I never wanted to be on TV
It just sort of happened
Just before I dive in, my serialised novel ‘Time & Money’ is gaining momentum and can be read here.
I watched a ‘how to’ video on YouTube with my wife this morning. It was about how you screen print multiple colours onto a T shirt. It’s not something I’m interested in, but my wife, who normally does fine art prints using a massive medieval looking printing press, has been asked to produce some T shirts bearing some of her more popular prints.
Anyway, the point is, the young woman fronting the videos was a perfect example of a TV presenter, looking straight at the camera, clear succinct sentences that conveyed the information without hesitation or repetition. She was a natural.
25 years ago her skills would be scooped up by some minor broadcast channel and she’d have earned a basic living being a vaguely familiar TV face. She would have had to follow the routine of whatever show she was in, and spout words supplied by the producers, covering topics she had no control over.
Today she has a healthy following on YouTube and works when she wants, how she wants and saying what she wants. I don’t expect she makes much money, but there are some who do.
25 years ago I used to make fun of people who stated they wanted to be a ‘TV presenter.’ Having done the job for decades I knew it was of very little actual importance. Sure, there are some people with skills in other areas who have, by default, become TV presenters, but that was very much a secondary occupation for them.
If you had set out to become a TV presenter, without a thought about what you were presenting, then I always believed it was a bit sad. A bit needy and tragic. A long time ago it was a very popular option for young people, the list of dream roles for many was very short, footballer, movie star,TV presenter.
The observation being, achieving success in the first two, really big challenge requiring genuine skill and talent, enormous luck and incredible amounts of hard work. The third option? Meh, if you are moderately presentable, in the UK specifically if you have a regional accent and you are desperate enough, you might end up being a TV presenter, but it’s a bit of a hollow victory.
I’m not sure now what my early resistance to working on TV was all about. I’m talking about the early 1980’s when I was having a lot of fun, and finally earning a living pratting about on stage. I got offered a lead role in a BBC drama in 1983 and I said no. Looking back it was probably a good thing as I wouldn’t have been any good. My fellow performers supported this decision, my friends outside show biz were appalled.
The group I worked with, the Joeys, did appear on TV but only twice. Once on a BBC news program, and once on a truly appalling early Channel 4 comedy show. The way we were treated on that show was so unpleasant we all vowed to steer clear of the capitalist, reactionary, misogynist and homophobic TV industry. I say that in all seriousness, back in the 1970’s and 80’s it was all those things and worse.
Much later, when the Joeys exploded and we all went our seperate ways, I was asked to ‘meet’ the writers of a TV series called Red Dwarf. The reason it was called a meeting was because I refused to do auditions, I have done them but I was so depressed afterwards I knew I wasn’t cut out for that life and didn’t have the desire you need to become an actor.
However, thankfully I got on with the two writers, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor and after initial reservations, I did end up playing Kryten in this now legendary long running TV sci-fi comedy series. I am so grateful to fate, to Paul Jackson, the producer who bullied me into accepting, Rob and Doug and of course to the rest of the cast that I got the job and stuck with it for the next 32 years
For the next ten years I worked on multiple series of Red Dwarf, but when I was walking down the street, doing the shopping, catching a train, waiting for a bus, very, very few people recognised me and said anything.
This really suited me, I had inadvertently found a way be work on an amazing TV show that millions of people watched (more than ever watched Top Gear, I know it doesn’t mean anything in the grand scheme but it’s a little nugget I hang on to) and I remained largely anonymous for a decade.
Then I met a young woman called Cathy Rogers. She’d had an idea for a engineering competition show called Scrapheap Challenge. She had never seen Red Dwarf, she had only seen me presenting, (yes, I was by that time an occasional TV presenter, the thing I never wanted to be) for the Open University. An educational TV show connected to an amazing adult learning establishment.
The idea she had eventually turned into Scrapheap Challenge, a show I worked on for another 10 years. So I admit it, someone who claims to not want to be on TV did has spent a hell of a lot of time appearing on TV since 1988.
Out of that experience, particularly working in the USA, specifically California at the time the true impact of millions of cars in cities burning billions of litres of fossil fuel started to be understood, grew the idea of The Fully Charged Show. Where I continue to be a wretched TV presenter to the present day.
And my goodness, how things have changed. What young person wants to be a TV presenter today. Not many, in fact most wouldn’t even know the role existed.
Having just been in China at the Shanghai auto show on press day, a term which used to mean people who wrote for motoring magazines or newspapers, radio and TV shows. It no longer means that.
Press day now means a young Chinese woman with 3 or 4 phones, a small tripod to hold one phone while she talks at 90 miles an hour non stop for hours, responds to written questions on the other phones, thumbs moving at lighting speed while she continues to talk, churning out hours and hours of content in competition with maybe 10 thousand other young Chinese women.
I’m sure some of them only had a couple of thousand followers, but I later learned that some of them have over 100 million people who have subscribed to their feed on Bilibili or TikTok.
And there’s an old, balding man who says he doesn’t want to be on TV.
Sit down love. Don’t worry about it, no one cares and also, no one remembers.
Kryten's surname is 523P, not 523C. What a jerky surname that would be.
Every job I've ever had has kinda just happened, usually with a quick meeting as well, not formal interviews. :D I just drift from thing to thing.