It’s 38 days, six hours and some chronological loose change since my last contact with an executive with sufficient rank and budget to commission a TV programme (I don’t count bumping into Fincham outside Booze Brothers on New Year’s Eve loading 200 Superkings Menthol and six dozen Jägermeister jelly ‘shotz’ into the boot of his car).
But just when I’m wondering whether the industry has been wiped out by zombies or relocated somewhere warmer (the British Antarctic Territories?), two tickets arrive for the first awards ceremony of 2011.
Telly-types have the same insatiable mania for self-decoration as Hermann Goering. Even the most self-effacing types, like the BBC’s Head of Religion, Aaqil Ahmed (the only senior BBC bod I know actually to be born within a whippet’s sprint of Salford), experience a Jekyllian conversion during awards season and start angrily demanding joint custody of BAFTA statuettes from award-winning producers.
Like A-level grades, the number of awards continually inflates in a forlorn attempt to prove standards are rising. Categories become ever more obscure: Most Damaging Exploitation of a Minor; Most Cynical Use of Family by a TV Chef; Best Sneer by a News Anchor; Most Misguided Commission involving a DJ called Chris (don’t bother entering… it’s Channel 4’s in perpetuity).
Yet the chances of most of us actually winning an award decrease in inverse proportion. Judging panels are as exclusive, clandestine and bitterly contested as Fight Club, with membership restricted to a mafia of senior broadcasters and indies, who defend this privilege with peculiar handshakes and extreme prejudice and twist everything from the truth to your nipples to give their own programme the best chance of winning.
For these and other reasons, I wouldn’t normally come within a £100 taxi ride of this particular event, which is run by the magazine that published such a grubby libel when I left the employ of a certain broadcaster last spring (for the record I was under the influence of nothing stronger than cough syrup, no baby animals were injured and no criminal charges pressed).
Since The Indie Awards died a death (the Reptile House at London Zoo was no longer available and they couldn’t find another venue equipped to deal with all that venom), The Broadcast Awards has become the main night in the calendar when independent producers come together to berate each other’s successes. The Grosvenor House will be heaving with producers speaking with forked tongues and slithering around a smattering of commissioning editors like vipers around Indiana Jones’ size 12s. Channel controllers don’t exactly relish braving this snake pit, which explains why last year’s Channel of the Year award was collected by a stoned and semi-naked junior cast member from Skins.
Unfortunately, attendance at even such a limited networking opportunity is compulsory for a producer whose remuneration exceeds the value of his commissions in the last nine months by a factor of 4.7396-to-1. With my business partner Lucinda “saving herself for The Emmys”, I ponder inviting the Right Hon. Mrs O, but the only person I’ve ever known to parade his wife at the coalface is The Infant Prodigy, wee Davy Elstein, and no good ever came of following his example. Alternatively, I’d love to take another tilt at The Fitzrovian Venus, but as a commissioning editor for a channel in the higher reaches of the Sky EPG that gorgeous creature won’t care for the view from table 119 where we’ll be sniffing urinal cake not the sweet smell of success.
Which means I’ll probably be reduced to a man-date with Camp Bradley, Admirable Production’s runner/researcher/resident-slave and formerly ‘Mr Showbiz’ for Good Morning Gold Coast on Queensland Community TV. Brad should be dizzy enough with gratitude to forget that the only thing we’re paying him is the price of a weekly travelcard.
Just possibly, the humiliation of being relegated to sit alongside the once-were's and never-will-be's could be the spur to greater things. In twelve months time I hope to be collecting an ugly, plastic doorstop of my own rather than the endurance record for longest gap between conversations with a commissioning editor.
