ProductionBase is almost exactly fifteen years old. I know this, because I have on my desk a champagne cork from a Camden wine bar with the biro inscription, “ProductionBase’s first day of trading, January 11 1995. Moray and Susan”. What that really meant was that I’d found a desk and got the phone line connected.
Perhaps the genesis of the ProductionBase was a meeting of TV industry figures called together in September 1999 by producers, Andrea Michell and Jane Thomas, to create a central point of information about production talent. Or maybe it was a conversation I’d had in August on Santa Monica beach with my then girlfriend Susan, a researcher who had just finished a contract with World of Wonder, and wished there was somewhere she could look for a comprehensive round-up of available jobs in TV production. Both propelled me into setting up the PB.
Why was there was no such database of production people already in 1995? Most production companies and departments relied on production managers’ contact books for the programme staff they knew and liked, and they sifted through the sack-loads of prospective CVs posted through their letterboxes every week for interesting looking newcomers.
There was already the small, personalised agency called the Research Register run by Diana Miller, which then promoted some 65 carefully selected clients. The British Film Commission had put together the bones of a free creative talent database, but few people in television production had put in their details. And of course, it took minutes to download a single static web page, let alone access any kind of dynamic online database. Put it like this, my most popular marketing material for the first three years was a glossy filofax insert!
For nearly five years, no one could join the PB unless I met them first. I had to believe there was a good chance of finding them new work before I took them on. Ten weeks after launch, I knew things were working when I heard a cameraman say to a colleague, “Oh yes, The Production Base. Are you with them?”. “Them” was me sitting at my desk wracking my brains for what to do next.
But I had worked out some basic concepts already. I had learned in my job at Pact that a single person has no bargaining power, but get a group of like-minded people together and they can really get things shifted in their favour. I thought that I could gather together individual programme-makers and create an influential constituency. Bectu, a union which I support wholeheartedly, was not courting freelance members then, and there was no other gathering point for this disparate community. My motivation wasn’t Alan Sugar-like profit, but it had a lot to do with my ego; I was convinced that if you got the community of members right, then the business would follow. It did.
By 1997, the Production Base was established enough to help create a freelance TV producers’ pressure group called Promo, chaired by documentary-maker, Ian Lilley. This had a signatory list of three hundred or so programme-makers, and called for clearer freelance rates, better health & safety and working conditions. Although Promo gained coverage in Broadcast, and took a stand at the Edinburgh TV Festival, its main achievement was to wake up Bectu to a key part of the workforce which needed its help. The later success of the self-created TVWrap campaign of 2005, which ended complacency about abusive long-term unpaid work experience in TV production, far outshone Promo’s earlier efforts. But both campaigns were able to access a homogenous community of TV freelancers at a single place.
By coincidence, this month also marks the tenth anniversary of the ProductionBase’s move from a phone & fax-based service to the web. Again, there was a basic concept involved in this launch. If you could get people to talk to each other, and coalesce through the website, then you could provide a level of service and importance to your members which goes far beyond just finding the next job. This would later be termed Social Networking, but we were trying to foster the thing long before we heard the phrase.
The web really changed what we could do for our members. Pre-web, the irony was that you mainly heard about new job leads when you were still working in a production office. But when your contract ended, you also dropped off the grapevine. You might meet TV friends for drinks or a coffee hoping to pick up any leads they might of heard of at work, but otherwise you were out in the cold. Once you could go online at any time of day or night to the ProductionBase, it was much easier to be proactive in the search for work from your own home.
The ProductionBase is now an established tool used by most production companies and thousands of freelancers. The culture of television has changed a lot in fifteen years, though not all for the better. I have written before that good production skills are undervalued by employers and that I expect that there will be a correction to this at some point as broadcast television declines while screen production work expands on other platforms using your skills. But the ProductionBase has played a big part in giving power to the freelancer’s elbow in the meantime.
It is over three years since I left the ProductionBase in the hands of new management , and its success has been a team effort for over the last decade, but I am still proud to have helped build this freelance resource.
Happy 15th birthday, ProductionBase!