Tonight I’m Going To Party Like It’s 1995

Tonight I'm Going To Party Like It's 1995

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.

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