Have you ever had experience of working in a hostile environment? With the picture this book paints of the industry, apparently anyone who works in TV can add this to their CV! This is my take on Elsa Sharp’s new book, “How to Get a Job in Television: Build Your Career from Runner to Series Producer.”
“It’s a very selfish industry and it’s very ruthless. It doesn’t suffer fools gladly or tolerate weakness. If someone’s not able to do their job properly it’s so incestuous that it gets around the industry really quickly. It’s a very superficial industry. If you have a hit, everyone wants to know you, if not…..” (C4 Executive).
Does this sound right to you? My fellow Talent Manager and experienced senior producer, Elsa Sharp, has just published How To Get A Job In Television: Build Your Career From Runner To Series Producer. It’s a detailed 278-page guide to opportunities and pitfalls that gives a realistic picture of the industry today, warts and all.
Although this book is really aimed at newcomers to the industry, specifically runners and researchers, it makes interesting reading for anyone in this business. It gives opinions from some 50 people working in the industry (disclosure: including me) from the chairman of RDF Group, Grant Mansfield, and Daisy Goodwin of Silver River, to runners, Glen Barnard and Helen Beaumont, and several case studies of how they got to where they are now.
The book gives comprehensive listings of the duties of the different production roles up to executive producer, as well as detailed explanations of call sheets, the fault lines between production, development, legal pitfalls, health & safety, and the edit suite. However, the real unique selling point of this work is the advice that Elsa and her contributors give on most aspects of do’s and don’ts of making a career in TV, backed up by first hand experience. The listings and advice together make this a very reliable guide.
Here’s a glimpse of what not to do: Julia Waring, RDF’s Creative Resources Head, remembers being kissed by a young man at interview before they had even begun to talk. She asked, out of interest, why he’d just kissed her. He replied, “My mum told me to do it”. It seems he didn’t get the job.
Some of the combined advice is contradictory, of course. I am quoted saying that a CV should be interpretive, giving a picture of who you are and what you offer, rather than a list of events, but Elsa calmly follows up by saying that she personally prefers to see a detailed chronology instead.
Elsa Sharp doesn’t shirk from noting that the business can be tough, brutal and you can be subject to unfair treatment and bullying, but she takes an optimistic line:
“Bullying is endemic in TV and it is sometimes tolerated for longer than it should be, but bullies do get their come-uppance in the end”.
I can personally think of one commissioning editor who was so famously difficult to work with that it has taken at least 18 months to find a production company that would employ her after she left the broadcaster, and this may be the same example that Elsa anonymously highlights here.
Working abroad gets an examination, concluding that you need to work as a programme consultant unless you have genuine local knowledge of where you want to work. It even takes a stab at the future of TV, and here Peter Bazalgette (who is the closest thing to Yoda we have in the UK TV industry), gives a rosy prediction that TV will remain popular, that it will use the internet as a crèche of creative and presenting talent which it can draw on, and that broadcasting will be amply funded by the power of brand marketing. And what will be the most important tools if you want to thrive in the future? According to Elsa’s book, it’s multi-skilling and entrepreneurialism.
This book will give newcomers wise advice on how to get ahead, but also a warning that television production is a stressful business in which you might never succeed if your face doesn’t fit. On the upside, Elsa Sharp says that you could find among your colleagues the most interesting, intelligent, fascinating people that you can find anywhere. But here’s Savannah Media MD Richard Drew’s assessment of our abilities,
“My rule of thumb…. is that ten percent of people in TV are amazing, eighty percent are OK, to varying degrees, and the other ten percent are absolutely awful”.
This book is a good guide to keep to hand, but Elsa offers no certainties:
“TV is an endless source of conundrums which you have to solve. You just have to be prepared to meet the challenge and keep your wits about you!”