But, pre-recording future events is easier, isn’t it?
April 3rd, 2012 at 07:22pm
This afternoon (yes, I do sometimes sleep in the afternoon when I’m on night shift) I had a dream that I was a regular guest on a TV show. It was my role to opine on the news of the day, and it looked like the TV show was a breakfast show, although it wasn’t one of the breakfast shows which is currently in existence. Instead it was a show titled “Talking” and had a set which looked like it was built out of concrete in Soviet Russia (hmmm, Maritz will read this…I wonder what she thinks of concrete buildings?), with a few small square bits of coloured paper stuck to the wall to make it look less bland…not that it helped.
Anyway, I walked on to the set one day for my segment, took my seat and was approached by a producer who quickly whisked me away in to an office to inform me that I was not going to appear that day, and would instead need to wait around until the end of the show so that I could pre-record a month’s worth of segments. According to the producer, I was “very difficult and troublesome to work with” because I wanted a cup of coffee each day instead of the company’s usual glass of water. According to the producer, coffee was “hard to come by” and “goes off very quickly once opened” and it was therefore not feasible to buy a new jar of coffee every few days when I was the only person drinking it. Instead, what they were going to do was buy a jar of coffee once per month and make me one cup of coffee per segment so that the jar would be emptied, the coffee would not be going to waste, and they would only need to buy one jar per month instead of four.
I told the producer that this was insanity, and that it would be impossible to pre-record opinion pieces on the news of the day a month before the news had happened, to which the producer replied “but, pre-recording future events is easier, isn’t it? I mean, that way you don’t have to worry about being late with a story because you can be ahead of it.”
I stared at the producer blankly before bursting out laughing, but the producer didn’t get it. I asked him how he expected me to know what would happen in advance, and he informed me that it was simple.
“News is all on the teleprompter, so if we just scroll forward then you can read it and then record your opinion segment” he said.
I told him that he was nuts, and as his decision had the full backing of the network executives, I enacted the severance clause in my contract which entitled me to one free tin of coffee and three coloured squares from the studio wall, and I left.
My segment was replaced that day by Blinky The Fortune-Telling Clown who, after a month on-air, had a zero percent accuracy rating. Oddly, the ratings for the show went up, and he was awarded with two segments per day. The network even launched an advertising campaign for it: “Just as much Talking, with double in inaccuracy”.
The dream ended when I saw the ad for that in the newspaper.
Samuel
Entry Filed under: Samuel's Dreams
