While idly going through Youtube I came across old episodes of a TVS programme called TV Weekly. For those who don't know TV Weekly was a programme that looked behind the scenes at the industry. The last episode can be found here:
It got me thinking. With the only exceptions (that I know of) being Newswatch and Points Of View there's nothing that provides insight into the actual business of Television. I feel that a programme like ABC Australia's Mediawatch would have some kind of audience.
There used to be a magazine called 'The Box' which took a fun, and in depth look at television programmes - it lasted all of two editions (just as I had sent in a postal subscription a week before it closed) and I thought a TV version of that would be good.
I think a really good, in depth intelligent look at the business of television, with plenty of industry jargon and behind the scenes footage would make great series.
There have been other programmes looking at TV, but aimed at the casual viewer, rather than the anoraks.
But mostly they were one off docs 'And Finally' which looked at News At Ten, before ITV put it into retiremement, only to bring it back again a few years later. There was a 4 part wider look at Television News which is out there in the wilds.
TVS did a Sunday evening programme called The Television Show - which Fern Brittan may have hosted - and I think TV Weekly sprouted out of the cancellation of that show.
Peter Fiddick presented a schools series about television called 'The Television Programme' made by Westward, and there's at least one full episode - ironically enough about how to win or retain a francise with the IBA - and slithers and fragments of other episodes of the series on YouTube.
Perhaps some of those behind-the-scenes programmes were a bit self-regarding but I think they were partly responsible for me being in the career I'm in. I know the little bits and pieces they sometimes did in the Broom Cupboard certainly were.
Probably the most recent great series about the mechanics of television would've been Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe and (to a lesser extent) Newswipe. How Television Ruined Your Life as well, of course.
Slightly related, I was thinking the other day about those archive clip shows like Windmill and Boxpops and how important they were to me because they were the first places I saw things like Monty Python sketches and bits of old comedy shows that weren't repeated at the time. Today anything similar would be about nostalgia (e.g. The TV That Made Me), but these went out at the end of Children's BBC on a Sunday morning and were just as much about introducing these clips to kids for the first time.
There was a series produced for 4Learning back in 2003, which a small series of a behind the scenes of Channel 4, from the boardroom, Continuity, ITN, Hollyoaks etc. I had the series on VHS at the time, but that was very informative.
Granada's "Television" was an excellent series in this regard.
Tyne Tees's "Kellyvision" was also really good, a couple of episodes are on YouTube. There was one going behind the scenes into VT/telecine which isn't readily available, that spent five minutes going through the basics of how to use an Aston 3 capgen. I'm not sure what the normal kids would have made of that but I found it interesting. In the 1990s the company also made "Frost on the Box" which covered similar ground, including Bill Steel trying to train Frostie to be a continuity announcer.
On YouTube there are some fascinating internal training videos, and run-throughs by archivists on how the technical stuff is operated and how to detect/resolve faults etc.