{"id":2923,"date":"2011-04-28T09:40:24","date_gmt":"2011-04-28T09:40:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/2011\/04\/things_a_tv_cha\/"},"modified":"2011-04-28T09:40:24","modified_gmt":"2011-04-28T09:40:24","slug":"things_a_tv_cha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/things_a_tv_cha\/","title":{"rendered":"Things a TV Channel Controller Should Never Say"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;re a TV executive you should be very careful when you axe something or say that you&#8217;ll never do something again.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/media\/2011\/mar\/30\/channel-4-list-shows\">Recently Jay Hunt<\/a>, Channel 4&#8217;s new chief creative officer said that the channel would no longer be making list programmes. That&#8217;s fine. They&#8217;re lazy, relatively cheap, and have run their course.<br \/>\nBut what&#8217;s that? In 2007, Kevin Lygo &#8211; then Channel 4&#8217;s director of television and content &#8211; said <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/media\/2007\/mar\/07\/broadcasting.channel41\">exactly the same thing<\/a>!<br \/>\nChannel 4 continued to make them because they drove audiences. And with channels like More 4 and E4 to fill, they repeated well too.<br \/>\nNow we have BBC1&#8217;s relatively new controller <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/media\/2011\/apr\/27\/tv-crime-drama-bbc1-chief\">saying that he axed<\/a> the generally well regarded, and well received Zen, because there are &#8220;too many male detectives&#8221; and &#8220;too much crime&#8221; on television.<br \/>\n<em>He does realise that this comment is going to come back and bite him doesn&#8217;t he?<\/em><br \/>\nLet&#8217;s face it. The real reason he cancelled Zen, and a few other successful series, was that he needs to make his own mark. One can only hope that mark isn&#8217;t going to be <I>made<\/I> by shows like Candy Cabs and Mrs Brown&#8217;s Boys (which unfathomably has been <a href=\"http:\/\/www.comedy.co.uk\/news\/story\/00000494\/mrs_browns_boys_series_2\/\">recommissioned!<\/a>). It&#8217;s what all new channel controllers do.<br \/>\nBut the reason this comment will remerge is that he&#8217;ll find it near enough impossible to avoid commissioning crime\/police series. He&#8217;s actually <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/media\/2011\/jan\/06\/waking-the-dead-the-body-farm-bbc\">just commissioned one<\/a> (albeit, with a female lead). If there&#8217;s one we&#8217;ve learnt from the history of TV over the years: you can&#8217;t go wrong with police or hospital dramas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;re a TV executive you should be very careful when you axe something or say that you&#8217;ll never do something again. Recently Jay Hunt, Channel 4&#8217;s new chief creative officer said that the channel would no longer be making list programmes. That&#8217;s fine. They&#8217;re lazy, relatively cheap, and have run their course. But what&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2923"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2923\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}