I avoided working today by going on to the notbbc comedy forum (
http://www.frogger.uklinux.net/comedy/index.php ) and complaining about the BBC talent initiative.
This has really been annoying me recently. They are showing those adverts about a man who has spent his life working as a plumber, but has always dreamt of being an actor. Then he applied to BBC Talent and he got a part in the Canterbury Tales. Fantastic.
Perhaps, in the short term, but I think the whole scheme is offensive to professional actors (and as they are also looking for sit-com writers and djs, many other media professionals), and also exploitative of the people it ends up supposedly helping.
There are so many people who are actually trying to be actors, who have studied at drama school or struggled with year upon year of auditions and rejections and crappy parts in theatre in education, so why does the BBC have to spread its net out to try and bring in more potential applicants, from people who haven't even been prepared to make that commitment to the job in the first place. The implication is that anyone could be an actor if only given the opportunity. I notice that the offer of jobs in the BBC does not extend into management positions (ironically the one place where someone off the street would probably do a better job than the people who are doing it at the moment) - of course not! Management requires training and a degree. Not anyone could be Controller of BBC2. It takes real skill and knowledge to make the sort of judgements that are made by the present controller every day.
More importantly though, I think the scheme does no good to the people it is claiming to help. It makes it seem so easy. There's nothing wrong with a plumber deciding to be an actor (except possibly with his mental state - he's going to make a lot more money in plumbing, that's for sure); it's certainly good to have a second trade if you are going to become a thespian. But what happens to this fella the day after filming stops on Canterbury Tales? He then joins the thousands of unemployed actors looking for work and unlike many of them he has no training and no experience of how to cope. Will the BBC be helping him by sending him letters about auditions? I don't think so.
TV nowadays seems obsessed with plucking people from obscurity and thrusting them into the limelight. This makes good PR and ratings for them, but I don't think it takes into account the long term effects on the people it elevates.
For the vast majority of us, being good at what we do takes lots of work. It is almost always good to work yourself up from the bottom in whatever profession you do. When I was 20 I would probably have leapt at the chance of getting on to telly immediately, but if I somehow had it would have been the end of my career. By working for 6 years in radio and doing stand-up gigs and Universities and Edinburgh I got to a point where I started to have some idea of what I was doing. As I think I've remarked before, even now after 15 years
I am regularly learning new things about writing and performing, but I've also learnt enough about the ups and downs of the business to roll with punches. Though it is tempting to do something that might make your dreams come true overnight, in the long run it is much better to learn your trade.
The fact is there shouldn't be competitions for actors and writers: seeing new performers and reading new scripts is the BBC's job. It seems to me that BBC Talent is more of a PR exercise to make it look like the BBC care, rather than a genuine attempt to find exciting new writers and performers. With a possible side effect that they can get cheap scripts from anyone who does turn out to be any good, without having to worry about agents making sure their client gets a fair financial deal.
Maybe I'm being old and crotchety and maybe my views are coloured by my own treatment at the hands of the corporation. I just sense that this is a situation where nobody ultimately wins.
I think I might have a crack at plumbing though. I've always fancied it and it can't be that hard. Anyone got any jobs they need doing?
