You can imagine the scene in the commissioning editor’s office. Four or five Armani suited execs (the Birt influence still stalks Television Centre) from the business unit doing what they call brainstorming.
“Where can we take this idea?”
“How do we bring it bang up to date, for the 21st century?”
“Can we make it into a reality format?” Whoops and high-fives all-round, as the “team” contemplates building a new team of C-list celebrities, business’s version of Simon Cowell, perhaps.
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Well, the real reality is that after Sir Gerry Robinson’s attempt to emulate Sir John Harvey-Jones failed, mainly due to the Granada mogul’s singular lack of his predecessor’s empathy with his programme’s subjects, BBC then dealt up the Dragon’s Den, where all attempts to turn entrepreneurship into a happening TV event in a late night, midweek BBC2 slot, foundered on a similar failure by the programme makers to get the viewers to identify with the “victims” (in the case of the Dragons programme, the poor wretched businessmen and women who placed their life’s work before a panel in the hope that they might help to fund it).
But in The Apprentice, which aired for the first time on BBC2 last night, the producers may have hit pay dirt. Why?
Not because of Sir Alan Sugar, the Amstrad millionaire, and putative star of the show. His rough-handed hire ‘em and fire ‘em approach is pure Victorian melodrama villain (he probably has to twirl his beard, rather than a waxed moustache, though). Sir Alan is good value, but he is rarely on screen.
No, where this format appears to work after the fireworks of the first episode is with the 14 budding entrepreneurs who will be competing to win the elimination game and be taken on at Amstrad on a £100,000 salary. It is in the relationships and rivalries between the team members that the necessary friction is created. After last night’s elimination over a few bunches of unsold lilies (the first weekly task; the men’s team made a 70 per cent profit, by the way), seeds have been sown for a build-up of bitterness over the coming weeks.
And herein is the irony of TV commissioning: the format was first offered to BBC, who declined. Instead, it was produced by Thames Talkback, who sold it back to the BBC and who this week hired Lorraine Heggessy, the erstwhile controller of BBC One.
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One of the first casualties of the Telegraph’s round of redundancies announced last week looks to be Lorna Bourke’s weekly personal finance column every Sunday. Bourke had written for the Sunday Telegraph for 14 years.
17 quit Saatchi in New York
Wednesday: To lose one senior executive might be unfortunate, two could look a little clumsy, but 17?
That’s the situation at the New York offices of ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi following the departure of Mike Burns, a vice chairman and worldwide account director on client General Mills.
The agency’s London offices are in the spotlight at present thanks to the BBC2 documentary Inside Saatchi & Saatchi (from which we never did learn who it was who forgot to get the superstar American photographer his entry visa for Brazil), but it is the goins ons at the New York office in the past week that appear to be the stuff of pure soap opera.
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According to reports in the US, the resignations were from staffers from different departments, including creative and account services, but all worked on General Mills.
Saatchi handles creative duties on brands such as Cheerios, Total, Wheaties, Lucky Charms, Yoplait, Pillsbury and Green Giant.
Sources said the staffers resigned on Monday, three days after New York CEO Mary Baglivo and executive creative director Tony Granger said in a memo that Mr Burns was “leaving” and “looking forward to the prospects of other life and career opportunities”.
Mr Burns had spent 25 years at Saatchi & Saatchi. Saatchi said Ms Baglivo and a quartet of senior group account directors would absorb his account duties.
Today’s number: 11 per cent, the number of Americans who own either an Apple iPod or other MP3 player. In total, that’s 22 million Americans wired for sound, and among the under-30s age group, the ownership percentage rises to 20.
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Panorama: the sop is in
Tuesday: So, the sop is in. With BBC One controller Lorraine Heggessey barely out of the door, today’s news and current affairs announcement was assumed by some to be the fulfilling of the BBC chairman Michael Grade’s call for flagship programme Panorama to be moved back from its Sunday graveyard slot to “its proper place and prominence”.
Or then again, maybe not. In the BBC’s announcement today, we found that £3 million extra is to be spent towards delivering an extra four Panorama investigations each year, to be shown midweek at 9pm.
“The thing about the 9pm specials is that we want to bring people to them who aren’t necessarily current affairs viewers. At 10.15pm on Sunday, we can have a more analytical agenda for people who are passionate about current affairs,” Helen Boaden, BBC’s news director, said in justification.
So having delivered this masterplan for making extra special current affairs programmes for people not especially interested in current affairs, Jana Bennett, the director of television, then had a pop at rivals ITV, calling their current affairs output “Trevor-lite”, a barb aimed at the Tonight programme fronted by Sir Trevor McDonald.
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Hmmm, we will see. Integral to the BBC plans announced today was more output from the Fiona Bruce-fronted Real Story strand, which of course has never been known to cover “popular” or “tabloid” topics. So no dumbing down at all, then.
Monday: After dire warnings in the UK about the damaging effects on the circulation of paid-for newspapers that daily freebie Metro is having, now publishers in the United States are waking up to an ominous thud on their doorsteps each morning carrying a similar threat.
Each day, more than 250,000 copies of a free tabloid wearing the heraldic eagle logo made famous by William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner is being distributed in the American capital.
The Washington Examiner is owned by the founder of Qwest Communications, billionaire Philip Anschutz. Mr Anschutz - personal wealth, about £5 billion - entered the newspaper business in early 2004 with the purchase of the San Francisco Examiner, by now a a free daily tabloid. In September, he bought a Washington community newspaper chain, revamped it, and rebadged it. Most menacingly for the owners of existing paid-for newspapers thoughout the United States, Mr Anschutz has applied for the trademark name ExaminerI in 70 American cities.
This week, Slate.com - which is owned by the 700,000 circulation Washington Post - described the Examiner’s approach as “carpet bombing high-income addresses”.
Those that have seen the Examiner indicate that it comprises a similar low-budget editorial blend to that familiar to the growing band of Metro readers in Britain: lots of agency copy, a few local stories by the small band of staff reporters and re-jigged versions of stories from other papers (in London, each day’s Metro may be familiar to anyone who had seen the previous day’s Evening Standard. Both are owned by Associated.
Mr Anschutz’s assault on paid-for newspapers’ declining circulations remains, though, a gamble, especially among the more affluent readerships which advertisers so cherish. How many present newspaper readers, after all, will turn to a free daily paper containing abbreviated news, rather than more in-depth coverage from established paid-fors or, dare we suggest it, the internet?
Only time, and the depth of Mr Anschutz’s pockets, will tell.
Television advertising spending in the UK is forecast to grow at its highest level for almost five years, according to new figures.
Zenith Optimedia has increased its internal growth forecast for the first quarter this year for spending on television advertising to 12 per cent. Before Christmas, it had forecast a rise of only around 5 per cent.
Media buying agencies said that prospects of a general election in May, as well as the economic upturn, have increased demand.
Chris Hayward, the head of television at Zenith, said: “Growth is coming from such sectors as cars, telecommunications, financial services, travel and, of course, government spending.”
The last time the World Advertising Research Center recorded growth for television ad spend as high as 12 per cent was in the second quarter of 2000.
John Overend, joint managing director at buying agency Opera, backed up Zenith Optimedia’s forecast for television. He said Opera’s estimates for growth in advertising spend for print and radio were up 3 per cent and 5 per cent respectively for the first quarter of this year.
Friday: A MIAMI businessman, with the help of an estimated 400 internet bloggers, has sparked a major row with the news chief of CNN over claims that US troops in Iraq were deliberately targeting journalists. Rony Abovitz, who runs a medical technology company, was a guest at last month’s World Economic Forum, where he listened to Eason Jordan, the chief news executive of CNN.
According to Abovitz’s internet account, the CNN boss failed to justify a claim he made in public: that US troops had “targeted” journalists in Iraq and had killed a dozen. Other bloggers took up the subject and CNN was accused of inaccuracy — forcing Jordan to say that he had been misunderstood.
After a fortnight, the controversy became so widespread that the row was picked up by the mainstream print media — another example of the growing power of internet bloggers in monitoring the US media.