In the broadsheets the shorthand for a success is `award-winning’ in the tabloids the shorthand is
Posted in General on 07. Aug, 2010
In the broadsheets, the shorthand for a success is `award-winning’; in the tabloids, the shorthand is `big rating’.”The BBC had expected around 3 million viewers for Holding On, but it peaked at just 2 million and averaged around 1.5 million. However, the series won the Bafta and Royal Television Society awards for Best Drama last year.Producers on the lookout for popular stars as well as critical kudos may shortly be spoilt for choice. The new EastEnders executive producer, Matthew Robinson, has already decided to sweep away ten of his cast in a major spruce-up.. But she is now swapping chilly Albert Square for three months in Cyprus as the star of Sunburn.Cindy and Tiffany Mitchell, also to be killed off shortly when the actress Martine McCutcheon leaves the long-running soap, were two of the biggest ratings boosters, Collins said.Nick Berry duly brought the viewers to Heartbeat, but the other key ingredient of the series was its rural setting. This allows viewers and writers to stay within the same well- established fantasy landscape.The panel agreed that what did not affect ratings was the opinion of television critics “In fact, it works the other way around,” said Mr Marchant.
Peak Practice and countless veterinary and medical shows have all benefited from the British love of the countryside, said the panel.”Something like Heartbeat creates its own self-contained world,” said Ian Parker. “And it did deal with a lot of sexual scenes, but trailers are important. We had lost a week of trailers before the series started because it was just when Diana had died and the BBC pulled the trailers until after her funeral. We got lower ratings for the series than we had expected.”But the key to higher ratings, the panellists claimed, is the casting of a popular soap star.Ms Hollingworth asked: “How big a success would Our Mutual Friend have been without Anna Friel in it? It was a BBC2 period drama, but it had a very good tabloid property in it, which was very helpful.”Sally Ryle, head of press at Granada Television, admitted: “Who is in it is the first question and is everything to ITV. Using your stars in programme PR is all about bringing the right horse to the right water.”Another departed EastEnders star, Michelle Collins, has been snapped up for a role in a major BBC comedy drama about holiday reps.The actress, 35, was furious when EastEnders producers plotted to kill off her popular character, Cindy Beale, next month. When Heartbeat was launched, Nick Berry was all we had to flog it on But we could say we have Wicksy from EastEnders. THE SECRET of successful television drama, the Holy Grail for TV producers, has been revealed.
The key to maximum ratings is, it seems, deceptively simple: a rural setting, a former soap actor as the star and promotional trailers full of sex. Edinburgh Television Festival was told this weekend that programmes stand the best chance of garnering high ratings if producers stick to this simple formula.
The guidelines were outlined at a drama workshop held by Tony Marchant, writer of the BBC’s Bafta-winning series Holding On, Corinne Hollingworth, the original producer of EastEnders, and Ian Parker, The Observer’s television critic and Granada’s head of PR.Mr Marchant revealed that his series, which had no soap stars and a grim urban setting, achieved its best rating when the trailer for the fifth episode in the series deliberately played up the sexual content of the episode.The trailer, which ran in the week before the episode, concentrated only on characters kissing each other – and it lifted ratings by almost half- a-million viewers.”It has become known as the `shagging episode’,” Mr Marchant told the workshop audience. “The stereotype of the prison warder is so bad, they were worried that it would be perpetuated if we only filmed prisoners,” said Mr Terrill. Filming began in May and will continue until Christmas.Steve Hewlett, the new Director of Programmes at Carlton, criticised cheating in docusoaps, for example when Maureen in Driving School wakes up at 4am to be tested on her Highway Code.Jeremy Gibson, the BBC executive who commissioned Driving School, said: “It would have been lunatic to have a film crew all night in her bedroom waiting for her to wake up.”. In a debate about the future direction of docusoaps at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, Mr Terrill was joined by Jeremy Mills of Airport and Hotel fame, and ITV’s Grant Mansfield who, when at the BBC, was responsible for Driving School, Holiday Reps and Vets School.”When we started doing Vets School we thought we would be lucky to find four or five who would want to do it, but out of 65 students there were only four or five who didn’t want to be in the film,” said Mr Mansfield.The experience has been just the same at New Hall, where prison officers are particularly keen to take part.
The Corporation will also need to consider the sensitivities of their victims. He says the material he is gathering is so compelling that the BBC is grappling with the difficult question of how to handle it. THE BBC is making a “docusoap” about life in a women’s prison, raising the possibility that thieves, drug addicts and even murderers could become as well known as Maureen from the Driving School series. Chris Terrill, the director responsible for successful docusoaps such as Cruise and HMS Brilliant is currently filming inside New Hall Prison in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. His “characters” include drug addicts and young offenders and, he says, viewers will become intensely involved with their lives inside the prison, perhaps without being aware of the crimes they have committed.
BBC bosses now have to consider whether to allow a series of programmes which is likely to develop characters with such household appeal that they become media stars.It is against BBC guidelines to allow criminals to use television to benefit from their crimes. They are, in effect, the descendants of the earliest migrations of Homo sapiens out of Africa,” she said.The present-day Andamanese are in decline, being highly susceptible to illnesses to which they have no immunity, and from pressure on their native forests from logging companies..
The report, by the Government’s Health and Safety Executive, looks at why the electricity power supply to Dounreay’s fuel cycle area – where some of the most potentially-deadly radioactive materials known to mankind are processed – was cut for 16 hours in May after an excavator driver’s machine sliced through the main underground cable.
The month-long probe in June was by a total of 14 inspectors and senior officials from the agency’s Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, plus one from the country’s other atomic safety watchdog, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency.The fine toothcomb exercise was ordered after a series of Dounreay scandals exposed in the late spring and early summer.They included the Atomic Energy Authority being fined pounds 2,000 at Inverness Sheriff Court in January over an incident in which four men,breathed in radioactive dust.Dounreay site managers are also likely to face prosecution over a mysterious incident where other workers were contaminated by plutonium.Also came the publication of a damning report by senior inspector Tony Walker, of the HSE, into a probe which he undertook there from June to September last year.This study, which had previously been officially classified as “secret”, was made public last June following demands by MPs investigating the decision to import atom bomb-grade uranium to Dounreay from Georgia.In advance of tomorrow’s expectedly hard hitting report the HSE has already clamped three so-called “Improvement Notices’ on the Authority.. MANAGERS AT the Dounreay nuclear facility are bracing themselves to be back in the spotlight, for all the wrong reasons, when the findings of the most thorough safety audit in the complex’s forty year history is made public tomorrow. Jon Aisbitt
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