Actor Neil McDermott

The voice of the nation speaks. Neil McDermott (who plays Ryan Malloy from EastEnders) is according to them at least the “sexiest” male in this video vox pop made ahead of the Inside Soap Awards.

Neil McDermott‘s appeal is no doubt because he sauntered around the square stark naked in one particular episode. I didn’t see it the episode. I’m only reporting what participants in the vox-pop said to producer James Goss and his team. Up until I watched this vox pop I’d no idea who Neil McDermott was.

Now that I’ve watched, I’ve still no idea who the other characters are the women speak of – one of them has quite a bad case of acne – so maybe we should just forget about all the others and concentrate on delivering what it is that the EastEnders audience wants. More of Neil McDermott, it seems.

However, actor Neil McDermott will be disappointed on missing out on the ‘Sexiest Male’ award which went instead to Scott Maslen who plays Jack Branning in the soap.

Oh well, at least EastEnders won Best Soap. Nice win.

[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKMroEyB9c8&feature=youtube_gdata_player]

Inso-doing he eclipses the lasting memory I have of him pictured in the BBC staff rag Ariel a few days after he started work there dressed in a sharp suit and tie encouraging staff to consider Fridays as a ‘dress up smart’ day.

An important case study. Take content that exists already – IKEA’s original making of video – and add an alternative soundtrack. Finish it off with a slightly amended end card. Stick it on the internet and wait for the hoards of cat lovers to start pushing it around the Internet.

Most important however, make sure the parodied world created in the video is reflected in the descriptive text. Oh and make sure all the most important things you want to promote are included in the first 140 characters of the descriptive text. Remember too that the word ‘meow’ is very valuable currency.

Nice work.

.. what I’m saying is that if you get into the right mood, then your mode of thinking will become much more creative. But if you’re racing around all day, ticking things off a list, looking at your watch, making phone calls and generally just keeping all the balls in the air, you are not going to have any creative ideas ..

But, when Brain Pickings founder and editor Maria Popova summarises Cleese’s recommendation of …

.. creating an “oasis” amidst the daily stress where the nervous creature that is your creative mind can safely come out and play, with the oasis being guarded by boundaries of space and boundaries of time

… I’m suddenly reminded of an exquisite justification for working from home.

I only returned from holiday on Wednesday. That day in the office was vital for catching up on the modest list of smallish problems which needed ironing out. Unexpectedly however, it was the following day spent working from home which ended up being the most productive with a number of creative ideas flowing from the list ticking and the email writing.

Like I say, Cleese’s ideas aren’t new. But the reminder is vital. Especially in an environment like the BBC.

Oh and of course, in pursuit of that aspirational creative environment thanks must surely be extended to @mylesrun for digging and distributing the gem in the first place.

Most interestingly (depending on how important you consider assessing TV output at breakfast in the grand scheme of things), the interview between Chiles and former Prime Minister Tony Blair saw the former pulling off a far more convincing image than the latter.

I didn’t enter the phone-in competition however.

Nice work ITV. I might even watch tomorrow.

As a user/addict of internet stuff, it’s a great tool for those desperate to find out what other people are thinking and saying about stuff.

As someone who works in web production at the BBC it’s also one of those things I’m mighty glad someone else worked on to delivery. It must have been quite a job. Raucous applause to all those who completed it. Nice work.

I’ll admit I’m not being entirely objective about it. My blog appears quite high in the results page for a BBC Proms search which appears to be being distributed via Twitter at a considerable pace. I should point out that the results are the result of an automated service – ie I haven’t bribed/cajoled/persuaded/slept with anyone in order to make this happen.

Still, it’s nice. I’ll look on it as an early birthday present, a bit like the christmas cards you get from your local chinese take-away.

When we did, I had to spend a surprising amount of time convincing the two clearly dedicated security guards that I really was the Jon Jacob written on the envelope they were clinging on to in which the glasses had been stowed.

Of course, what I didn’t know was that the glasses in the envelope weren’t mine. A producer in Henry Wood House had emailed me to say he’d found my glasses. I’d said they couldn’t be (without letting on I’d completely lost it looking for my glasses shortly after I’d got up that morning). And anyway, I’d said in an email, “my glasses are black-rimmed”. “So are these,” he’d replied. Hence why I’d dropped in at Broadcasting House to pick them up.

Only I didn’t realise they weren’t mine until I’d got home. That’s when I’d realised both the trip and the earlier argument had been a waste of time.

Consequently, I now have a pair of glasses which aren’t mine. A pair of glasses which demand a return visit to Broadcasting House. Between now and then someone is going to be fumbling around like a fool – assuming he or she doesn’t have a replacement pair or a supply of contact lenses.

Do please get in touch if you care.

A few handy tips for getting ahead with (and for offsetting any corporate nonsense about) Twitter.

Use TweetDeck

It will seem overwhelming to begin with but stick with it. Be sure to use it for live events – or popular stuff broadcast on TV or radio. Assign a column based on a search criteria for that particular programme name or the associated hashtag if you know it. Then follow the tweets in that specific column. Ignore everything else.

Engage

If you’re building community then you need to engage with the community. Spitting out tweets on a particular subject is dull, tiresome and fundamentally irritating. Strike up conversation (as much as time will allow) with people you see tweeting on your subject. Make it genuine. Be sincere. At the very least you’ll make a new friend. Friends are good.

Follower Numbers

Media people are obsessed with statistics. It’s something to measure success by. Only it’s not. That’s rubbish. Nonsense. Your follower number might seem terribly important but the reality is they mean nothing at all. Ignore your follower numbers. Devote your efforts instead to engaging in conversation with those people who are following you.

Doubt people

You may not have journalist in your job title, but if you’re using Twitter – or any social media for that matter – you’re basically a journalist in all but name. If there’s no biog under the picture then assume the person is a creation of a social media consultancy. If you’re more trusting than I am, look over their most recent tweets. You’ll be able to tell if they’re just talking rubbish or not. If they are, ignore them. They’re a construct. Real people hate constructs with a passion. Or at least, they should.

Remember the Golden Rule

They like you because of the ID card hanging around your neck. Just don’t let the baggage which comes with that ID card limit your potential online.

Remember the other Golden Rule

Be nice. Always. In the same way you’d hold a door open for anyone at work, be nice to anyone online. If you sense bitterness and resentment creeping up on your then step away from the keyboard and go get a coffee. *

* The author is still working on this last point.

The picture in this blog post was published by Flickr User n-o-n-a and is used in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons License.

Aside from the nice shock opening guaranteed to command attention right from the start, here are some of the highlights now that I’ve clawed my way through the entire thing. Whilst some of his points were about the wider television industry, you’d be a fool not to read a BBC subtext into some of them.

First up, UK license fee payers travelling (or presumably ex-pats those living abroad) will be pleased to hear of Mr Thompson’s plan for the iPlayer …

At the BBC, we want to rise to the challenge. Within a year we aim to launch an international commercial version of the iPlayer. Subject to trust approval, we also want to find a way of letting UK licence fee payers and servicemen and women use a version of the UK public service iPlayer wherever they are in the world.

Then there was a fairly strong indicator of the tone in which the licence fee will be defended when negotiations open up next year:

…do not believe anyone who claims that cutting the licence fee is a way of growing the creative economy or that the loss in programme investment which would follow a substantial reduction in the BBC’s funding could be magically made up from somewhere else. It just wouldn’t happen. A pound out of the commissioning budget of the BBC is a pound out of UK creative economy. Once gone, it will be gone for ever.

There was some flattery for both audience and programme makers alike …

We have an audience who are not just critically astute but hungry for fresh ideas. We still have programme-makers and broadcast institutions with a very particular strain of public service broadcasting pulsing through their arteries.

… and the usual (not entirely unjustified) self-referencing from recent output to underline continued skill and relevance in television output:

In the eight decades that the BBC’s existed, I don’t believe we have ever made a better, more insightful, more educational programme about opera than the one we showed this spring Tony Pappano’s Opera Italia.

The inevitable invocation of BBC One as the nation’s favourite (I must remember that just because I don’t watch it, doesn’t mean everyone else doesn’t):

People go there when major events happen elections, state occasions, the biggest sporting moments because they are used to going there. In large measure, that’s because of the popular programmes, the soaps, popular dramas and entertainment programmes which, in their own way, also chronicle and celebrate our national life and culture.

He also provided a surprise alternative definition for the term ‘public service broadcasting’ …

It’s about services as well as individual programmes.

… and that it’s also about ‘public space’ :

the belief that there is room for a place which is neither part of government or the state nor purely governed by commercial transactions

Phew. Quite a relief to hear that. He went on to be quite complimentary about the new coalition government ..

The new coalition government has been explicit in supporting the independence of the BBC and the Charter which underpins that independence.

.. before sharing a possible scary vision of the future from another public service broadcaster:

In Italy, politicians are threatening to insist that the public broadcaster should disclose the amounts it pays to individual artists in the end-credits of the programmes in which the artists appear.

Why stop with the artists? Why not include the entire budget as a Excel spreadsheet on the closing slide? Goodness me. What a preposterous idea.

But usefully, Mark Thompson pointed towards the public as one of the four pillars of support underpinning the BBC, providing some interesting statistics:

Across the UK population, 71% of people say they’re glad the BBC exists. Among readers of the Daily Mail, it’s 74%. The Telegraph, 82%. The Times, 83%. The Sunday Times, 85%.

That thorny issue of funding was returned to again though, with Thompson underlining the measures which have already been implemented to reduce costs and make for ‘a more distinctive BBC’. Pensions got a special mention too:

I’m determined to end up with pension arrangements which meet the test of affordability in the long-term, but which are reasonable, fair and which will apply evenly across the organisation … I don’t see how anyone could look at this process, compare it with pension reform in other organisations public or private, and still claim that we’re not prepared to grasp serious change.

Other big promises from the man at the top included:

90% of expenditure on commissioning
Overheads need to reduce by a quarter
Reduce senior management numbers by a fifth
Senior management paybill will reduce by at least a quarter
Reducing top talent pay

It’s this last bit which interests me. Over the next few years could the BBC be seen as a breeding ground for ‘new’ or ‘cost-effective’ talent who break their teeth in public service before trotting off to the commercial opportunities?

Sometimes we will lose established on-air stars as a result. When we do, we will replace them with new talent.

Where technology is concerned Mr Thompson appears to be saying all the right things …

We stand firmly on the side of open standards, plurality and choice. We want to share our breakthroughs with the rest of the industry.

Even if the cut in web services still saddens me because of the potential implications on how the web seems to be viewed – fundamentally as a distribution platform:

We expect to cut its footprint on the web very substantially, to exit some editorial areas entirely, and to reduce the amount we spend on it by 25%.

And on the subject of Sky, Mr Thompson is following an interesting path. Sky has a massive marketing budget he tells us, but it needs to invest in British content:

Our system depends on the big commercial broadcasters backing British talent – not with occasional commissions which are then lavishly marketed, but with week in, week out investment across a wide range of programmes.

And one way Sky could do that effortlessly, it seems is via a modestly described ‘modest proposal’ from Thompson. If the likes of ITV, Channel 4 and Five were able to charge retransmission fees for their output going out over Sky satellite instead of paying an EPG charge, then a considerable amount of money could be reinvested by those broadcasters back into British independent production.

Novel idea, for sure. We’re all in this together after all. At least that’s how it seems come the final call to arms …

If we want a strong industry, if we want the resources and the collective will to go on producing the best television in the world, it’s time for us to agree what really matters and then to take a leaf out of the public’s book.

Nice work from Love Productions for the BBC in the Great British Bake-Off.

Presenters Mel and Sue don’t so much dominate the competition to find the UK’s greatest baker, rather they just glue the bits together into one entire slab of gorgeousness which also happens to include the master cake-baker my mother always swore by – Mary Berry.

Eggs were beaten, butter combined with sugar. Tears shed too when sponges emerged from the oven not as originally anticipated. Hey ho. There’s the risk when you’re baking a cake.

Nice too to see a couple of low-key featurettes distracting attention away from the competition. One presented by Sue Perkins about why it is we feel guilty when we eat cake. The other featuring Perkins’ comedy partner Sue Giedroyc detailing the hard work involved in making a cake with 12 eggs and a pound of sugar. Thank Christ for my Kenwood Chef.

Definitely something to be pleased with. Excellent late Saturday afternoon viewing. Nothing like the Telegraph review of the programme. Bitter so and so.

If you’re interested, here’s the cake I made for husband Simon’s birthday. It was pretty much finished off less than 3 hours after I’d finished making it.