Thursday 28 June 2007

Bertie drops a bombshell

I was forced to interupt a v v important viewing first thing this morning after picking up this from Bertie.

FROM: bertie@tvgenius.tv
TO: TVC01@corporation.co.uk

I had Layla Smith on the phone virtually in tears last night, absolutely begging me to come in and save Tycoon. They had big crisis talks all day yesterday at Network Centre - Grade even had to get involved at one point.

The good news is that they have hired *MOI* to completely restructure the entire series, cutting it down to half-hours, plus re-shooting 'the pier', 'Peter in-car' and 'participants pieces to cam' scenes (almost the entire series, come to think of it!!). Unless you can match the frankly silly money Daniela Neumann and that Jones prick are having to fork out to get me on board for the next four weeks, I'm afraid your Parisian chav format thing - Slops (or whatever it's called) will just have to wait its turn like everybody else!

PS - very worried for Layla. Reckon she is well out of her depth. Who knows - she might be calling you for a job soon!

Love and air-kisses,
Bx
Fucking typical. This is not what I wanted to hear. It throws the spanner in the fucking works for Salopes right when I least needed it.

Called Hincksy immediately to say we needed to delay the start of pre-production INDEFINITELY. I'm not kicking off Salopes Anglaise until my main man is on board and totally focused, not fannying about fixing prime-time ITV fuck-ups. Hincksy stumbled a bit, and said that he'd already hired two SPs, five shooting APs and a runner who started on Monday. What should he do with them, he asked? "Jesus! Just fire them and bring them back in 3 months or whenever. Sorry Tim, but I don't understand what the fucking problem is?" I shot back, a bit enraged.

Honestly. Is my favourite [for now] squash partner starting to go a bit soft in his middle age??

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Simon Ford has quit the BBC, citing the continued collapse of factual. Throughout the article, quality programme-makers give honest and meaningful responses to Ford's decision.

The BBC meanwhile answer with classic sixth floor gobbledygook: "Factual is adjusting to the quotas for 'out of London' and the arrival of the WoCC." Absolutely no addressing of the issue at hand; namely the loss of brilliant talent, and the surely fatal brain-drain. Like the rancid old tramp who sits at the White City crossing, the BBC mumbles away to itself in a language nobody else either knows or cares to understand.

And for those of us unfortunate enough to 'get it', OOL and WoCC were looming stories in 2000! What sort of wild personnel mismanagement has led to this apparent surprise at the lack of work?!!