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’.'