January 2011 offcuts_Jan Offcuts 2010.qxd.qxd - The OKS Association

More documents

Recommendations

Info

THE WORKING CLASSES As a TV Producer part of my job is coming up with new ideas. This year’s most controversial was The Day The Immigrants Left which was shown on BBC1, presented by Evan Davies and watched by around six million people. I wanted to make a programme about something that people were talking about. Immigration is definitely one of the hottest potatoes in Britain but how to make a programme about it that anybody wanted to watch However important it is, once the news is over, wouldn’t most people prefer to put their feet up in front of X- Factor Then it struck me. I’d heard it so many times: “They’re taking our houses and jobs. Why don’t they just F... off back home!” I started to think - what would happen if the immigrants really did leave I decided to do something daring - we would conduct a controversial social experiment, a TV stunt with a real purpose, where we actually would take away the immigrants and give British-born locals the chance to take over their jobs. Crazy, but it could just work on TV. The BBC was excited about the idea but also nervous that it couldn’t be done so it was my job to prove it could. We decided to set the programme in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, which used to be one of the most ethnically “English” towns in Britain until six years ago when thousands of Eastern European immigrant workers moved in. Locals now call it “Wizbekistan”! When the assistant producer and I went for our first visit we realised how tough it was going to be to get people to take part. The immigrants were scared to talk in case they lost their jobs and the locals had plenty to say about the subject but were, not surprisingly, worried about being filmed. We literally tramped the streets until we had enough people to make the experiment work. But with such a controversial subject we always had to be careful that what we filmed was a genuine attempt to get every side of the story. We obviously couldn’t send away a whole town of immigrant workers, so we just targeted a cross section of jobs – croppickers on a farm, production line workers in a packing plant, waiting staff and cooks at the Indian restaurant, etc. and with their permission we replaced them with our local British “wannabe” workers. Then it was time for the action to begin. When it came to the big day the local workers just seemed to hang themselves. We’d tried our hardest to find people who genuinely needed a job and had the kind of skills that would fit, but in the final reckoning, they turned up hours late, others called in sick and those who did come to work found all kinds of excuses as to why they weren’t able to keep up with their fellow (immigrant) workers. They even accused people of setting up the conveyor belt too fast (in fact it was slowed down a bit for their first day), complaining about being told what to do by a foreigner, and giving up half-way through the day because it was too difficult. When the final show went out, it was a hugely controversial hit, watched by 6 million people and written about in all the papers, on the radio, TV and the internet. The most common reaction was “It made me ashamed to be British”. It wasn’t quite the result we were expecting but it certainly made people sit up and think again about an important subject! Deborah Colman (GR 1983-85) (The programme Deborah describes went out on BBC1 Wednesday 24 February 2010). IS THAT PUBLISHING WELL I’LL BE DAMNED! The publishing bug There was a certain inevitability that, with hindsight, I would go into publishing and become an editor. My father was a Fleet Street journalist before the war, and I enjoyed writing small contributions for my prep school magazine, for The Cantuarian and Richard Branson’s recently started Student magazine while I was at King’s, and then decided that Linacre had enough home-grown talent for me to bring out a house magazine, Oracle, which I think managed only two editions, and was run off on a spirit duplicator machine in the staff common room. I have no idea how the machine worked, but you had to generate a master copy of each page that was transferred to blank sheets of paper, as you cranked a handle, by the use of a liquid that smelt like meths. The master copy had a limited life, but could manage many more copies of Oracle than I could ever hope to circulate. However, the excitement of having an idea for a publication, commissioning contributors for it, and witnessing the mechanics of going into print, confirmed for me my love of publishing. At university I got involved in the college magazine straightaway, being offered the editorship in my second year. There was the added attraction that, instead of having to move out into digs, a room in college came with the job. However, I probably have the dubious distinction of being responsible for an upheaval in the college’s magazine output. I wanted to produce a publication that had a mix of literary creativity and journalistic treatment of stories and issues of topical relevance, and decided that a record of how the (talented and enthusiastic) sports teams and leisure activity clubs had fared through the year would sit uncomfortably with this approach – and so left them out. There were complaints, inevitably, but eventually all this information found a place in subsequent official college magazines, glossily and professionally produced and very different animals from the scruffy OKS Offcuts • Jan 2011 • Issue 31 8 The OKS Association • www.oks.org.uk
undergraduate magazine I had published. I like to think this liberated the undergraduates’ magazine to be as freewheeling and creative as I hoped they would henceforth be, but to be honest I don’t know what became of it after I left university. Getting into publishing Once I had graduated I applied for a number of graduate trainee posts with large London book publishers, but without success. However, many publishers still look to recruit a small number of staff this way, and I would recommend this route to anyone keen to get into publishing. The pattern is to move you around a number of different departments, whether your stated interest is in sales, editorial, or any other publishing function, so that you get an overall view of how the company works in a way that few are lucky enough to enjoy. My first move into publishing was in a role and on a publication that was completely outside the direction in which I had been aiming: I became Assistant Editor on a monthly financial magazine. I know nothing about the world of finance, but as the magazine had a tiny circulation and only two full-time staff, the job involved many additional responsibilities, such as commissioning, editing, proof reading, marketing and production (I was sent down to the printer to see how the magazine’s articles were first turned into lines of hot metal type – an anachronism even in the 1970s.) I hated the job and didn’t last long, but I had gained an excellent grounding in the mechanics of creating, producing and selling a publication. I decided to make a determined effort to get into book publishing again. As my degree was in English it was natural for me to approach literary publishers, and I started with all the ones whose names I already knew, then the ones who published my favourite authors, but got nowhere. I then moved on to non-fiction publishers, where I struck lucky, and have been ever since. Looking back, I am glad that the world of non-fiction publishing was kind enough to draw me in, as I don’t think I would have taken to fiction. I had very high-minded ideals of what made good literature and, for example, would have rejected any Jeffrey Archer typescript outright, thus proving myself a complete commercial failure as a fiction publisher. Instead, I found I enjoyed working with photographers, illustrators and book designers to create pages that were as clear and as visually stunning as possible, and liked the fact that we were working together as a team to create something that was both attractive and informationpacked. Little or none of this happens with a work of fiction. To generalise hugely, in the world of fiction publishing the sales department decides what size of page the novel should be printed on, how many pages the book should have, and will look to the designers to come up with an arresting cover. The marketing and publicity departments produce ideas for generating interest and sales of the book. Your job as an editor is to have an excellent knowledge of what is selling well, and a finely tuned sense of what makes a good piece of fiction. Once you have made a sound case to the company to sign up your author, your work on that book is mostly complete, and you must get on and hunt down the next talented writer. Some people live for this, and it can be profoundly rewarding to spot and nurture new talent, as well as to work with and develop the output of established authors. Going with the flow The mechanics of printing have, of course, developed hugely over the years that I have been involved. Having come in at the very last gasp of hot-metal setting, I have seen it move from camera-ready copy to photosetting, from supplying typed sheets of text to typesetters to the virtual eradication of typesetting as an industry once authors started supplying their text on floppy disc. Once upon a time printers proofed up your text, now you generate the pages in-house, and send printers the text and illustrations exactly as you want them to appear. The competition, too, has been nibbling away at fiction and nonfiction publishing’s pre-eminence in communicating words and pictures, from talking books, videos and DVDs to the internet and – probably soon – e-readers. The texts of many out-of-copyright books, including a number of classics, are freely available on the internet, and while they don’t have the physical appeal of a book they have the advantage that one can carry out a number of mechanical tasks that some scholars find useful, such as word counts, word frequencies, and so on. Anyone thinking of going into publishing in the next few years has to take two things on board: firstly, the book publishing world has shrunk and will continue to do so, and secondly, following on from this, a publisher nowadays is someone who publishes the material he owns in a number of different formats. For many companies, the money made from selling physical copies of books is one of the smallest sources of revenue; income from digital sales, on the other hand, is steadily increasing, previously unheard-of publishing roles such as Digital Sales Director or Electronic Publisher reflect this. The right rights The buzz phrase now is ‘Content is king’. Publishing the content in the 21st century is so changed from what it used to be that the very word ‘publisher’ is almost an anachronism; perhaps a term like ‘media provider’ is more appropriate, and commissioning editors will become ‘content scouts’. For years it has become important for publishers to own the majority if not all of the rights to anything they handle. These rights include the right to publish in all languages, in any country, in book, magazine and serial rights, film rights, rights to publish (as a whole or in extracts) by all electronic means (both in existing forms and in forms yet to be invented), and the rights to license illustrations to, for example, picture agencies or newspapers. While publishers still need people on their staff to bring new ideas into the company, an increasing percentage of new jobs are in marketing, and in working with new digital technology; in other words, going out and selling subsidiary rights to the maximum, and having the technical skills to work with electronic handling and transmission of the different types of content. Simon Tuite (LN 1965-70) OKS Offcuts • Jan 2011 • Issue 31 9 The OKS Association • www.oks.org.uk
Page 1 and 2: OKS January 2011 No.31 Months of pr
Page 3 and 4: Dr Liz Pidoux, Luxmoore Reunion Spe
Page 5 and 6: Never mind, Luxmoore rejoiced in it
Page 7: LORD PILKINGTON We are grateful to
Page 11 and 12: To Trust and To Love: Sermons and A
Page 13 and 14: Gavrilo Princip: The Assassin who S
Page 15 and 16: Musical Canterbury A Recital What h
Page 17 and 18: The OKS Association Hugh Robertson
Page 19 and 20: Rowing from Westbere Lake to West L

January 2011 offcuts_Jan Offcuts 2010.qxd.qxd - The OKS Association

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?