Angus
13-08-2010, 03:59 PM
This is PEJ's post from the DS Forum:
Hello
Thought I might just address some things you've been talking about on the DS BB Forum. Those of a high strung disposition should probably look away now as I may not say the things you want to hear (which, if I'm not mistaken, is "sorry sorry sorry we got it wrong, everything is rubbish and we couldn't "Produce" a "fart").
Still here? OK...
Rather than doing that I thought I'd try and explain the processes involved in trying to put a the show together and that might perhaps help you to understand some of the constraints, pressures and practical issues that are all factors in how the end product emerges onto our TV screens.
Before that, though, a word on the "Soap Opera" thing that seems to have caused such a furore. I should say that I have always referred to it a a Soap Opera - albeit a real life Soap, where everyday dramas are played out in real time with real people (I did an interview on BBC Breakfast News on the day of launch where I talked about it being a Soap). In fact before the very first series the Execs at the time met with Soap Opera producers to talk about how Soaps were put together to get a sense of how that kind of narrative structure works... Calling it a Soap doesn't mean it's scripted like Coronation Street. So, to be clear, we think of this as a real-life Soap Opera (much in the way many of us describe our daily lives).
Next - this whole thing about "Chosen Ones" and "Good Edits/Bad Edits". We don't have an egenda. It doesn't matter to us who wins - there is nothing in it for us. We don't benefit from any subsequent media deals ex Housemates do, it has no impact on us whatseoever. Of course we're all human here (honestly, even me) and - just like you - we find some housemates more entertaining than others (eg, I found Ben very funny and miss him in the house, but that's BB - the entertaining ones sometimes go. Not that he entertained everyone, plenty of people didn't like him. No one here ever suggested giving him a "good edit" to keep him in. I am not sure that's even possible, the real person always appears on screen and people at home make up their own minds). The fact is the show is edited and editing is by it's very nature a process of selection. It may be that you and I would make some different choices about what we thought was important to show when we came to condensing 24 hours into 45 minutes of TV. It's also true that you could show 2 people the same piece of footage of someone and those 2 people would have 2 different views on that person based on their own prejudices and whether they fundamentally liked or disliked that person. The "editing" takes place in the edit suite and in the minds of each individual viewer at home.
To help your understanding of how we get to the choices we make, this is how it works here on a practical level: There are 11 Day Producers; they work on a shift system which broadly speaking means they do a Gallery Shift (where they are the voice of Big Brother, talk to housemates in the diary room and manage the days activities in the house). The other shift they do is a 24 hour "Story Producing" shift. Basically they sit there, watch the whole day and commission stories as the day continues. The reason we do it this way is that that 24 hour shift allows the producer to get a proper overview of the day (say, for example, an argument takes place at 7pm. If you weren't watching for the entire 24 hour period you might have missed that the roots of that argument were in a comment someone made earlier that day. As you're there all day you can go back to that, make sure it's in ther show and give the thing context.) Each Story Producer tries their very best to present a fair view of the day. We have strict rules about following timelines and not editing things out of context. But you can't show everything. Once the Producer has created the first cut of the show with the overnight editors it's then viewed by a Senior Producer who helps polish it, interrogates it to make sure everything that's in the show is there for a reason and gets it ready for a 9.30 morning viewing with the Executive Producer, the Channel 4 Commissioning editor, The Lawyer and me. We watch it and make notes (and there are often wildly differing viewpoints flying round the edit suite) and then the rest of the day is spent with the senior producer making the agreed changes and polishing it up so it's fit for broadcast.
So the show goes through many hands before it gets to air, and each of those people have a different perspective and approach. No system is perfect, but this is an approach that gives us the best possible chance of creating a show that's balanced across the series and is also an entertainingly told story (or Soap Opera).
NOTE: Before you pounce on the word "story" and come back with "Stories are WRITTEN and therefore fictional so it proves BB is scripted to the Producers AGENDA" - please remember there is such a thing as a true story/a real life story and so on.
Meanwhile, back in the office, our Task Team are in the room next door to me prepping their tasks. We have had on average 2 tasks per day happeing in the house. The tasks are designed fopr their entertainment value and to test HMS. 90 per cent of the tasks were dreamed up, agreed and scheduled in before the series went on air (ie, The Shopping Tasks and Save and Replace tasks). Then we have a big folder of mini tasks (for treats etc) that are prepped and ready to go when we feel we need them). Some things we think of more on the hoof (like the Tree of Temptation Hits which are more spontaneous and based on what we are watching in the house). In truth we have spent more time on those things than we have on devising punishments. I can understand why some people think it may have been inconsistent. Noms talk isn't always as clear cut as it might first appear for example (and we watch all these things back) so we have punished clear and blatant rule breaks. That's not to say we may have missed a couple which we should have picked up on.
Finally: we did adopt a slightly different approach to this year's show when we came to talking about the tone before we began. We wanted it to feel warmer and be skewed towards the funny rather than the nasty. We also thought that because it's the last one on Channel 4 we had the opportunity to play with the rules a little bit. You've also got to remember that BB is a show constantly under scrutiny from all angles and over the years we have accumulated constraints and we do have to be a litle bit careful about what we do. These constraints are, of course, one factor amongst many that helped us along the way to our decision to keep it lighter.
Ultimately as producers on this show we are damned if we do and damned if we don't, and when I read frothed up posts on here complaining about how the show is produced when I read between the lines you pretty much always spot that it because the person posting doesn't (or does) like a particular housemate and they think that person is getting a rough ride (or someone else isn't). That's the soap bit too - heroes and villains, everything in black and white. Meanwhile: ratings are up, audience appreciation is up and the show's doing well by all the usual telly measures.
What BB has taught me over the years is that people are complicated - we have good and bad in all of us. Different people draw different things from us in terms of character. We aren't just one thing or another. We aren't just "real" or "fake", "nice" or "vile", a "victim" or a "bully" - we are, all of us, all those things and more. I have interviewed and selected countless housemates over the years, I may have liked some more than others and, from a producer's perspective, thought some brought more to the show than others, but I can say have had respect for pretty much all of them for taking part in this show and exposing their personalities for us all to discuss.
It's a very long post this - I am sure there lots to highlight in black and throw back in my face. I know there will be some inconsistincies and contradictions between things I've said here and elsewhere but WTF - life's full of them.
All the very best pej
am off for a pre flounce flounce now.... "
Any thoughts?
Hello
Thought I might just address some things you've been talking about on the DS BB Forum. Those of a high strung disposition should probably look away now as I may not say the things you want to hear (which, if I'm not mistaken, is "sorry sorry sorry we got it wrong, everything is rubbish and we couldn't "Produce" a "fart").
Still here? OK...
Rather than doing that I thought I'd try and explain the processes involved in trying to put a the show together and that might perhaps help you to understand some of the constraints, pressures and practical issues that are all factors in how the end product emerges onto our TV screens.
Before that, though, a word on the "Soap Opera" thing that seems to have caused such a furore. I should say that I have always referred to it a a Soap Opera - albeit a real life Soap, where everyday dramas are played out in real time with real people (I did an interview on BBC Breakfast News on the day of launch where I talked about it being a Soap). In fact before the very first series the Execs at the time met with Soap Opera producers to talk about how Soaps were put together to get a sense of how that kind of narrative structure works... Calling it a Soap doesn't mean it's scripted like Coronation Street. So, to be clear, we think of this as a real-life Soap Opera (much in the way many of us describe our daily lives).
Next - this whole thing about "Chosen Ones" and "Good Edits/Bad Edits". We don't have an egenda. It doesn't matter to us who wins - there is nothing in it for us. We don't benefit from any subsequent media deals ex Housemates do, it has no impact on us whatseoever. Of course we're all human here (honestly, even me) and - just like you - we find some housemates more entertaining than others (eg, I found Ben very funny and miss him in the house, but that's BB - the entertaining ones sometimes go. Not that he entertained everyone, plenty of people didn't like him. No one here ever suggested giving him a "good edit" to keep him in. I am not sure that's even possible, the real person always appears on screen and people at home make up their own minds). The fact is the show is edited and editing is by it's very nature a process of selection. It may be that you and I would make some different choices about what we thought was important to show when we came to condensing 24 hours into 45 minutes of TV. It's also true that you could show 2 people the same piece of footage of someone and those 2 people would have 2 different views on that person based on their own prejudices and whether they fundamentally liked or disliked that person. The "editing" takes place in the edit suite and in the minds of each individual viewer at home.
To help your understanding of how we get to the choices we make, this is how it works here on a practical level: There are 11 Day Producers; they work on a shift system which broadly speaking means they do a Gallery Shift (where they are the voice of Big Brother, talk to housemates in the diary room and manage the days activities in the house). The other shift they do is a 24 hour "Story Producing" shift. Basically they sit there, watch the whole day and commission stories as the day continues. The reason we do it this way is that that 24 hour shift allows the producer to get a proper overview of the day (say, for example, an argument takes place at 7pm. If you weren't watching for the entire 24 hour period you might have missed that the roots of that argument were in a comment someone made earlier that day. As you're there all day you can go back to that, make sure it's in ther show and give the thing context.) Each Story Producer tries their very best to present a fair view of the day. We have strict rules about following timelines and not editing things out of context. But you can't show everything. Once the Producer has created the first cut of the show with the overnight editors it's then viewed by a Senior Producer who helps polish it, interrogates it to make sure everything that's in the show is there for a reason and gets it ready for a 9.30 morning viewing with the Executive Producer, the Channel 4 Commissioning editor, The Lawyer and me. We watch it and make notes (and there are often wildly differing viewpoints flying round the edit suite) and then the rest of the day is spent with the senior producer making the agreed changes and polishing it up so it's fit for broadcast.
So the show goes through many hands before it gets to air, and each of those people have a different perspective and approach. No system is perfect, but this is an approach that gives us the best possible chance of creating a show that's balanced across the series and is also an entertainingly told story (or Soap Opera).
NOTE: Before you pounce on the word "story" and come back with "Stories are WRITTEN and therefore fictional so it proves BB is scripted to the Producers AGENDA" - please remember there is such a thing as a true story/a real life story and so on.
Meanwhile, back in the office, our Task Team are in the room next door to me prepping their tasks. We have had on average 2 tasks per day happeing in the house. The tasks are designed fopr their entertainment value and to test HMS. 90 per cent of the tasks were dreamed up, agreed and scheduled in before the series went on air (ie, The Shopping Tasks and Save and Replace tasks). Then we have a big folder of mini tasks (for treats etc) that are prepped and ready to go when we feel we need them). Some things we think of more on the hoof (like the Tree of Temptation Hits which are more spontaneous and based on what we are watching in the house). In truth we have spent more time on those things than we have on devising punishments. I can understand why some people think it may have been inconsistent. Noms talk isn't always as clear cut as it might first appear for example (and we watch all these things back) so we have punished clear and blatant rule breaks. That's not to say we may have missed a couple which we should have picked up on.
Finally: we did adopt a slightly different approach to this year's show when we came to talking about the tone before we began. We wanted it to feel warmer and be skewed towards the funny rather than the nasty. We also thought that because it's the last one on Channel 4 we had the opportunity to play with the rules a little bit. You've also got to remember that BB is a show constantly under scrutiny from all angles and over the years we have accumulated constraints and we do have to be a litle bit careful about what we do. These constraints are, of course, one factor amongst many that helped us along the way to our decision to keep it lighter.
Ultimately as producers on this show we are damned if we do and damned if we don't, and when I read frothed up posts on here complaining about how the show is produced when I read between the lines you pretty much always spot that it because the person posting doesn't (or does) like a particular housemate and they think that person is getting a rough ride (or someone else isn't). That's the soap bit too - heroes and villains, everything in black and white. Meanwhile: ratings are up, audience appreciation is up and the show's doing well by all the usual telly measures.
What BB has taught me over the years is that people are complicated - we have good and bad in all of us. Different people draw different things from us in terms of character. We aren't just one thing or another. We aren't just "real" or "fake", "nice" or "vile", a "victim" or a "bully" - we are, all of us, all those things and more. I have interviewed and selected countless housemates over the years, I may have liked some more than others and, from a producer's perspective, thought some brought more to the show than others, but I can say have had respect for pretty much all of them for taking part in this show and exposing their personalities for us all to discuss.
It's a very long post this - I am sure there lots to highlight in black and throw back in my face. I know there will be some inconsistincies and contradictions between things I've said here and elsewhere but WTF - life's full of them.
All the very best pej
am off for a pre flounce flounce now.... "
Any thoughts?