Have I got a Reality TV show for you?!

So I was at this dinner party and among the guests sat a Bank Manager. As we swilled nice wine and nibbled cheese, the room went quiet, I saw my chance. “Hey”, I coughed in the direction of the Bank Manager through some crumbly Gouda, “I’ve got a great idea for a bank account”…

I bet he gets that all the time. I know I do, whenever I say the words… “I produce TV. Mostly reality”.

Yes. I’ve heard a lot of dinner-party pitches. Date My Fridge, (I won’t even break that one down for you – I think you get it), My Gran Can Dance! and any number of shows where the ‘surprise twist is that someone is going to win ONE MILLION DOLLARS’. Thank goodness for good wine and cheese.

Now, I’m not ragging on people having ideas. Keep ‘em coming, I do love to hear them. But, the problem is that it takes a lot of work to get even MY shows on air, let alone shows from someone I just met . And the truth of it is, when someone pitches an idea it just sounds like a lot of work to me – shooting pitch tapes, scouting for new on-screen talent, re-cutting the tape, convincing my agent this idea doesn’t suck as much as he thinks it does, putting up the cash to fly to the East Coast to meet the 28 year-old Executives who barely reach over their important-looking desk, and who aren’t important enough to even offer you coffee, let alone a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and who have to pitch this show they clearly don’t understand to their bosses at the Wednesday meeting. Then waiting for the inevitable rejections. And then doing it all again with the next idea I get pitched standing in the Gents in the Mondrian.

Yes. It’s a lot of work – regardless how mindless, shoddily shot, or how poorly constructed the shows that we yell at on TV might be – I guarantee you that a lot of work went into them. So it’s difficult to get overly excited when you hear yet another good idea you won’t have time in the world to sell as it needs to be sold.

But it’s more than that.

The really real reality of Reality TV is that not only have most of these shows already been pitched – a good lot of them have even already been made. Some have even been sold to Germany.

When I first started in TV back in the mid ‘90’s, one drunken evening my producing team came up with a game show featuring divorcing couples betting their contested household contents on general knowledge questions. Get more questions correct and you might end up with the TV, the Bert Bacharach collection and if you’re lucky, even the lawnmower. I think we called it ‘SPLITTERS’. We thought it was so horrible and cruel and outrageous that we could never pitch it. How we laughed. What a night.

Well, this morning they announced that show, pitched by someone I never met, just got picked up by a big network.

Call it ‘Zietgeist’, call it ‘a clever mix of two successful existing formats’, call it ‘thievery’ if you will. The simple truth of it is that the very thing that makes Reality TV a great industry to work in, that it’s fast and relatively cheap to produce, is exactly what is working against every one of us toiling hard to come up with shows. Reality TV has such a fast turnaround, and such an enormous rate of failure, that I can guarantee you that whatever genius idea you might have, I’m sorry to say, that unless you own the talent, the access or the network, someone better placed is already on it.

So, back to that dinner party – with me, finger pointing excitedly, and spouting my half knowledge about ISAs and high yield accounts. The Bank Manager nods politely. You see, what the Bank Manager is actually thinking is, “Mmmm. Nice Gouda”.