Talented?

Keep clear of the BBC's talent scouts
Nick Thomas
NOT THAT 1 wish to nag, but 1 feel I should point out that you only have a month to go. April 28th is the closing date for the submission of your sitcom script to BBC Talent, so you'd better get a move on. Exciting, isn't it? As the leaflet stapled to the Radio Times informs us:
"If it's funny, we'll pay you a commission and invite you to a two-day workshop on situation comedy. If it's really funny, we'll put it on the radio or maybe television...The 10 successful writers will have a BBC producer allocated to them to mentor their script."
I don't know about you, but I find the prospect of a two-day workshop on situation comedy rather offputting. It carries overtones of self-defeat. The object of the whole BBC Talent exercise is presumably to recruit the next extended family of Aunty's nephews and nieces, to inject a huge shot of originality into a corporadon whose output is increasingly stale and fornmluic. So if someone has already produced a script that's funny, or even really funny, the smart thing would surely be to obtain a court order preventing them from coming within 50 yards of any BBC premises, lest they, too, fall to the wasting disease. Leave them alone, let them submit their scripts by e-mail without ever meeting a producer, and we might end up with something worth its air time.
That second sentence strikes a jarring note, as well. Maybe television? Does that mean TV is the top prize, or consolation for the runner-up? Either way it should make us wonder whether these people know what they're doing, for it necessarily implies that one medium is superior to the other. TV is certainly still more glamorous, though the gap is nowhere near as wide as it used to be, but the tacit admission of this fact appeals merely to the vanity of the entrant. Worse, it is an assumption which still informs the decisions of the programmers, who persists in trying out comedy on radio before commissioning a small screen version. This is not just insulting to the radio audience, it is also boneheadedly wrong, because getting laughs in each of the two media are radically different skills for writers and performers alike. The Goon Show, The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy and Alan Partridge were all massive hits in radio because, in their different ways, they offered undiluted verbal humour while stimulating the visual imaginations of their audience. Levered and squashed into the round hole of a TV format, they elicited only affectionate smiles. So before we otter the fruits of our creativity to the BBC. we should pause to consider what might happen to them after the thrill of receiving that commission (amount unspecified) has warned off.
The introduction to the Talent leaflet reminds us; "Many of your favourite presenters, performers, writers and producers began their careers at the BBC," which would seem to imply that they have subsequently taken their talents elsewhere. I think we can be forgiven for asking why.
Of course the confidence of my fellow pedants on the authority of BBC Talent will have been undermined at once simply by the sloppiness with which its blurb was written, the ambiguities, the inappropriate punctuation, the use of "mentor" as a verb. Undoubtedly the malign influence of the glamorous medium is to blame, for TV's worst crime has been to distract its audience from the disciplines of language, and raise a generation of people who neither know nor care how a sentence is constructed.
As that unusually gifted TV writer, Jimmy McGovern of Cracker fame, remarked in Monday's Times: "You never hear anyone in television say 'this is a great story but, I'm sorry, you can't write'. Television is not like that."