Goodbye lockdown. I’ll miss you…but not the Zooms

Thank God the end now seems in sight.  A return to normality, perhaps even a return to winning work - but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, one step at a time.

The thought of lounging around Soho House drinking Picante de la Casas whilst eviscerating TV-types to anyone that will listen does have a certain allure I’ll grant you, but looking back is there anything I will miss about our time in lockdown?

Yes - being able to see into commissioner’s houses whilst on Zoom calls.  It was the closest I could get to a reformatting of “Through the Keyhole” to “Through the Commissioners Keyhole”. 

This time however, instead of Lloyd Grossman (remember him?) sympathetically asking “whoooo livessss in a house like this?” you would have a channel’s editorial guard-dog continually barking and sneering at me as I vainly pitched ideas whilst all the time trying to make out who it was in the photographs hanging on the wall behind them.

Anyway, I was chatting to a mate the other day who had just got off a Zoom with an ITV commissioner, “I couldn’t believe it, she was video calling from her bedroom“ she trilled. 

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked. It seemed suitably hip and sensible to me, especially if your bedroom is the smallest room in your otherwise gigantic mansion - I mean you don’t want to show off do you?

“No, it was the fact that her duvet set didn’t go with the rest of the decor.  I mean if she can’t get that right what does it say about her editorial sensibilities?”

Admittedly, she had a point - I mean, I hadn’t thought about this before but a video conference background can speak a thousand words. Whilst you actually speak a thousand words. 

Interesting breakout factoid here - we all speak on average 120 words a minute so that’s a total of just over 8 minutes talking during an average conversation. If we allow a couple of minutes for the usual pregnant pauses (you go first, no, you go first) that gives a commissioner about 20 minutes of chat time in a half hour meeting.  Sounds about right to me - rarely do they actually want to hear what you have to say as their voice is much more important, obviously.

But I digress. My conversation did get me thinking, however, about other Zoom backgrounds that I had encountered over the past year.  I recently spoke to another producer (who was an ex-commissioner so can’t really be counted as one of us) and he had an enormous study with a a giant TV and an expensive exercise bike in the background.  Err hello? Don’t you realise the way to win work is to look like you are poor and haven’t got time to look after yourself like the rest of us?

Then, another realisation.  I think about 99% of all commissioners I talked to actually lived in the city (apart from C4’s Danny Horan who appeared to be talking from either a Favela or brightly coloured room in Spain, I couldn’t work out which). Their backgrounds were all either loft rooms in Victorian terraces or bland, white walled basement extensions with skylights and trendy music posters - one even had a guitar propped nonchalantly against the wall - ugh…try hard.

BIG thumbs up for looking down to earth (NOT) but an even bigger thumbs down for originality.  It was amazing how alike all their houses were, as if they had been cloned, which brings me back to my mate’s thought - what does that say about their sensibilities?

Everything is all about diversity nowadays and quite right too - but diversity needs to be more than just ethnicity or your social background. It also needs to include people who live OUTSIDE cities if you are going to get true diversity of thought. Building yet another hub in Birmingham, or Leeds or wherever is all very well but, if lockdown has taught us anything, it’s that you don’t need to be in a CITY. 

How about some minority commissioners that actually come from Scunthorpe, or Stevenage or even Corby?  Places that give alternative views of this country rather than the usual metropolitan opinions trotted out by commissioners.

According to the ONS over half the population of England and Wales live in towns but you wouldn’t see that in the decision makers at the top - all seem to live a city life.  It’s no wonder that viewers feel disenfranchised when all the programming is done by people that live 20 metres away from an ethically sourced mobile coffee ‘artisan’ (maybe thats why Horan moved to Brazil?

So I’m now off to paint my office wall with a massive rural town mural so when people next speak to me on Zoom they know exactly where I’m from.

I hope the commissioners will do the same.