12th. Asked if she thought having so many children was selfish she merely replied: “We put our heart and soul into the kids.”
And they obviously did. In fact the joyful chaos of large families was nothing if not obvious in this thoroughly enjoyable, occasionally jaw-dropping film. What wasn’t so clear, though, was how any of them could afford it. For a question that will have baffled many viewers, it was skated over with an almost Victorian delicacy. “We do our bit, we go out and work,” said Karan’s husband Ellis. And that was it, apart from some fleeting references to his efforts to convert the adjoining pair of council houses the family occupy into one. As for Derek and Deborah, nothing at all was said of their finances – although their outgoings on wild yak cream and pregnancy test kits alone might have challenged the average purse.
Only Mohammed’s fiscal position was laid bare. A former maths teacher, he put his unemployment down to discrimination. “Nobody will give me a job because I am a Muslim,” he said. A claim put into perspective when a fellow Rochdale resident gruffly pointed out the high proportion of gainfully employed Muslims in the town. Mohammed seemed to be enjoying his reputation as tabloid bogeyman of Rochdale. He went to the town centre and had merry scraps with locals who thought he was a benefits scrounger. In what looked like a set-up, a man collared Mohammed and ranted at him for a while about how irresponsible it was to have so many children. But the man looked like an idiot; we sided with Mohammed. Meanwhile a trip to the local cash and carry made big-family sums more graspable: five gallons of milk every two days, 75 nappies a week, and so on. “Three to four hundred a week goes nowhere,” tutted Mohammed.
Mostly, what the camera captured was these perfectly pleasant people, with a few children in tow. Sometimes there were group shots, but these just looked like happy people going on a school trip. There seemed to be no way of capturing the extraordinary nature of the subject matter. Two questions were asked at the start. Why did these people want so many children? And what was it like to be in such a big family? The answers we got were: they have lots of children because they love them. And big families are great fun, but hectic. Ultimately, this film didn't stop to examine what was going on in its subjects' heads in any depth; but the impression you were left with was of people who did not know when to say enough's enough. I'm like that with chocolate biscuits myself. In the end, some things are just very hard to film in a light that is not positive. Giving birth successfully and happy families are two of them. We were left with a documentary about some essentially decent people who looked, at best, harmlessly eccentric. Which seems a pity, because, when you think about it, having 13 children seems pretty damn freakish.
If the 36 children borne by these three couples seemed excessive, it was as nothing compared to the 40 marriages clocked up by the six individuals featured in Hidden Lives: Wedding Addicts (Five). There was rather more of a veneer of psychology applied here, compliments of psychotherapist Phillip Hodson, who trotted out a long list of reasons for this particular obsession, from immaturity to over-romanticism and straight forward attention-seeking. But the emphasis was definitely on fun.
Ron, currently on wife number eight, happily admitted his nuptial compulsion was an addiction. Martin blamed the collapse of seven marriages on his passion for Liverpool FC. The “Liz Taylor of Clydebank”, Sandra, who’s totted up seven big days, is still looking for Mr Right. Anyone who doubted the efficacy of this approach could always look to convicted bigamist Pam, who’s been up the aisle 10 times, though only six of those were legal. “It took me 10 times to find my Mr Right, but I found him,” said Pam, with a definite air of triumph.
Finally, the Government, secret services and a badly named defence policy think-tank were still bumping off people for not entirely plausible reasons in the final episode of Midnight Man (ITV1). The conspiracy drama ended with madness intact. James Nesbitt, as the ruffled hero Max, got used to sunlight and took off his silly hat. His cyber-literate daughter managed to bring down the fascistic Western industrial complex by downloading a vital video. The lady from the right-wing defence policy organisation betrayed Max.
Reece Dinsdale shot about 20 people in the back of the head, his hair shiny with black shoe polish. Nesbitt’s editor was also a criminal. Alan Dale lathered up his Ugly Betty American accent until it was so Yankee Doodle Dandy it made Boss Hogg look Home Counties. A blackhearted ending, with Nesbitt framed by the baddies as a murderous, light-phobic lunatic, beckoned but he was reunited with his daughter and all wrongs righted. Another police procedural with him as a decent though flawed hangdog hero is surely imminent.
Thursday, 22 May 2008
BBC mix-up over verdict in Nisah Patel-Nasri murder trial
The BBC has landed itself in hot water for another on-air gaffe today after the BBC News channel mistakenly announced that a verdict had been reached in the trial of the men accused of murdering special constable Nisah Patel-Nasri. Just after 11am today, the BBC News channel broadcast what it claimed was a "breaking news" story about the trial of the suspects in the case of the murder of Patel-Nasri, who was killed on her doorstep in north London in 2006. Today's inaccuracy is the third in a week for BBC News.
BBC presenter Jane Hill told viewers there was news in from the Old Bailey that a verdict had been reached. The BBC then announced the supposed verdict on air and on a "strapline" on screen. After a few minutes Hill said there was some "confusion" at the Old Bailey and that the BBC would bring more news when they had it.
Hill's co-presenter Tim Wilcox then said they would move on to something on "stronger grounds" and the breaking news strapline disappeared. However, sources at the Old Bailey said the courtroom was locked at the time and the jury was out considering its verdict in the Patel-Nasri case on its fourth day of deliberations.
It has not been an easy few days for BBC News – which, like other broadcasters, has found its resources stretched by covering the disasters in Burma and China. On Tuesday the BBC admitted that a factory making Adolf Hitler dolls that it told viewers was part of the rise of Neo-Nazism in Ukraine was actually located in Taiwan. The BBC apologised for the mistake, which it broadcast on television and online on April 23.
On Friday last week it made an on-air apology after it broadcast a picture the previous day which it claimed was of dozens of people killed by the devastating Burmese cyclone, but which instead was taken in Sumatra during the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004.
A BBC spokeswoman said: "We wrongly reported that a verdict had been delivered in the Nisha Patel-Nasri murder trial. The mistake was realised very quickly and a live retraction aired soon after."
Elsewhere, The BBC has apologised on air and agreed to pay legal costs over an allegedly defamatory episode of BBC1 forensic drama Waking the Dead. A recent storyline in the hit show featured a villain who had a similar name and background to a former Guards officer, now security boss, Jonathan Garratt.
The episode of Waking the Dead, 'Duty and Honour', broadcast three weeks ago on BBC1, revolved around a corrupt former Guards officer called John Garret who helped set up security firm Apx Solutions – a company which specialised in working in Iraq. As well as the Waking the Dead character having a similar sounding name and background to him, Garratt's firm Erinys is one of a just a few British security companies working out in Iraq. In addition, the fictional John Garret was played by Rupert Graves, who is said to have a similar appearance and voice to Garratt. Jonathan Garratt's name is also often shortened to John.
However, unlike Garratt, the Waking the Dead character enters into a corrupt arrangement with a local Iraqi criminal, commits a murder and authorises another killing. After seeing the episode and receiving phone calls from people who had seen the programme, commenting on some of the "striking" similarities in background between him and the fictional John Garret, Garratt began legal proceedings against the BBC, claiming defamation.
Garratt's lawyer, media specialist David Price from David Price Solicitors & Advocates, requested an apology be broadcast as soon as possible. Two apologies were broadcast on BBC1 this week, immediately after Monday and last night's episodes of Waking the Dead, which were both watched by more than 6 million viewers. The BBC apologised for "any embarrassment caused" and said John Garret was "entirely fictional" and "was not intended to bear any similarity to Jonathan Garratt".
Price is also seeking for a statement based on the apology broadcast on BBC1 to be read out in court and for the BBC to pay "substantial damages", claiming that "considerable damage has been caused to our client's reputation". The BBC told Price that the matter was a coincidence. But he said he was surprised at the level of coincidence in the drama.
"We're waiting for an explanation as to how this happened. It does seem remarkable. We don't know if it was cock-up or conspiracy but the level of similarities is extraordinary," he added. "We assume there was some level of negative checking by the BBC before the programme went out." The BBC had not responded to requests for comment at time of publication.
It is not the first time Waking the Dead has courted controversy. Last year Roman Catholic sect Opus Dei complained the drama had misrepresented some of its members – a claim the BBC rejected.
Erinys International and Garratt are not unknown to the media and have had some coverage in the press. In an interview in 2004 with the Independent on Sunday, Garratt called for international regulation for private security guards.
A BBC spokeswoman said the corporation had no comment at this stage about costs and damages. "The BBC carried out a number of checks (as is usual practice with such dramas) to clear the fictional character name John Garret prior to filming Waking The Dead: Duty And Honour," she added. "Following the broadcast of this episode, the BBC received a letter from solicitors representing Jonathan Garratt.The checks we had carried out did not pick up the alternative spelling of Mr Garratt's name. We were happy in these circumstances to apologise and make clear that the character, John Garret, as with all dramas like this, was entirely fictional and was not intended to bear any similarity to Jonathan Garratt."
BBC presenter Jane Hill told viewers there was news in from the Old Bailey that a verdict had been reached. The BBC then announced the supposed verdict on air and on a "strapline" on screen. After a few minutes Hill said there was some "confusion" at the Old Bailey and that the BBC would bring more news when they had it.
Hill's co-presenter Tim Wilcox then said they would move on to something on "stronger grounds" and the breaking news strapline disappeared. However, sources at the Old Bailey said the courtroom was locked at the time and the jury was out considering its verdict in the Patel-Nasri case on its fourth day of deliberations.
It has not been an easy few days for BBC News – which, like other broadcasters, has found its resources stretched by covering the disasters in Burma and China. On Tuesday the BBC admitted that a factory making Adolf Hitler dolls that it told viewers was part of the rise of Neo-Nazism in Ukraine was actually located in Taiwan. The BBC apologised for the mistake, which it broadcast on television and online on April 23.
On Friday last week it made an on-air apology after it broadcast a picture the previous day which it claimed was of dozens of people killed by the devastating Burmese cyclone, but which instead was taken in Sumatra during the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004.
A BBC spokeswoman said: "We wrongly reported that a verdict had been delivered in the Nisha Patel-Nasri murder trial. The mistake was realised very quickly and a live retraction aired soon after."
Elsewhere, The BBC has apologised on air and agreed to pay legal costs over an allegedly defamatory episode of BBC1 forensic drama Waking the Dead. A recent storyline in the hit show featured a villain who had a similar name and background to a former Guards officer, now security boss, Jonathan Garratt.
The episode of Waking the Dead, 'Duty and Honour', broadcast three weeks ago on BBC1, revolved around a corrupt former Guards officer called John Garret who helped set up security firm Apx Solutions – a company which specialised in working in Iraq. As well as the Waking the Dead character having a similar sounding name and background to him, Garratt's firm Erinys is one of a just a few British security companies working out in Iraq. In addition, the fictional John Garret was played by Rupert Graves, who is said to have a similar appearance and voice to Garratt. Jonathan Garratt's name is also often shortened to John.
However, unlike Garratt, the Waking the Dead character enters into a corrupt arrangement with a local Iraqi criminal, commits a murder and authorises another killing. After seeing the episode and receiving phone calls from people who had seen the programme, commenting on some of the "striking" similarities in background between him and the fictional John Garret, Garratt began legal proceedings against the BBC, claiming defamation.
Garratt's lawyer, media specialist David Price from David Price Solicitors & Advocates, requested an apology be broadcast as soon as possible. Two apologies were broadcast on BBC1 this week, immediately after Monday and last night's episodes of Waking the Dead, which were both watched by more than 6 million viewers. The BBC apologised for "any embarrassment caused" and said John Garret was "entirely fictional" and "was not intended to bear any similarity to Jonathan Garratt".
Price is also seeking for a statement based on the apology broadcast on BBC1 to be read out in court and for the BBC to pay "substantial damages", claiming that "considerable damage has been caused to our client's reputation". The BBC told Price that the matter was a coincidence. But he said he was surprised at the level of coincidence in the drama.
"We're waiting for an explanation as to how this happened. It does seem remarkable. We don't know if it was cock-up or conspiracy but the level of similarities is extraordinary," he added. "We assume there was some level of negative checking by the BBC before the programme went out." The BBC had not responded to requests for comment at time of publication.
It is not the first time Waking the Dead has courted controversy. Last year Roman Catholic sect Opus Dei complained the drama had misrepresented some of its members – a claim the BBC rejected.
Erinys International and Garratt are not unknown to the media and have had some coverage in the press. In an interview in 2004 with the Independent on Sunday, Garratt called for international regulation for private security guards.
A BBC spokeswoman said the corporation had no comment at this stage about costs and damages. "The BBC carried out a number of checks (as is usual practice with such dramas) to clear the fictional character name John Garret prior to filming Waking The Dead: Duty And Honour," she added. "Following the broadcast of this episode, the BBC received a letter from solicitors representing Jonathan Garratt.The checks we had carried out did not pick up the alternative spelling of Mr Garratt's name. We were happy in these circumstances to apologise and make clear that the character, John Garret, as with all dramas like this, was entirely fictional and was not intended to bear any similarity to Jonathan Garratt."
CBBC shows set to get kids wriggling and voting
Digital channel CBBC is to make a 13-part food series called Gastronuts that will encourage children to stew worms, catch farts in jars and bake toenail cakes. Fronted by Stefan Gates, the presenter of BBC2's Cooking in the Danger Zone, the series aims to educate children about the way food is grown, made, shaped and marketed.
Questions that Gates and his team of junior Gastronuts will examine include "should we eat insects?", "why don't we eat turkey eggs?" and "what would happen if I didn't fart?", according to the BBC. Other promised activities include eating scorpions, cooking with a JCB and eating dog food. Gastronuts is being made by Objective, the independent producer behind Channel 4 comedy Peep Show and Derren Brown's TV output.
"Gastronuts will encourage children to dabble in the science of food and nutrition, guided by intrepid expert Stefan Gates," said the CBBC controller, Anne Gilchrist, who commissioned the show. "It's not a cookery show and it's not about recipes but it will leave no scone unturned in the search for answers to the weird questions every child has about the food on their plates."
Andrew O'Connor, the chief executive of Objective, will executive produce the show alongside CBBC's Alison Gregory. In addition, Gilchrist has also commissioned Zodiak Television-owned independent producer Diverse to make a CBBC series focusing on a search to find a leader among British children. The 10-part series Election will whittle down applicants to a shortlist of 10 children in the first episode and present a set of challenges to the candidates. The winner will be chosen in the final episode, but the means of voting has not yet been decided according to a BBC spokeswoman.
Gilchrist said: "What does it take to be popular and persuade people to vote for you - is it amazing policies or a friendly demeanour and skilful communication skills? CBBC viewers are about to find out in this exciting new series - democracy in action for six- to 12-year-olds." Election is being executive produced by Gregory for CBBC and by Matt Paice and Roy Ackerman for Diverse.
Both programmes are expected to air on CBBC later this year.
Questions that Gates and his team of junior Gastronuts will examine include "should we eat insects?", "why don't we eat turkey eggs?" and "what would happen if I didn't fart?", according to the BBC. Other promised activities include eating scorpions, cooking with a JCB and eating dog food. Gastronuts is being made by Objective, the independent producer behind Channel 4 comedy Peep Show and Derren Brown's TV output.
"Gastronuts will encourage children to dabble in the science of food and nutrition, guided by intrepid expert Stefan Gates," said the CBBC controller, Anne Gilchrist, who commissioned the show. "It's not a cookery show and it's not about recipes but it will leave no scone unturned in the search for answers to the weird questions every child has about the food on their plates."
Andrew O'Connor, the chief executive of Objective, will executive produce the show alongside CBBC's Alison Gregory. In addition, Gilchrist has also commissioned Zodiak Television-owned independent producer Diverse to make a CBBC series focusing on a search to find a leader among British children. The 10-part series Election will whittle down applicants to a shortlist of 10 children in the first episode and present a set of challenges to the candidates. The winner will be chosen in the final episode, but the means of voting has not yet been decided according to a BBC spokeswoman.
Gilchrist said: "What does it take to be popular and persuade people to vote for you - is it amazing policies or a friendly demeanour and skilful communication skills? CBBC viewers are about to find out in this exciting new series - democracy in action for six- to 12-year-olds." Election is being executive produced by Gregory for CBBC and by Matt Paice and Roy Ackerman for Diverse.
Both programmes are expected to air on CBBC later this year.
Whishaw to star in BBC thriller
The BBC is to broadcast a drama from Hawking writer Peter Moffat, starring Ben Whishaw as a young man imprisoned for murder despite protesting his innnocence. The five-part drama, called Criminal Justice and due to be shown on BBC1, features Whishaw, star of the recent film Perfume, as Ben Coulter, who wakes to find that a woman he has just slept with has been stabbed to death.
Whishaw's character is unable to remember what happened and the drama follows his life in prison and his encounters with the criminal justice system. His co-stars include Pete Postlethwaite as a hardened criminal called Hooch and Bill Paterson as the policeman investigating the murder. Rome actress Lindsay Duncan plays Ben's defence barrister in the drama, which has been commissioned by the BBC Fiction controller, Jane Tranter, and will be shown in the summer.
Kate Harwood, the BBC head of series and serials, said: "This is not a prison, legal or police drama. Peter Moffat has created something beyond these labels. He has delivered an exceptional and audacious piece of writing – full of colour, texture and humour. This is a combative, insightful, and sophisticated look at the criminal justice system."
Former barrister Moffat's previous dramas have included the BBC2 film Hawking, about scientist Stephen Hawking, and the BBC1 series Cambridge Spies, as well as the critically lauded but short-lived legal series North Square for Channel 4. His forthcoming dramas include BBC1's Einstein And Eddington, starring David Tennant and Andy Serkis.
Whishaw's character is unable to remember what happened and the drama follows his life in prison and his encounters with the criminal justice system. His co-stars include Pete Postlethwaite as a hardened criminal called Hooch and Bill Paterson as the policeman investigating the murder. Rome actress Lindsay Duncan plays Ben's defence barrister in the drama, which has been commissioned by the BBC Fiction controller, Jane Tranter, and will be shown in the summer.
Kate Harwood, the BBC head of series and serials, said: "This is not a prison, legal or police drama. Peter Moffat has created something beyond these labels. He has delivered an exceptional and audacious piece of writing – full of colour, texture and humour. This is a combative, insightful, and sophisticated look at the criminal justice system."
Former barrister Moffat's previous dramas have included the BBC2 film Hawking, about scientist Stephen Hawking, and the BBC1 series Cambridge Spies, as well as the critically lauded but short-lived legal series North Square for Channel 4. His forthcoming dramas include BBC1's Einstein And Eddington, starring David Tennant and Andy Serkis.
ITV under attack from Ofcom, unions and God
ITV is facing another investigation after it failed to match its quota for programmes to be made outside London for two years running. The network is required by the government to spend half its budget on productions made outside the capital. Figures to be revealed by Ofcom today show that it fell well short of that at 44% last year. After being forced to audit and restate 2006 figures, it missed the target that year too, at 46%.
"It is something that Ofcom is taking very seriously and we are looking at what action should be taken," said the watchdog's market research director, James Thickett. "Action could potentially include fines but at the moment we are not in a position to comment on any sanction we might impose." The latest investigation into ITV follows Ofcom's imposition of a record £5.7m fine on the broadcaster this month for "misleading its audience" over years, causing viewers to waste millions on worthless premium-rate calls.
Sources at ITV said last night it would like to see a reassessment of the level and criteria used by Ofcom, particularly given disparities between requirements on ITV and its rivals. The other public-sector broadcasters all met or exceeded their out-of-London targets in the past two years. But their quotas are lower: 30% for the BBC and Channel 4 and 10% for Five.
Programmes must meet two out of three criteria to qualify as out-of-London productions. Ofcom asks whether a production base was outside the M25 motorway, what proportion of spending occurred outside the M25 and how much of the behind-the-camera and on-screen talent are from outside London. In ITV's case, that means that even though shows such as Doc Martin and Kingdom are made in Cornwall and Norfolk respectively they do not count towards the quota because other criteria are not met. ITV insisted it was "committed to a diversity of production". "We recognise that we must comply with these challenging obligations and we will be taking the necessary steps to meet the quota in 2008," said a spokesman.
The company is also on a collision course with unions over production outside London. Broadcasting union Bectu yesterday lambasted ITV's announcement this week that it wants to make 89 staff redundant, with job losses targeted on production centres in Leeds and Manchester. It said that was at odds with ITV executive chairman Michael Grade's pledge under a turnaround plan to increase the levels of in-house production.
"What is clear is that the company's turnaround plan is failing," said Bectu's David Beevers. "The five-year plan promised acquisitions and greater commissioning power to re-establish ITV's network presence. Those objectives are not being met so the company reaches for its most cowardly weapon, the P45." An ITV spokesman said: "Technological advances in production techniques combined with a slowdown in studio commissions means that the level of resources staff in Manchester and Leeds is higher than required for the business levels forecast."
ITV was also attacked yesterday for entering just three religious programmes for the annual Sandford St Martin Trust's awards rewarding excellence in the genre. The Reverend Colin Morris, the chair of the awards judges and a former head of BBC religious broadcasting, speaking at the prize ceremony at Lambeth Palace in London, said he thought it was sad that ITV seemed to have "abandoned religious broadcasting".
ITV put three programmes up for this year's Sandford St Martin Trust awards, out of a total of 43 submissions from broadcasters. BBC2 documentary The Boys from Baghdad High won the trust's award. "I think it is sad that one of our great public service broadcasters seems to have abandoned religious broadcasting," Morris said.
Morris, also the former head of BBC Northern Ireland, added that ITV's stance was a sharp contrast to the rest of television, which "generally has discovered God ... or Allah" – a reference to the number of programmes about Islam – and was making high quality religious output. However, the award judges did pick out for special mention a clip from one ITV documentary, Little Town of Bethlehem, which followed the plight of Jews and Arabs in the town.
Though BBC2 won the main award with The Boys from Baghdad High, a documentary following four teenagers of different religious backgrounds, Morris added that the BBC's submissions generally tended to "be celebratory rather than analytical". He expressed disappointment that none of the BBC's submissions this year had been "in the tradition of Everyman or Heart of the Matter".
Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe, who presented the awards, also commented on the entries: "There is a great deal about the body on television, cookery, beauty, exercise, and psycho babble, but very little about the soul." Widdecombe also pointed to the fact that three of the four programmes to win awards were about Islamic themes and society. "I hope next year the winners will come from the Christian religion. There is a creeping embarrassment about Christianity," she said.
"It is something that Ofcom is taking very seriously and we are looking at what action should be taken," said the watchdog's market research director, James Thickett. "Action could potentially include fines but at the moment we are not in a position to comment on any sanction we might impose." The latest investigation into ITV follows Ofcom's imposition of a record £5.7m fine on the broadcaster this month for "misleading its audience" over years, causing viewers to waste millions on worthless premium-rate calls.
Sources at ITV said last night it would like to see a reassessment of the level and criteria used by Ofcom, particularly given disparities between requirements on ITV and its rivals. The other public-sector broadcasters all met or exceeded their out-of-London targets in the past two years. But their quotas are lower: 30% for the BBC and Channel 4 and 10% for Five.
Programmes must meet two out of three criteria to qualify as out-of-London productions. Ofcom asks whether a production base was outside the M25 motorway, what proportion of spending occurred outside the M25 and how much of the behind-the-camera and on-screen talent are from outside London. In ITV's case, that means that even though shows such as Doc Martin and Kingdom are made in Cornwall and Norfolk respectively they do not count towards the quota because other criteria are not met. ITV insisted it was "committed to a diversity of production". "We recognise that we must comply with these challenging obligations and we will be taking the necessary steps to meet the quota in 2008," said a spokesman.
The company is also on a collision course with unions over production outside London. Broadcasting union Bectu yesterday lambasted ITV's announcement this week that it wants to make 89 staff redundant, with job losses targeted on production centres in Leeds and Manchester. It said that was at odds with ITV executive chairman Michael Grade's pledge under a turnaround plan to increase the levels of in-house production.
"What is clear is that the company's turnaround plan is failing," said Bectu's David Beevers. "The five-year plan promised acquisitions and greater commissioning power to re-establish ITV's network presence. Those objectives are not being met so the company reaches for its most cowardly weapon, the P45." An ITV spokesman said: "Technological advances in production techniques combined with a slowdown in studio commissions means that the level of resources staff in Manchester and Leeds is higher than required for the business levels forecast."
ITV was also attacked yesterday for entering just three religious programmes for the annual Sandford St Martin Trust's awards rewarding excellence in the genre. The Reverend Colin Morris, the chair of the awards judges and a former head of BBC religious broadcasting, speaking at the prize ceremony at Lambeth Palace in London, said he thought it was sad that ITV seemed to have "abandoned religious broadcasting".
ITV put three programmes up for this year's Sandford St Martin Trust awards, out of a total of 43 submissions from broadcasters. BBC2 documentary The Boys from Baghdad High won the trust's award. "I think it is sad that one of our great public service broadcasters seems to have abandoned religious broadcasting," Morris said.
Morris, also the former head of BBC Northern Ireland, added that ITV's stance was a sharp contrast to the rest of television, which "generally has discovered God ... or Allah" – a reference to the number of programmes about Islam – and was making high quality religious output. However, the award judges did pick out for special mention a clip from one ITV documentary, Little Town of Bethlehem, which followed the plight of Jews and Arabs in the town.
Though BBC2 won the main award with The Boys from Baghdad High, a documentary following four teenagers of different religious backgrounds, Morris added that the BBC's submissions generally tended to "be celebratory rather than analytical". He expressed disappointment that none of the BBC's submissions this year had been "in the tradition of Everyman or Heart of the Matter".
Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe, who presented the awards, also commented on the entries: "There is a great deal about the body on television, cookery, beauty, exercise, and psycho babble, but very little about the soul." Widdecombe also pointed to the fact that three of the four programmes to win awards were about Islamic themes and society. "I hope next year the winners will come from the Christian religion. There is a creeping embarrassment about Christianity," she said.
Obituary: Margot Boyd
Margot Boyd, the stage and radio actor who has died aged 94, had the voice of a duchess and a way of delivering every word she spoke as if she were addressing the back row of the gallery. She brought the sound of the grande dame to every role during more than 70 years of acting, and in recent years was best known as Mrs Antrobus in The Archers on Radio 4. While she did not normally play actual aristocrats, she remarked: "I've always played terribly fierce parts. But I've never felt fierce. Petrified, more like. I'm a terrible worrier."
In 1984, as a 71-year-old member of the BBC radio drama company, Boyd found a note in her file asking her to travel to Birmingham for a one-off appearance in The Archers, to give a talk to the over-60s club on "the colourful world of the Afghan hound". She knew "not a lot" about the programme ("I had never actually listened to it"), but her father had worked as an estate manager, and in her native Bath "every other woman was a Mrs Antrobus ... it was full of ex-colonial people who had servants galore. They were all very horsey and doggy." A regular visitor to Crufts dog show in former years, she proved such a success in Ambridge that Mrs Antrobus became a regular character for the next two decades.
Born Beryl Billings, Boyd belonged to a family that loved the theatre and entertaining itself with recitations. Acting at school led to a place at Rada, where she won a gold medal and found herself in a play directed by George Bernard Shaw. "He was wonderful - very encouraging," she recalled. Her first professional job was in twice-nightly rep at the Theatre Royal, Leeds. Although in her 20s, she would play women of 55 or more, and got the chance to play in all the touring West End productions. Thus it was a natural step to join the touring companies and go to London.
In 1950 Boyd got a part in Toni Block's Flowers for the Living at the Duchess Theatre, and ten years later came her first venture into Agatha Christie, Go Back for Murder. In the meantime, she had her own BBC-TV series as Mary Pemberton in Our Miss Pemberton (1957), and three years later was Mrs Trench in Richard Hearne's Leave It To Pastry.
Noël Coward gave her a two-year run in Waiting In The Wings, in the leading role of a manager of a home for retired actors. Not one of Coward's best plays, it nevertheless brought together a bunch of famous old players, led by Sybil Thorndike. When Coward turned up in Dublin to rehearse it before the London opening, he told the cast: "You're all worried in case you dry up. But I don't give a damn. If you forget a line I'll shout it from the box."
In James Hanley's new piece, Say Nothing (Theatre Royal, Stratford East, 1962) Boyd played a voracious, bulky, adulterous wife who thinks only of money. Her performance particularly deserved wider attention, for the play was quite unusual - a gloomy but original and sharp-witted study of a family which had turned in on itself. But without a transfer it languished. She returned to Agatha Christie, in the triple bill Rule of Three.
Then Boyd tried musical comedy. Joining Sandy Wilson's sequel to The Boy Friend at the Players, she came forward as the formidable Lady Brockhurst in the mildly successful Divorce Me, Darling (Globe, 1965). After touring to Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool and Birmingham as the housekeeper of a tense theatrical household in Lesley Storm's They Ride On Broomsticks, Boyd returned to the West End. Playing opposite James Stewart in Mary Chase's Harvey (Prince of Wales, 1975) she was cast as the mountainous Mrs Ethel Chauvenet.
Television work continued with Dixon of Dock Green and Middlemarch; in 1973 came an appearance in ITV's Upstairs, Downstairs and there was also a lot of radio work. Looking back at her introduction to The Archers, she remarked: "When I first looked at the script it was one of the funniest things I'd ever read. In my 70s I'd have been mad not to have taken it on. I've always loved working on radio anyway. It demands such precision and discipline to get the timing right."
Boyd, who did not marry, found her 90th birthday celebrated with a surprise party at BBC Pebble Mill, Birmingham, when she went to record scenes for the programme, now as the oldest-ever member of the cast. She had her favourite lunch: egg and chips with a whisky and soda.
Margot Boyd, actor, born September 26 1913; died May 20 2008
In 1984, as a 71-year-old member of the BBC radio drama company, Boyd found a note in her file asking her to travel to Birmingham for a one-off appearance in The Archers, to give a talk to the over-60s club on "the colourful world of the Afghan hound". She knew "not a lot" about the programme ("I had never actually listened to it"), but her father had worked as an estate manager, and in her native Bath "every other woman was a Mrs Antrobus ... it was full of ex-colonial people who had servants galore. They were all very horsey and doggy." A regular visitor to Crufts dog show in former years, she proved such a success in Ambridge that Mrs Antrobus became a regular character for the next two decades.
Born Beryl Billings, Boyd belonged to a family that loved the theatre and entertaining itself with recitations. Acting at school led to a place at Rada, where she won a gold medal and found herself in a play directed by George Bernard Shaw. "He was wonderful - very encouraging," she recalled. Her first professional job was in twice-nightly rep at the Theatre Royal, Leeds. Although in her 20s, she would play women of 55 or more, and got the chance to play in all the touring West End productions. Thus it was a natural step to join the touring companies and go to London.
In 1950 Boyd got a part in Toni Block's Flowers for the Living at the Duchess Theatre, and ten years later came her first venture into Agatha Christie, Go Back for Murder. In the meantime, she had her own BBC-TV series as Mary Pemberton in Our Miss Pemberton (1957), and three years later was Mrs Trench in Richard Hearne's Leave It To Pastry.
Noël Coward gave her a two-year run in Waiting In The Wings, in the leading role of a manager of a home for retired actors. Not one of Coward's best plays, it nevertheless brought together a bunch of famous old players, led by Sybil Thorndike. When Coward turned up in Dublin to rehearse it before the London opening, he told the cast: "You're all worried in case you dry up. But I don't give a damn. If you forget a line I'll shout it from the box."
In James Hanley's new piece, Say Nothing (Theatre Royal, Stratford East, 1962) Boyd played a voracious, bulky, adulterous wife who thinks only of money. Her performance particularly deserved wider attention, for the play was quite unusual - a gloomy but original and sharp-witted study of a family which had turned in on itself. But without a transfer it languished. She returned to Agatha Christie, in the triple bill Rule of Three.
Then Boyd tried musical comedy. Joining Sandy Wilson's sequel to The Boy Friend at the Players, she came forward as the formidable Lady Brockhurst in the mildly successful Divorce Me, Darling (Globe, 1965). After touring to Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool and Birmingham as the housekeeper of a tense theatrical household in Lesley Storm's They Ride On Broomsticks, Boyd returned to the West End. Playing opposite James Stewart in Mary Chase's Harvey (Prince of Wales, 1975) she was cast as the mountainous Mrs Ethel Chauvenet.
Television work continued with Dixon of Dock Green and Middlemarch; in 1973 came an appearance in ITV's Upstairs, Downstairs and there was also a lot of radio work. Looking back at her introduction to The Archers, she remarked: "When I first looked at the script it was one of the funniest things I'd ever read. In my 70s I'd have been mad not to have taken it on. I've always loved working on radio anyway. It demands such precision and discipline to get the timing right."
Boyd, who did not marry, found her 90th birthday celebrated with a surprise party at BBC Pebble Mill, Birmingham, when she went to record scenes for the programme, now as the oldest-ever member of the cast. She had her favourite lunch: egg and chips with a whisky and soda.
Margot Boyd, actor, born September 26 1913; died May 20 2008
Self-censorsip at the cup final
The after-match interviews with participants in the FA Cup Final were highly revealing: not for anything that the players or coaches said, but for the way in which the questions were put. "How sweet is this moment?" the triumphant Portsmouth boss, Harry Redknapp, was challenged, while his goalkeeper, David James, was asked to "describe your emotions at this moment?"
Behind these exchanges lies an intriguing story of TV self-censorship, says Mark Lawson. For years, TV critics and letter-writers to listings magazines ridiculed the habit of asking sweaty athletes, straight after their event: "How do you feel?" Survivors of high-school shoot-outs or earthquakes would also be prodded for immediate feedback on their feelings.
In a relatively rare example of satire changing behaviour, the complaints eventually resulted in on-the-scene reporters recognising that these four words had become unacceptable. Hence, now: "Describe your emotions."
But such translation is the linguistic equivalent of repainting the walls in a doss-house. Equally, "how sweet is this moment?" is not inherently a better question than "How do you feel?" and may, in fact, even be a worse one because it assumes a positive response, whereas even the now-discredited four-worder allowed the interviewee to say that they felt shitty or angry.
Another solution is to use a boring formula but try to defuse it. So, after Ryan Giggs received his latest Premiership medal, Sky asked him: "It's a cliche that the first one is the sweetest but how does this compare with the rest?"
This was another good example of the nervousness about hackneyed phrases. But switching from inanity to inanity that's apologised for is a small step. The problem is not the language but the format. No good interview can be drawn from an athlete who is exhausted and desperate to celebrate, so the only possible question is a stupid one, however phrased. How would they feel about dropping these breathless encounters completely?
Behind these exchanges lies an intriguing story of TV self-censorship, says Mark Lawson. For years, TV critics and letter-writers to listings magazines ridiculed the habit of asking sweaty athletes, straight after their event: "How do you feel?" Survivors of high-school shoot-outs or earthquakes would also be prodded for immediate feedback on their feelings.
In a relatively rare example of satire changing behaviour, the complaints eventually resulted in on-the-scene reporters recognising that these four words had become unacceptable. Hence, now: "Describe your emotions."
But such translation is the linguistic equivalent of repainting the walls in a doss-house. Equally, "how sweet is this moment?" is not inherently a better question than "How do you feel?" and may, in fact, even be a worse one because it assumes a positive response, whereas even the now-discredited four-worder allowed the interviewee to say that they felt shitty or angry.
Another solution is to use a boring formula but try to defuse it. So, after Ryan Giggs received his latest Premiership medal, Sky asked him: "It's a cliche that the first one is the sweetest but how does this compare with the rest?"
This was another good example of the nervousness about hackneyed phrases. But switching from inanity to inanity that's apologised for is a small step. The problem is not the language but the format. No good interview can be drawn from an athlete who is exhausted and desperate to celebrate, so the only possible question is a stupid one, however phrased. How would they feel about dropping these breathless encounters completely?
Erectile dysfunction and tissue market penetration
Last night's TV reviewed: Viagra: Ten Years on the Rise; My New Best Friend; The Apprentice; Desperate Housewives
"I can, hand on heart, say I've never had a tofu experience," said a journalist called Jenny Davis in Viagra: Ten Years on the Rise. Jodie Marsh had, though, and she recalled it in terms of wondering bemusement, a moment when her ability to induce turgidity had momentarily failed her. They weren't talking about food but responding to an unusual piece of equipment intended to help doctors gauge the precise extent of their patients' erectile failure. It consists of a small rack containing a cucumber, a banana, a peeled banana and a square of tofu, each of which the sufferer is invited to compare, in terms of rigidity and resilient bounce, with his own sluggish organ. The cucumber struck me as cruelly redundant, frankly, given that only men with a problem are likely to encounter this diagnostic kit. It protruded at the end as a grade-four erection, a mocking green reminder of lost glory for those still haplessly mired in the territory of the grade one (tofu) and the grade two (a peeled banana). But who knows, perhaps it offers hope as well.
In the old days, there wasn't a lot of hope around. Getting the salad- days crispness back in your erection was a laborious business involving pneumatic pumps, self-administered injections into the penis (even the female narrator gave an audible squeak at that point) or full-blown surgery. But then a pharmaceutical company testing a new heart drug discovered that their male guinea pigs were unusually reluctant to hand back the surplus pills when the trials were over – and Viagra was born. To celebrate its 10th birthday, Five had glued together this loose assembly of anecdote, innuendo and television cliché with a script that sounded as if it was sidling around a bedroom in a rubber nurse's uniform. We got saucy talk about lead in pencils and descriptions of how combat pilots had been given the drug so that they would have "better control of their joysticks". We got reversed film of factory chimneys being demolished. We got stripper jazz on the soundtrack and soft-focus reconstructions involving improbably toned models. We even got that old trope of interruption: the gramophone needle skidding across the grooves. I think the whole thing was supposed to do for our attention span what fluffers used to do for male porn stars before Viagra made them redundant, but I'm afraid it just left me with viewer's droop.
Not as much as My New Best Friend (BBC Four), though, a new series about children making the transition from primary school to secondary school that, on the evidence of the first episode, could successfully be marketed as an aid for insomniacs. I can't work out why this is, because there's nothing inherently dull about the lives of children and the subject here – the fraught diplomacy of playground relationships – is a perfectly good one. It proved to be a very long haul, even so. This first episode followed Daisy, Nanae, Annabelle and Lydia, four girls taking up places at Cheltenham Ladies' College, and there was the odd flicker of class tourism in watching them pack their tuckboxes and trunks for the start of term. Of cousre, friendship is hard enough without the distorting prism of boarding school. Cliques, isolation and homesickness all affected the girls in different ways. Lydia had the most circumspect approach – “You don’t want to become someone’s personal stalker”. Daisy felt betrayed when her first close friend started to ignore her. Nan felt only a “semi-Cheltenham girl” because she was a day pupil. Why their friendships flamed into life, burnt brightly, then died the girls couldn’t express – but all seemed privileged and confident so it will probably all work out.
The real problem, as any parent will know, is that 12-year-olds aren't very forthcoming when questioned by adults about their inner feelings. "What does making really good friends mean?" one girl was asked. "I know them a bit more than I did and I play with them a lot," she answered, less than enthrallingly. "And how do you sort things out when things go wrong?" the off-camera voice inquired of another. "Well, in the end we just do, I can't really explain it," she said. I suspect that if they'd left the camera and removed the grown-up from the room – as video-diary films have successfully done with children in the past – they'd have ended up with something a lot more satisfactory. Someone we assumed to be the headmistress said at assembly that she wanted her girls to learn the value of “compassion and tolerance”. The Apprentice contestants must have missed that assembly.
In the original, US-based version of The Apprentice (BBC1), Donald Trump is in charge; one writer said he was playing the part of God. In our version, Alan Sugar plays the part, not of God, but of money - or possibly mammon. Here, Sugar is money. Everybody wants to know where he is, what governs him, and how to get as much of him as possible. Like money, he is ruthless, judgmental and, in the end, incomprehensible. If money could speak, it would speak with Sir Alan's sneering finality. If Big Brother reflects, and condenses, the world of slackers, The Apprentice does the same thing for aspirational people. And it turns out, of course, that these business-heads, with all their sharpness and life-skills, are just as hollow as the contestants on all the other reality shows. I say, of course, because that's the point of reality shows - they are anti-talent contests. Is there one for aspiring politicians? If not, there should be.
We are just over halfway through the series now, so we're down to the serious contestants - human beings who want, above anything else, to turn themselves into money. This week's show concerned tissues - the task was to create a brand of nose-wipes, and make that reliable source of Apprentice hubris, the TV advert. The fact that the product was anti-bacterial tissues might have struck some people as a bit unsexy – but not Raef. As project manager of his team, he excitedly greeted Claire Young’s suggested brand name of “I Love My Tissues” as “fun, all-embracing and slightly cheeky”. His main interest, though, clearly lay in directing the advert itself. After all, he’d done some amateur dramatics in the past. He and Michael reminisced about their love of performance and musical theatre: “I played Sebastian in Twelfth Night,” Raef said to which Michael offered a few bars of Fagin: “Can a fella be a villain all his life?” From not knowing what a kosher chicken was, Sophocles celebrated “one of the great Jewish characters”.
Raef's first decision was to cast weather forecaster Siân Lloyd- principally known for losing her freaky MP boyfriend to a Cheeky Girl- as the mother of a small boy who, once his own nose had been safely wiped, would later give a tissue to a little girl crying on a school bench. How he knew the process of booking celebs was one of those gaps you occasionally get in the Apprentice narrative, but here the real mystery was why he’d booked this one. Certainly, Siân was baffled – what with her not being a mother, and the advert having nothing weather-related about it. “They’re using me for my acting skills, not my weather symbols,” she noted. But the boys didn’t care. Raef and Michael were happiest wiping yoghurt off each other’s noses.
Lucinda, wearing another killer beret, wound up Alex (the other project leader) and Lee by suggesting they shoot a gay-themed advert for their tissue, “Atishu”. The two men whinged they would never buy a tissue if gays advertised it. Despite Lee (his “That’s what I’m talking about” was in abeyance) pleading for the team to unite, Lucinda scolded Alex, the ineffectual heart-throb, with a “Naughty naughty naughty” when he offended her. She couldn’t understand why they had put a picture of a woman blowing her nose on the cover of their box of tissues. “It’s quali-eeeeeeeee,” Lee replied.
In the meantime, Raef had soon disappeared into some sort of a parallel universe in which he was a major film director. Strangely, he didn’t opt for jodhpurs and a riding crop, but he did stalk about dispensing lordly advice on the whole business of film-making. “When you’re dealing with children, it’s about simplifying,” he explained. “In the bench scene, everything is done through gestures.” Admittedly, Michael’s sense of proportion wasn’t much more developed. (“Plenty of passion,” he urged Siân before she went for her crucial piece of maternal nose-wiping.) Nonetheless, as project manager, it was surely Raef’s fault that in the final ad, you couldn’t tell that the mother was Siân Lloyd – or what product was being advertised. Raef said he was aiming for a “nonWoody, DiCaprio-esque” style, focusing “on gesture and action”, while Lee, Lucinda and Alex oversaw a hideously wooden family trio (scary dad, singsongy mum, devil child with runny nose). Lee delivered a thuggy presentation to a group of advertising experts about “Atishu” being aimed at something called the “female genre” and “the muvvver communiii-eeee”.
For a long time, I thought Raef's team would cruise it, because they had more taste. But I should have known better. The Apprentice is not about taste. It's about money. And that's why this show always has the capacity to surprise the viewer. As a stage villain, money is never predictable. It's always more diabolical than you thought it was. The winning team came up with a surprisingly plausible name for their product and then crafted a pack and a pitch that were so awful they made you want to crawl under a table. Raef, however, decided to let his inner luvvie out to play and went all theatrical, copywriting a touching little vignette of school-day tenderness in a baffling attempt to arouse feelings of attachment towards a product entirely defined by its disposability. Raef's advert could be watched without involuntary grimacing, but he'd forgotten that its purpose was not to get him a place at film school but to make money. He opted for the soft sell while his rivals chose the hard- garish packet and garish name. Fatally, he had forgotten that when it comes to marketing thrust, Sir Alan is a grade-four cucumber man all the way – tofu just won't cut it.
Their adverts may have been more garish, the other team’s more stylish, but as Sir Alan exploded at Raef and co (calm down dear!): “I do not know what your bloody advert is about!” To Lucinda, Lee and Alex: “You won! Your horrible ad, your horrible box threw it in people’s faces!” After Sir Alan had pointed this out, Raef bravely vowed to blame nobody but himself. He then blamed everybody but himself – including the entire modern world, with its mad insistence that adverts should advertise things. “If that’s what advertising’s about these days,” he lamented, in a manner reminiscent of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, “then God help us.” Later, when he was summing up, it was great to hear Sir Alan utter the words "Cheeky Girl"; this is a show that feeds the tabloids, and is, in turn, sustained by tabloid cruelty.
Raef tried to raise the tone of the final boardroom: he was determined it would not degenerate into a back-stabbing bearpit. Some hope. Snake Sophocles said that “everything good about the ad came from me”. The one very small part of me that still likes him does so for his unself-conscious way of calling people “dum dums”. Still, Sir Alan is a fan despite his mounting calumnies. Raef was too posh, too elegant and, according to the Gnome on High, full of “hot air”. This wasn’t true (all available evidence seems to suggest he is just kind and decent) and so not for the first time Sir Alan fired the wrong person. Despite being barbecued by Snake Sophocles, Raef said they were still friends.
So yet again, we sat back and saw capitalism in action. This was our system laid bare. This, I kept thinking, is what people do. Worse, this is what people aspire to do. In a way, The Apprentice gives us a clearer view of what the world is like than anything else on television. Here, the teams talked less about the tissues, and more about the boxes the tissues came in - the whole problem of capitalism, in a nutshell. Still, looking on the bright side, maybe Raef has gone off being a businessman anyway. As he’d said while cocking up a 30-second commercial for his bacterial tissues, “after doing this, I want to get into movies.” Raef: buy a Biggles flying scarf and keep The Quiff.
Meanwhile, over on Channel 4, another old TV favourite is also going from strength to strength. In last night’s Desperate Housewives, a tornado blew through Wisteria Lane – and this time it wasn’t metaphorical. No less uniquely, Mary Alice’s opening voice-over actually added to the action. With its usual mixture of lugubriousness and glee, it told us that the tornado was on the way – and that by the end of the day, one of the four main women would have lost a husband. Once we knew this, the ever-sparkling dialogue suddenly had a darker undertow, and the programme as a whole became an impressively teasing thriller. (Not so much a whodunit as a whowoulditbedunto.)
In fact, the CGI tornado that eventually showed up proved about as convincing as the supposed baby Bree (Marcia Cross) carries around. At first too, it seemed to have resulted in far too convenient a disaster. For one thing, the husband who died was only Victor (John Slattery) who received a white picket through his black heart. For another, impending catastrophe neatly managed to make friends of the most unlikely people – up to and including Bree and Katherine (Dana Delaney). But that was all before Lynette (Felicity Huffman) emerged from her own hiding place, saw that the house sheltering her family had been demolished and let out perhaps the best scream of horror in recent television. (Cue, needless to say, the closing credits.)
"I can, hand on heart, say I've never had a tofu experience," said a journalist called Jenny Davis in Viagra: Ten Years on the Rise. Jodie Marsh had, though, and she recalled it in terms of wondering bemusement, a moment when her ability to induce turgidity had momentarily failed her. They weren't talking about food but responding to an unusual piece of equipment intended to help doctors gauge the precise extent of their patients' erectile failure. It consists of a small rack containing a cucumber, a banana, a peeled banana and a square of tofu, each of which the sufferer is invited to compare, in terms of rigidity and resilient bounce, with his own sluggish organ. The cucumber struck me as cruelly redundant, frankly, given that only men with a problem are likely to encounter this diagnostic kit. It protruded at the end as a grade-four erection, a mocking green reminder of lost glory for those still haplessly mired in the territory of the grade one (tofu) and the grade two (a peeled banana). But who knows, perhaps it offers hope as well.
In the old days, there wasn't a lot of hope around. Getting the salad- days crispness back in your erection was a laborious business involving pneumatic pumps, self-administered injections into the penis (even the female narrator gave an audible squeak at that point) or full-blown surgery. But then a pharmaceutical company testing a new heart drug discovered that their male guinea pigs were unusually reluctant to hand back the surplus pills when the trials were over – and Viagra was born. To celebrate its 10th birthday, Five had glued together this loose assembly of anecdote, innuendo and television cliché with a script that sounded as if it was sidling around a bedroom in a rubber nurse's uniform. We got saucy talk about lead in pencils and descriptions of how combat pilots had been given the drug so that they would have "better control of their joysticks". We got reversed film of factory chimneys being demolished. We got stripper jazz on the soundtrack and soft-focus reconstructions involving improbably toned models. We even got that old trope of interruption: the gramophone needle skidding across the grooves. I think the whole thing was supposed to do for our attention span what fluffers used to do for male porn stars before Viagra made them redundant, but I'm afraid it just left me with viewer's droop.
Not as much as My New Best Friend (BBC Four), though, a new series about children making the transition from primary school to secondary school that, on the evidence of the first episode, could successfully be marketed as an aid for insomniacs. I can't work out why this is, because there's nothing inherently dull about the lives of children and the subject here – the fraught diplomacy of playground relationships – is a perfectly good one. It proved to be a very long haul, even so. This first episode followed Daisy, Nanae, Annabelle and Lydia, four girls taking up places at Cheltenham Ladies' College, and there was the odd flicker of class tourism in watching them pack their tuckboxes and trunks for the start of term. Of cousre, friendship is hard enough without the distorting prism of boarding school. Cliques, isolation and homesickness all affected the girls in different ways. Lydia had the most circumspect approach – “You don’t want to become someone’s personal stalker”. Daisy felt betrayed when her first close friend started to ignore her. Nan felt only a “semi-Cheltenham girl” because she was a day pupil. Why their friendships flamed into life, burnt brightly, then died the girls couldn’t express – but all seemed privileged and confident so it will probably all work out.
The real problem, as any parent will know, is that 12-year-olds aren't very forthcoming when questioned by adults about their inner feelings. "What does making really good friends mean?" one girl was asked. "I know them a bit more than I did and I play with them a lot," she answered, less than enthrallingly. "And how do you sort things out when things go wrong?" the off-camera voice inquired of another. "Well, in the end we just do, I can't really explain it," she said. I suspect that if they'd left the camera and removed the grown-up from the room – as video-diary films have successfully done with children in the past – they'd have ended up with something a lot more satisfactory. Someone we assumed to be the headmistress said at assembly that she wanted her girls to learn the value of “compassion and tolerance”. The Apprentice contestants must have missed that assembly.
In the original, US-based version of The Apprentice (BBC1), Donald Trump is in charge; one writer said he was playing the part of God. In our version, Alan Sugar plays the part, not of God, but of money - or possibly mammon. Here, Sugar is money. Everybody wants to know where he is, what governs him, and how to get as much of him as possible. Like money, he is ruthless, judgmental and, in the end, incomprehensible. If money could speak, it would speak with Sir Alan's sneering finality. If Big Brother reflects, and condenses, the world of slackers, The Apprentice does the same thing for aspirational people. And it turns out, of course, that these business-heads, with all their sharpness and life-skills, are just as hollow as the contestants on all the other reality shows. I say, of course, because that's the point of reality shows - they are anti-talent contests. Is there one for aspiring politicians? If not, there should be.
We are just over halfway through the series now, so we're down to the serious contestants - human beings who want, above anything else, to turn themselves into money. This week's show concerned tissues - the task was to create a brand of nose-wipes, and make that reliable source of Apprentice hubris, the TV advert. The fact that the product was anti-bacterial tissues might have struck some people as a bit unsexy – but not Raef. As project manager of his team, he excitedly greeted Claire Young’s suggested brand name of “I Love My Tissues” as “fun, all-embracing and slightly cheeky”. His main interest, though, clearly lay in directing the advert itself. After all, he’d done some amateur dramatics in the past. He and Michael reminisced about their love of performance and musical theatre: “I played Sebastian in Twelfth Night,” Raef said to which Michael offered a few bars of Fagin: “Can a fella be a villain all his life?” From not knowing what a kosher chicken was, Sophocles celebrated “one of the great Jewish characters”.
Raef's first decision was to cast weather forecaster Siân Lloyd- principally known for losing her freaky MP boyfriend to a Cheeky Girl- as the mother of a small boy who, once his own nose had been safely wiped, would later give a tissue to a little girl crying on a school bench. How he knew the process of booking celebs was one of those gaps you occasionally get in the Apprentice narrative, but here the real mystery was why he’d booked this one. Certainly, Siân was baffled – what with her not being a mother, and the advert having nothing weather-related about it. “They’re using me for my acting skills, not my weather symbols,” she noted. But the boys didn’t care. Raef and Michael were happiest wiping yoghurt off each other’s noses.
Lucinda, wearing another killer beret, wound up Alex (the other project leader) and Lee by suggesting they shoot a gay-themed advert for their tissue, “Atishu”. The two men whinged they would never buy a tissue if gays advertised it. Despite Lee (his “That’s what I’m talking about” was in abeyance) pleading for the team to unite, Lucinda scolded Alex, the ineffectual heart-throb, with a “Naughty naughty naughty” when he offended her. She couldn’t understand why they had put a picture of a woman blowing her nose on the cover of their box of tissues. “It’s quali-eeeeeeeee,” Lee replied.
In the meantime, Raef had soon disappeared into some sort of a parallel universe in which he was a major film director. Strangely, he didn’t opt for jodhpurs and a riding crop, but he did stalk about dispensing lordly advice on the whole business of film-making. “When you’re dealing with children, it’s about simplifying,” he explained. “In the bench scene, everything is done through gestures.” Admittedly, Michael’s sense of proportion wasn’t much more developed. (“Plenty of passion,” he urged Siân before she went for her crucial piece of maternal nose-wiping.) Nonetheless, as project manager, it was surely Raef’s fault that in the final ad, you couldn’t tell that the mother was Siân Lloyd – or what product was being advertised. Raef said he was aiming for a “nonWoody, DiCaprio-esque” style, focusing “on gesture and action”, while Lee, Lucinda and Alex oversaw a hideously wooden family trio (scary dad, singsongy mum, devil child with runny nose). Lee delivered a thuggy presentation to a group of advertising experts about “Atishu” being aimed at something called the “female genre” and “the muvvver communiii-eeee”.
For a long time, I thought Raef's team would cruise it, because they had more taste. But I should have known better. The Apprentice is not about taste. It's about money. And that's why this show always has the capacity to surprise the viewer. As a stage villain, money is never predictable. It's always more diabolical than you thought it was. The winning team came up with a surprisingly plausible name for their product and then crafted a pack and a pitch that were so awful they made you want to crawl under a table. Raef, however, decided to let his inner luvvie out to play and went all theatrical, copywriting a touching little vignette of school-day tenderness in a baffling attempt to arouse feelings of attachment towards a product entirely defined by its disposability. Raef's advert could be watched without involuntary grimacing, but he'd forgotten that its purpose was not to get him a place at film school but to make money. He opted for the soft sell while his rivals chose the hard- garish packet and garish name. Fatally, he had forgotten that when it comes to marketing thrust, Sir Alan is a grade-four cucumber man all the way – tofu just won't cut it.
Their adverts may have been more garish, the other team’s more stylish, but as Sir Alan exploded at Raef and co (calm down dear!): “I do not know what your bloody advert is about!” To Lucinda, Lee and Alex: “You won! Your horrible ad, your horrible box threw it in people’s faces!” After Sir Alan had pointed this out, Raef bravely vowed to blame nobody but himself. He then blamed everybody but himself – including the entire modern world, with its mad insistence that adverts should advertise things. “If that’s what advertising’s about these days,” he lamented, in a manner reminiscent of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, “then God help us.” Later, when he was summing up, it was great to hear Sir Alan utter the words "Cheeky Girl"; this is a show that feeds the tabloids, and is, in turn, sustained by tabloid cruelty.
Raef tried to raise the tone of the final boardroom: he was determined it would not degenerate into a back-stabbing bearpit. Some hope. Snake Sophocles said that “everything good about the ad came from me”. The one very small part of me that still likes him does so for his unself-conscious way of calling people “dum dums”. Still, Sir Alan is a fan despite his mounting calumnies. Raef was too posh, too elegant and, according to the Gnome on High, full of “hot air”. This wasn’t true (all available evidence seems to suggest he is just kind and decent) and so not for the first time Sir Alan fired the wrong person. Despite being barbecued by Snake Sophocles, Raef said they were still friends.
So yet again, we sat back and saw capitalism in action. This was our system laid bare. This, I kept thinking, is what people do. Worse, this is what people aspire to do. In a way, The Apprentice gives us a clearer view of what the world is like than anything else on television. Here, the teams talked less about the tissues, and more about the boxes the tissues came in - the whole problem of capitalism, in a nutshell. Still, looking on the bright side, maybe Raef has gone off being a businessman anyway. As he’d said while cocking up a 30-second commercial for his bacterial tissues, “after doing this, I want to get into movies.” Raef: buy a Biggles flying scarf and keep The Quiff.
Meanwhile, over on Channel 4, another old TV favourite is also going from strength to strength. In last night’s Desperate Housewives, a tornado blew through Wisteria Lane – and this time it wasn’t metaphorical. No less uniquely, Mary Alice’s opening voice-over actually added to the action. With its usual mixture of lugubriousness and glee, it told us that the tornado was on the way – and that by the end of the day, one of the four main women would have lost a husband. Once we knew this, the ever-sparkling dialogue suddenly had a darker undertow, and the programme as a whole became an impressively teasing thriller. (Not so much a whodunit as a whowoulditbedunto.)
In fact, the CGI tornado that eventually showed up proved about as convincing as the supposed baby Bree (Marcia Cross) carries around. At first too, it seemed to have resulted in far too convenient a disaster. For one thing, the husband who died was only Victor (John Slattery) who received a white picket through his black heart. For another, impending catastrophe neatly managed to make friends of the most unlikely people – up to and including Bree and Katherine (Dana Delaney). But that was all before Lynette (Felicity Huffman) emerged from her own hiding place, saw that the house sheltering her family had been demolished and let out perhaps the best scream of horror in recent television. (Cue, needless to say, the closing credits.)
Wednesday, 21 May 2008
Sean Bean and Sam Neill to star in Crusoe series
Sam Neill and Sean Bean are to feature in a big-budget production of the Robinson Crusoe story being made by a UK independent producer for US network NBC. Crusoe is to be played by Philip Winchester, who featured in the 2004 movie remake of Thunderbirds, while the role of Friday, his companion on the desert island, is yet to be cast. Flashbacks of Crusoe's life are interwoven with the action, with Bean playing his father James, Neill playing family friend Jeremiah Blackthorn, and Anna Walton playing his love interest Susannah. Joss Ackland will appear in one episode in the role of Judge Jeffries.
The series, written by Stephen Gallagher and directed by Duane Clark, follows the swashbuckling adventures of the two island dwellers as they contend with marauding militias, hungry cannibals, wild cats, starvation and lightning storms. NBC's Crusoe is the first TV remake of the Daniel Defoe novel since the 1964 French children's drama series The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, which was repeated on UK TV during summer holidays for many years.
Power, the show's UK producer, claims this is the first time a US network has directly commissioned a British supplier for nearly 40 years. The producer is currently looking for UK distribution for the series, which will screen in the US next year and has also been sold to other territories including Canada.
Crusoe has a production budget for 13 one-hour episodes of $25m (£13m) and the Power chief executive, Justin Bodle, has promised "a landmark piece of event television" and a "new take on an old favourite".
The series is currently filming in the UK and the production will soon move on location in South Africa and the Seychelles. Executive producers are Justin Bodle for Power, Michael Prupas for Muse and Genevieve Hofmeyr for Moonlighting. Previous productions by Power, which was founded in 1995, include Flood, The Virgin Queen and Casanova.
The series, written by Stephen Gallagher and directed by Duane Clark, follows the swashbuckling adventures of the two island dwellers as they contend with marauding militias, hungry cannibals, wild cats, starvation and lightning storms. NBC's Crusoe is the first TV remake of the Daniel Defoe novel since the 1964 French children's drama series The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, which was repeated on UK TV during summer holidays for many years.
Power, the show's UK producer, claims this is the first time a US network has directly commissioned a British supplier for nearly 40 years. The producer is currently looking for UK distribution for the series, which will screen in the US next year and has also been sold to other territories including Canada.
Crusoe has a production budget for 13 one-hour episodes of $25m (£13m) and the Power chief executive, Justin Bodle, has promised "a landmark piece of event television" and a "new take on an old favourite".
The series is currently filming in the UK and the production will soon move on location in South Africa and the Seychelles. Executive producers are Justin Bodle for Power, Michael Prupas for Muse and Genevieve Hofmeyr for Moonlighting. Previous productions by Power, which was founded in 1995, include Flood, The Virgin Queen and Casanova.
ITV hopes for £10m Euro final payday
ITV could make more than £10m in ad revenue from tonight's all-English Champions League final, with major brands flocking to the event - including Ford, which is launching a $60m (£30m) pan-European TV campaign. Huge interest in the first all-English final, between Manchester United and Chelsea, has led ITV to speculate that viewer numbers could hit 13 million across around two hours of live coverage.
The broadcaster has lined up an array of top-flight advertisers for the final including Nike, Heineken and Audi - as well as some more unusual names, such as BlackBerry, which is thought to be running its first TV campaign in the UK. Ford Europe is using the event to launch a TV campaign, created by Ogilvy Advertising in London and Stockholm, to launch the four-wheel drive "crossover" car Kuga, which will compete against models such as Toyota's Rav4. The car manufacturer, which is launching the multimedia campaign across 21 markets, is committing around £30m to the campaign, around £6m of that in the UK market.
ITV will make close to £9m from TV advertising during the final, and more than £10m if the match goes to extra time and penalties, according to Havas-owned media agency MPG. The advertising bonanza compares with between £2m and £3m in ad revenue for a typical Wednesday night schedule and between £3m and £4m for a Champions League final with no British presence, said MPG.
Advertisers have been flocking to book Champions League final ad spots, which have rocketed in price from between £100,000 and £150,000 for a 30-second slot in a final with no UK teams involved to as much as £250,000 for tonight's match. "On top of a hugely valuable football fan demographic, this type of event gets people watching who are not heavy TV viewers. It is a unique opportunity," said Gary Digby, the customer relations director at ITV. "The market will pay what it will pay. We have sold out so they [the ads] are at a price the market thinks is sensible."
Digby added that the contest could easily crack a live match average of 13 million viewers because of the presence of United - which attracts more viewers than other top-flight English clubs - particularly if the match went to extra time. United's last-gasp 2-1 victory in the 1999 Champions League final attracted a peak audience of 19 million viewers.
Ford's TV ad opens with a woman waking up and running outside to find that an entire city has been covered over - from street level to the tops of buildings - as a giant white canvas. The ad states: "We keep following the same old design rules. Imagine if we could start again with a blank canvas." It finishes with a Ford Kuga rolling through the "white-out" of the city.
Ogilvy Advertising used 53,475 sq ft of artist's canvas, most of which was recycled after the shoot. The commercial was directed by Nicolai Fuglsig, who was also responsible for the Guinness "Tipping Point" and Sony "Balls" ads. Ogilvy Advertising estimates that Ford's ad will reach an audience of around 360 million across Europe when it airs during the final. Ford used last year's Champions League final to launch the "Balloons" TV ad to promote the launch of its new Mondeo model.
Last year's final, which saw Liverpool lose 2-1 to AC Milan, attracted a peak audience of 10.1 million viewers and a live match average of 9.5 million. The 2006 final, which saw Arsenal lose 2-1 to Barcelona, drew a peak audience of 12.2 million viewers and a live match average of 11.2 million. And Liverpool's epic 2005 win over AC Milan after extra time and penalties saw an average of 10.8 million viewers and a peak audience of 14.6 million.
The broadcaster has lined up an array of top-flight advertisers for the final including Nike, Heineken and Audi - as well as some more unusual names, such as BlackBerry, which is thought to be running its first TV campaign in the UK. Ford Europe is using the event to launch a TV campaign, created by Ogilvy Advertising in London and Stockholm, to launch the four-wheel drive "crossover" car Kuga, which will compete against models such as Toyota's Rav4. The car manufacturer, which is launching the multimedia campaign across 21 markets, is committing around £30m to the campaign, around £6m of that in the UK market.
ITV will make close to £9m from TV advertising during the final, and more than £10m if the match goes to extra time and penalties, according to Havas-owned media agency MPG. The advertising bonanza compares with between £2m and £3m in ad revenue for a typical Wednesday night schedule and between £3m and £4m for a Champions League final with no British presence, said MPG.
Advertisers have been flocking to book Champions League final ad spots, which have rocketed in price from between £100,000 and £150,000 for a 30-second slot in a final with no UK teams involved to as much as £250,000 for tonight's match. "On top of a hugely valuable football fan demographic, this type of event gets people watching who are not heavy TV viewers. It is a unique opportunity," said Gary Digby, the customer relations director at ITV. "The market will pay what it will pay. We have sold out so they [the ads] are at a price the market thinks is sensible."
Digby added that the contest could easily crack a live match average of 13 million viewers because of the presence of United - which attracts more viewers than other top-flight English clubs - particularly if the match went to extra time. United's last-gasp 2-1 victory in the 1999 Champions League final attracted a peak audience of 19 million viewers.
Ford's TV ad opens with a woman waking up and running outside to find that an entire city has been covered over - from street level to the tops of buildings - as a giant white canvas. The ad states: "We keep following the same old design rules. Imagine if we could start again with a blank canvas." It finishes with a Ford Kuga rolling through the "white-out" of the city.
Ogilvy Advertising used 53,475 sq ft of artist's canvas, most of which was recycled after the shoot. The commercial was directed by Nicolai Fuglsig, who was also responsible for the Guinness "Tipping Point" and Sony "Balls" ads. Ogilvy Advertising estimates that Ford's ad will reach an audience of around 360 million across Europe when it airs during the final. Ford used last year's Champions League final to launch the "Balloons" TV ad to promote the launch of its new Mondeo model.
Last year's final, which saw Liverpool lose 2-1 to AC Milan, attracted a peak audience of 10.1 million viewers and a live match average of 9.5 million. The 2006 final, which saw Arsenal lose 2-1 to Barcelona, drew a peak audience of 12.2 million viewers and a live match average of 11.2 million. And Liverpool's epic 2005 win over AC Milan after extra time and penalties saw an average of 10.8 million viewers and a peak audience of 14.6 million.
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