People assume that jobs in television are well paid. I did. And so they are, if you are head of marketing, or in charge of flogging reality formats to the Chinese. It's HUGELY lucrative then.
If you work in Reality you can rack up a footballer's salary. A fantasy salary. If you work in real reality, lower-case reality, ie a shop, a school, a call centre, a building site, a hospital, then you just make ordinary money. Pitifully ordinary money often.
We know this.
The last thing Reality is, is real. Reality is a carefully scripted fantasy where the top practitioners cavort with one another in baths of the finest Krug, snorting coke from each other's gym-honed, lipo-sucked and silicon enhanced torsos. Strippers wrap themselves celebrity widowers (that's you, Tweed) and boxers swap the undignified pantomime of the ring for the far more brutal arena of hoofing before twinkling starlets on Strictly. (Sit up straight at the back there, Calzaghe)
Ordinary people like us, we can rage against the insanity of Reality. It won't do any good. We can fulminate all we want against the injustice of a system that rewards ASBO personalities at the expense of the psychiatric nurses they will no doubt require in the years to come. However hard you swear and curse be in no doubt that you won't be able to curse the glittery Reality machine any harder than those who toil in the mines of TV drama.
However angry you are - they are angrier. However hard badly you want to twat the endlessly bobbing shrunken twin heads of the beast they call Antndec, they want to do it more urgently and harder.
If you would be put out not at all by the demise of Bruce Forsythe, then the average TV drama drone wants to be there at the funeral to tramp the dirt down on in person.
The way TV drama people feel about Reality people is the way a BNP councillor feels towards the Asylum seeker who moves in next door starts dating his sister and, after several months on benefits, finally gets a job as a diversity compliance officer and announces that he has now got enough security to start trying for a baby. There might just be some antipathy there.
Those who work in TV drama feel that Reality has stolen several things that were important to them: Money, status, audiences.
Of course there is still some money in TV drama, and not just if you work in HR or marketing. If you have a track record and a regular gig on a popular show, then you can make very decent wedge. Not as much as the top people in Reality, but far more than the poor sods who have to stay in reality.
For the rest TV is far more penny-pinching that you'd think. Most people in TV earn less than 30k. A lot earn less than 20k. Some earn nothing at all (remember our friends Molly, Polly and Olly - remember them, but don't feel sorry for them).
When I ask Redford how much he's going to pay the storyliners in this brave new world where it becomes home for his best writers, he looks puzzled. It hasn't occured to him.
'What do you want?' He says.
'Well...' I begin. What do I want? I'm not even sure I want the job for a start.
'Well...' I have no idea what to ask for. There's a pause. I go to the bar.
In the end I take a deep, deep breath and I say ' You'd be paying me for my life experience as much as my imagination I guess. And the thing is my life experience has resulted in me building a collection of children - all at awkward (ie expensive) ages. You'd be paying me for my divorces, my unhappy love affairs. You'd be paying for all the jobs I've been sacked from, the dreams I've had trampled on. You'd be paying for all my degrees from the University of Life, School of Hard Knocks - and the tuition fees at that particular alma mater ain't cheap.
'You'd be paying me for for my proven resilence in the face of disaster. Plus, you'd be paying me for all the books I've read and films I've seen. You'd be paying for all the stuff you can never get from Molly, Polly and Olly.'
'Who?' He says, frowning.
'Never mind.' I say. 'The point is you say the current crop of storyliners are children and how can they come up with stories about the terrifying comedy of adult life, if their idea of an emotional trauma is getting zapped on the PS3, or finding out that half-price WKDs at the local nitespot have been rendered illegal by new government anti-happy hour legislation.'
In Ye Olde Daze of course bright kids could have learned about the bitterness of life from Zola novels. Or from Jane Ayre. Or from Watership Down at the very least. Now, however, you can't assume that even the very brightest kids will have read anything much since Biff, Chip and Kipper in Year 2. And nothing bad ever happens to them. (more's the pity).
'And then there's the fact that I already have my perfect job.' I say.
'Really?' Say Birkin and Redford together. Their incredulity is piercingly unfeigned and causes the whole pub to pause and stare our way. I blush. They sound so shocked that I think I must be missing something about my current day-job.
'Yes. Really.' I say. But I'm suddenly uncertain. Maybe I am in a rut. Maybe I do need a change? A new challenge? Maybe I do.
Redford stands up. 'Same again?'
'No,' I say. 'Something different. Surprise me.
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Every post there's an hilarious bit like the extended description of how much drama writers hate Reality (though perhaps documentary makers rank even higher, having to restrain themselves from hiring a hitman, if they could afford that on benefits...)
ReplyDeleteBut then you have a bit that is so bitterly, exquisitely accurate, the only response is a bared teeth grimace. This time at the fact that it 'hadn't ocurred' to Redford what sort of money to pay.