Norma Desmond in TELEVISIONLAND

The classic movie, Sunset Boulevard is an important feature of  TELEVISIONLAND.  You may be surprised to discover that in the novel, Vince Poll has an intimate relationship with Norma Desmond, but in TELEVISIONLAND anything is possible...

Perfect candidates for Vince Poll's figurine collection

Vince would love these!

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/21st_century_bastard_asshole_action_figures_for_the_darkest_timeline

21st Century Casting Couch

 

So you thought the casting couch was just for actresses?  Think again.

Everyone is familiar with the cliché of the predatory, powerful, heterosexual male in television preying on vulnerable young females and exploiting them sexually.  While this certainly goes on, Roger Ailes at Fox in the USA is a prominent recent example, what is less well known is that there are other victims of sexual exploitation in the business.   One surprising example of this is the director.  Yes, the director.  Believe it or not, directors are in a uniquely vulnerable position in television drama today.  Unlike other senior members of the production or editorial team, principal cast and often the crew, the director is rarely a permanent member of the unit.  Typically directors are freelance, hired to shoot an individual episode in a series.   This means directors have, effectively, no employment rights whatsoever and can be dropped like a used tissue as soon as their gig is over.   Directors live or die entirely at the whim of the producer and in order to get on, directors must get on with the producer and other permanent members of the team.  Directors in television are the original victims of the gig economy.

Nevertheless, directors can themselves be subject to temptation, especially on location.  So the wise director, particularly if married, will avoid fraternising with the cast.  The possibility of finding oneself in compromising and potentially career threatening, not to mention marriage breaking, situations is all too evident.  Young bit-part players are particularly to be avoided in this context.  But it is not just the hungry and ambitious, looking for a leg up on the ladder, that present a career hazard to the director.  People who have nothing to gain from an assignation with the director will also pursue them for sex.  People like the director’s boss, the producer.  It can be a profound shock for the director to discover that their role confers on them a certain sexual allure but there are too many examples of this occurring to ignore the effect.  Producers can and do demand sexual favours from directors in return for career advancement or even just the prospect of another contract.   They can do this precisely because of the director’s vulnerability in the workplace.  The unscrupulous producer knows they have the director over a barrel and will exploit that fact very happily.  The casting couch is well used in the 21^st century tv business.

In writing TELEVISIONLAND Ian Reid delved deep into the underbelly of television drama.  The character of the director, Max Virtue, is based on several specific individuals who Reid knows.  Here are three examples of how the casting couch operates with regard to directors in today’s television world.  These are all true stories…

Director A was working on a very well-known popular drama for a national broadcaster.  He was a married man in his 50s and, like Max Virtue, he was very well preserved.   The production was based far from his home, and so he would find himself on location for weeks on end.   He was in the habit of occasionally dining with his female first AD.  She was gay, and so director A considered this to be an entirely safe and pleasurable way to unwind.  There would be no question of anyone getting the wrong idea.  

After several of these enjoyable meals, the first AD brought up a new topic of conversation.  The producer, she informed the director, fancied him.   The director laughed it off but the first AD pursued the point.  The producer was in her thirties and undeniably attractive.  The first AD would not be deflected.  She was a friend of the producer.   With her girlfriend, a senior production executive, the first AD had recently entertained the producer to dinner.  At this meal the producer had made clear her desire for director A.   The first AD had been delegated to make the approach.    In other words, the first AD was pimping for the producer.  Director A recorded the conversation in his diary.

‘She’s not my type,’ said director A.

‘Maybe you’d better make her your type,’ said the first AD.

‘I’m married,’ said the director, showing his wedding ring.

 ‘(Producer) gets what (producer) wants,’ countered the first AD.

As director A said to Ian Reid: ‘It was unbelievable.  There was no subtlety about it.  It was blatant.  A demand, with menaces, for sexual favours.  I couldn’t believe it.  I was 53.  The producer was in her thirties.’

Not only that but it is clearly entirely wrong and in breach of all employment law for a manager to be soliciting sexual favours from their staff. 

Director A politely declined the offer and subsequently he was never asked to work on the show again.

Reid asked if the director had spoken to anyone about it; HR for instance.  ‘No,’ said the director.  ‘It would be my word against that of the first AD.  I was a freelancer.  The first AD was staff and closely connected to powerful people in the organisation.  If I kicked up a fuss I would only be seen as a trouble maker.’

A few months later the, still single, producer became pregnant.  It would appear she had been looking for a sperm donor and had found a more compliant provider…

Director B was working on a high profile drama for an independent broadcaster.  The shoot was in the Peak District, far away from the production company which was based in London.  The film unit was based out in the wilds with cast and crew unable to get home for weeks on end.   It will come as no surprise that romantic assignations were formed.  As they say, what goes on the road stays on the road.   However, Director B was recently married and had a young family.  He was there to work, nothing else.

The young female producer was very flirty around director B.  On the technical recce, instead of riding on the bus with the rest of the team, the producer decided to take her own car.  It was an open-topped, Audi sports car.  It was summer and she was looking cool in sunglasses behind the wheel.  ‘She looked like she was on her way to Monte Carlo,’ said director B.  The producer invited director B to ride with her in the Audi.  ‘My spider sense tingled,’ said director B.  ‘It didn’t feel like a professional approach.’  He elected to ride in the bus, as is usual on a technical recce.  On the bus during a technical recce many important conversations are held concerning production.  The director couldn’t take part in those conversations if he was swanning around in the producer’s sports car.  This event was an indication of things to come. 

Social duties are part of a director’s job on these location shoots.  When the producer threw a party for the production in her rented home in the Peak District, Director B had little choice but to attend.   The party happened on a Thursday night.  So there was a shoot the next day.  At the party the producer became very drunk and made a pass at the married director.  At which point the director pointed out that he was due on set at 7.00am the next day and, as politely as possible, he left.  The next day the heavily hungover producer arrived on location at 4.00pm.  It was an interior and yet the producer wore her sunglasses for the entire time she was on set.  After this, the producer, who had up until then been conspicuously friendly to the director, became cold and even hostile.

When the shoot was over, the producer fired the director out of the edit.  He never worked for that production company again.

The show crashed and burned after one series due to the ineptitude of the producer.  The scripts were terrible.  Nevertheless, the producer moved serenely on to other high profile productions where she also failed and she is now out of the business.

Director C was working on a well-known soap for an independent broadcaster.  He was sitting in the edit with the male producer, the editor and a manager.   They were all watching a review of the director’s latest show.  The director was a seasoned professional but even he was shocked to hear the producer boast about his forthcoming dinner date with one of the actors in the show.   The performer in question was a bit-part player and a very bad actor.   Watching the actor on the screen, the producer proceeded to make several lascivious comments about him; comments which, if said by a heterosexual, male producer about an actress would be considered inappropriate for the workplace… to say the least.  Eventually the producer seemed to realise that he had overstepped and chided himself with: ‘Dignity.  Dignity…’ while inviting all in the room to chuckle along with his charming ‘naughtiness’.  Maybe the director didn’t laugh loudly enough because thereafter the producer proceeded to tear into his show, finding numerous supposed faults. 

Sometime later, the manager returned to the edit and took the director aside for a quiet word.  He suggested that the director should spend some time with the producer.  The manager informed the director that the producer was, ‘di-curious’; short for, director curious.   His point was clear; be ‘nice’ to the producer and the director would get more work on the show. 

The director didn’t take up the offer.  He was never asked to work on the series again.

His supposedly ‘bad’ show received a very warm critical reception.

 

Some may see these stories as deserved revenge for centuries of heterosexual male abuse.  Maybe so.  Others may say that two wrongs don't make a right.  I simply set out these stories as examples of life in television today.  They are not isolated examples.  They are three true stories, three first-hand accounts, which feed into the character of Max Virtue in TELEVISIONLAND.   Television can be a dirty business.  The obvious question that presents itself is this; how many successful directors working in television drama today didn’t say, ‘no’, when presented with similar choices?

 

Peeping Tom

In 1960 Michael Powell made the masterpiece, Peeping Tom.  It was the TELEVISIONLAND of it's time.  Or vice versa...

Zoe Kazan proves that TELEVISIONLAND is a documentary.

Although TELEVISIONLAND  may seem in many ways to be a gross caricature of life in television.  Startling evidence keeps emerging which shows it is nothing more than the truth.  From the details of Roger Ailes' behaviour at Fox, to Zoe Kazan's revelations in today's Guardian. 

Journalist Emma Brockes asked Zoe Kazan:  Was she ever directly propositioned...?

To which Kazan replied:

“No. I mean. Hmmm.” There is a long pause. “Like, I had a producer ask me on set once if I spat or swallowed. At work. He’d say, ‘Oh, it’s a joke, ha ha.’ But he was also paying my cheque and then watching me from the monitor as I made out with another actor – so when he tells me I look good, it feels different.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jul/08/zoe-kazan-actor

This is exactly Vince Poll's behaviour pattern in TELEVISIONLAND.

TELEVISIONLAND is  documentary.

The Psychopath Test and TELEVISIONLAND. Ian Reid speaks...

 

'The original idea for Televisionland came to me when I was reading Jon Ronson’s, The Psychopath Test.  Jon’s book was very entertaining but I found myself disagreeing with his thesis.  While some corporate executives can be manipulative, capricious and unpleasant, I didn’t think that amounted to psychopathy.  It was more like passive aggression, often allied to narcissistic personality disorder and other psychological conditions, but not psychopathy.  Psychopaths kill people.  That’s what they do. It’s their defining characteristic.  Murder is the thing that makes psychopaths special.  So I started to wonder, how might a fully functioning, murdering psychopath behave in a corporate environment?   That was the germ that spawned Televisionland.    Since the corporate environment I knew about was television, I decided to set my story there.

I have been careful to provide Vince with the correct clinical character traits of psychopathy but I didn’t want him to be a mere cypher for a psychological condition.  Therefore I have based Vince on life.  Vince is an amalgam of several people I have encountered personally in television.   His character traits, his physicality and many of the things he says and does, are drawn directly from life. 

The television environment is seductive and heady.  It is fertile ground for unscrupulous and egotistical characters to flourish.  In recent years we have seen many stories surface of transgressive and criminal behaviour in the sector.  Jimmy Savile was not an isolated case.  I am very familiar with the capricious, manipulative and malicious abuses of power in television.  For instance, the ‘yellow’ episode in Televsionland is lifted directly from my personal experience as a director.  Similarly, I have been sexually propositioned on more than one occasion by third parties on behalf of powerful players.  ‘Di-curious’ and ‘Vikki gets what Vikki wants’, are verbatim quotes from these encounters (the names have been changed to protect the guilty).  I declined, I hasten to add.  In fact, most of the episodes in Televisionland, apart from the murders, are drawn from life, either from my own personal experience or from first-hand accounts related to me by colleagues.  As such, there is an element of telling tales out of school here.   Televisionland is indeed, in those terms, ‘a true story’.'  

The death of Eastenders' Tiffany

Anita's exit from the soap opera, Lark Lane, in TELEVISIONLAND is spookily similar to Tiffany's classic death scene in EastEnders!

TELEVISIONLAND’S Vince Poll: Is he Frank Underwood or Donald Trump?

In Netfix’s wonderful, House of Cards, the character of Frank Underwood, brilliantly played by Kevin Spacey, is a fabulous monster.  However, it is also fair to say that Underwood is one of literature’s traditional, ‘understandable’, psychopaths.  He does terrible things but we understand his reasoning.  There is a purpose.  His appalling deeds are carried out in the service of comprehensible aims.  There is logic.

That is not the case with President Trump.   Oceans of ink have been spilled in efforts to make sense of Trump’s bizarre behaviour.  My view is that his actions can only be explained in terms of psychopathy.   Not an Underwood-like, ‘rational’ and literary psychopathy, but a real world psychopathy developing from an unfettered, childlike need for desire fulfilment.  Like a baby, Trump has wants.  He wants things and he wants them now. Poor impulse control is a key psychopathic trait, as is vanity and overbearing egotism.

In these terms it is difficult to see Underwood as a true psychopath.  He is too rational for that.  His acts of evil are the means to an end, rather than the end in themselves.  They are the rational acts of a man with a plan, albeit a man untethered from any considerations of morality.  Underwood is essentially a triangulating, Blairite character.  As has been observed many times, he has much in common with Richard III.   Richard didn’t have the princes in the tower killed because he liked killing children. He did it to consolidate power.  It was the act of a rational, if ruthlessly amoral, man.  That’s Underwood.   Trump isn’t like that.  He acts spontaneously on immediate impulse, like a baby wanting milk.  For instance, his hair-raising tweets serve no discernible purpose other than to make him personally feel bigger and more important.  When the President of the United States of America starts tweeting about a news presenter’s cosmetic surgery, logic is not part of the equation.  Trump’s sociopathic tendencies manifest in childish, impulsive blurts of wild emotion.  He acts like a mafia don, intimidating president Xi of China by boasting of his on-going attack on Syria over chocolate cake.  That is manifestly not normal.  He’s like a dysfunctional child, playing at being the president.  He is a Caligula for our time.

TELEVISIONLAND’S protagonist, Vince Poll, although he works in tv rather than politics, is much more like Donald Trump than Frank Underwood.   Like Trump, Vince’s actions are impulsive and spontaneous.  Like Trump, he succeeds against all expectations, including his own.  Like Trump, Vince is a freak.  Underwood is an understandable expression of our system when all moral boundries are removed.  Trump and Vince Poll don’t acknowledge that any system exists at all, and if it does, they don’t believe it applies to them.   Just as Trump would say that taxes are only for poor people, so he and Vince Poll feel that systems are only for little people.   Size matters here.  Although Trump is a physically large man, albeit, one with unusually small ‘hands’, he acts like a small person overcompensating for a lack of stature by, to coin a phrase, ‘bigging himself up’.  Vince is very short, only five foot two in his elevator shoes.  As such Vince’s stature feeds directly into his psychopathic behaviour.   He envies the tall, strapping actors who claim life’s bounty as if it were their God given right.  He wants, just as Trump wants, all the treasures and pleasures they have and he means to get them, by any means necessary.  

Vince Poll kills, but not in the way Underwood kills, there is rarely a greater purpose in Vince’s murders.   Vince kills because he likes it.  Killing is what he wants.   The act gratifies his needy ego but more than that, he finds murder pleasurable for its own sake.  In his mind, murder validates his existence.  As such, Vince is an expression of the self-serving, Trumpian  paradigm of our fame-obsessed, reality tv age.  It’s all about him. Vince is a legend in his own lunchtime.  Vince is not a Blairite character and he is nothing like Richard III.  Vince has more in common with Iago in Othello.   As Coleridge said in uncomprehending exasperation, Iago exhibited, ‘the motive hunting of a motiveless malignancy’.  Coleridge didn’t understand psychopathy but three centuries before Freud, Shakespeare did. 

Iago and Vince Poll are, though fictional characters, both evidently more intelligent than Trump, however they both share with the president the overriding childish need for immediate ego fulfilment and personal satisfaction, especially and essentially at the expense of others.   For them to feel big, others must be diminished.  Vince Poll may not be capable of Iago’s long term planning, however another character in TELEVISIONLAND is (no spoilers, you’ll have to read the book to discover their identity).   In the end Underwood is a bureaucrat.  However, although Trump may not be a murderer, he and Vince Poll exhibit true psychopathy, unburdened by social constraint, morality, decency or any sense of decorum.