Like many students, my University years were spent getting annihilated, not doing much work and trying to get laid at every opportunity. I somehow managed to scratch a good grade in Law, an astounding feat thanks to a website where I bought all my essays.
After leaving college, I spent a few years temping. Cleaning out the fat from the sewers was a particular highlight. My tools in the turd trade were a white jump suit – yes white – and a long broom handle with a hook on the end. This was used to break up all the congealed fat that had made its way down to the sewers from kitchen sinks. That may not sound too bad but the solidified fat acted like a sieve catching every floater and other unimaginable objects from toilets across London. I threw up violently the first time and only did one more day before I thought it just wasn’t worth it.
Then there were the mind-numbing filing jobs in banks working with fat girls who would go out at lunchtime, drink Gin with slimline tonic and eat baked potatoes with just tuna. To those girls I can now tell you an amazing secret - tonic water doesn’t make you fat! It’s all the chocolate, cakes, crisps, KFCs, burgers and curries you shove down your enormous gob every week that make you fat. Losing weight is actually a very simple science.
The litany of crap jobs continued for a year or so until I met Samantha in a club. She was a plainish brunette with an astounding body and a penchant for the gak. As well as being a complete and utter lunatic, it turned out that her father owned a very successful production company making children’s programmes that sold across the world. Her Dad got a producer to interview me for a runner’s position. Steve, the gayest man I’d ever met (and still is to this day), flounced in and proceeded to tell me what a crisis he was having with one of the presenters who was about to be exposed in The News of The World. Apparently her wholesome image was about to take a battering with pictures of her snorting coke. This was a refreshing change to any other interview I’d ever had and I that’s when I thought that my future lay in TV. Steve actually didn’t care what I was like and wasn’t really conducting an interview, he’d been told by Samantha’s dad to talk to me and knew that it was actually a foregone conclusion.
So began my first TV job. It didn’t last very long because when I stopped seeing Samantha a few weeks later, it was amazing to find myself not in the job anymore.
August 6th, 2009 at 12:12
I’m in my final year of a media studies degree. I want to be a producer/director, what’s the best thing I can do to improve my chances of getting a job when I leave?
August 7th, 2009 at 12:17
I hate to tell you but when your lecturers say that once you’ve got your media studies degree, getting a good job in TV is all but guaranteed, that’s absolute bollocks. I’m sorry to say this but if you’re lucky enough to land a job after college, it will almost certainly be one of the most junior positions on the production. Be prepared to do the really bad jobs on the production.
August 7th, 2009 at 17:27
Oh great, thanks a bunch. I’m wasting my time then.
August 8th, 2009 at 10:29
Always amazes me that media graduates seem to think that they can graduate and go straight into senior roles - presumably this is something that is fed to them by their lecturers, who have all presumably failed to make it big in the industry themselves.
Anyway, reading this makes me feel slightly better about some of the things I’ve done in my few years of TV so far…
August 8th, 2009 at 10:56
Hi there. Thanks for stopping by. If any of my university lecturers had said I’d be a shoo-in for job - once I’d sobered up, I would have believed them.
Of course it’s not just the jobs we have done pre-tv career, it’s the ones we are cursed to take as freelancers while ‘in between’ gigs. I’m sure you’re no stranger to those.