Oh January! As The Two Ronnies’ favourite Scottish songbird* so memorably warbled… Don’t You Come Around! And tell February to sling its hook while you’re about it.
Go-getters like my wife, The Right Hon. Mrs O, greet the new year with the same relish and salivation that Signor Berlusconi brings to a game of spin the bottle in a Sardinian sixth form college, indulging in a frenzied orgy of self-improvement. But for lesser mortals, it’s the absolute dregs, the coconut eclairs lying unwanted at the bottom of the Quality Street tin.
And for small independent producers, amongst whose suffocating, submissive ranks I very reluctantly find myself for the first time in more than three decades working in television – like a noble beaver evicted from his cosy lodge and forced to slum it with his rat cousins – this time of year is the very worst of all.
Even the Endemols and All 3 Medias of this world struggle to reach anyone when the only people working at the broadcasters are the cleaners, press assistants and the man at the BBC who logs complaints about the number of repeats. Everyone else is on a seemingly never-ending Winter break: ITV execs somewhere hot but obvious, like Barbados or Dubai; Channel 4 bright-sparks on their ashtanga yoga retreats in a communal yurt on Easter Island or conserving sea slugs in the South China Sea; BBC bods visiting maiden aunts in Cromer; BSkyB’s foot soldiers on a command and conquer mission to a distant galaxy; and, Five’s rag tag army chained together in a specially constructed dungeon underneath The Thames near London Bridge.
Not that I’m especially looking forward to the resumption of hostilities. With Hurricane Jay making landfall in SW1 and Canny D and Zai scuttling up the greasy pole behind her, the proposals we’ve got skulking in various inboxes will surely be swept away by the winds of change. I won’t even get to drown my sorrows with a decent lunch at The Wolseley this side of Valentine’s Day, with anyone who’s anyone bound to be following the latest prune and raw egg diet and eschewing the sedative properties of the grape in favour of Satan’s wee (sparkling mineral water).
Whisper it quietly in The Hospital Club, but I’ve spent the festive fortnight working. In my former reincarnation as the most high caste of all God’s creatures – a full-time employee of a major broadcaster with a final salary pension scheme – the only time I set foot in the office when the Radio Times Christmas double issue was on sale was to sign my end of year expenses. But those glorious days of plenty are over, as my business partner Lucinda spelt out for me at our office Christmas lunch, aggressively jabbing her Pret a Manger turkey sandwich in my face for added emphasis.
Austerity may be the new black, but at Admirable Productions it’s not fashion but necessity. Lucinda’s latest squeeze, Damian the Analyst, has reviewed our draft 2010 accounts and declared us ‘technically insolvent’. Lucinda is already hinting that her alimony pot from Bill the Banker is running low and that if we want to keep trading I may have to dip into my precious redundancy.
Which may explain why, for the last month, I’ve hardly left the dingy Farringdon garret that passes for our London offices and world headquarters. I’d like to have a stack of new proposals to show for my labours, but my source of inspiration – the weekend supplements – have been full of nothing but slush, actual and metaphorical. I’ve stopped hoping for Julian Assange to leak something genuinely useful, like the combination to Danny Cohen’s cold robotic heart.
Instead, Lucinda and I have been working on our relaunch. From next month Admirable will have a new business plan, a new name and new offices in the shadow of the M4 within a sulphurous belch of Osterley, as close as possible to the epicentre of evil without our skin beginning to blacken and shrivel.
Changing our name is drastic, but it’s not as if Admirable is awash with brand equity with just a single one-off doc for Living on the History of Burlesque – advertiser funded by Mr Thong! and all our friends at the Chinese Underwear Marketing Association – to show for nine months of operation.
Taking our cue from our fellow independents, there are a number of renaming routes we’re exploring: the upbeat (Shine); the megalomaniacal (Studio Lambert); the ironic (Love Productions); the gnomic (Tiger Aspect); the what’s-that-got-to-do-with-TV? (Shed); and, the bet-no-one-else-has-thought-of-this (Libidinous Aadvark). If we follow RDF’s lead and use our initials we could style ourselves L.E.S.B.O, which won’t open doors at BBC Knowledge but might just endear us to the inmates of Big Dicky Desmond’s dungeon.
* Barbara Dickson, not the bearded tit.
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