Telestars

YouTube Meets The X Factor

RATIONALE

Parallels between broadcast television and the motor industry are not hard to find.

In the beginning, both Ford and the BBC had a virtual monopoly on their markets and similar sales propositions - you can have any colour you like as long as it's black (and white).

The wheel came off for the US and UK car industries in the 80s, when Japanese manufacturers like Honda and Toyota started producing better quality products at a fraction of the price.

But it wasn't competition that wiped-out the dinosaurs of the motor trade. It was complacency. The monopolist mindset that was the foundation of the industry still lived on in the board-rooms of the only production lines in town.

It's an irony of truly classic proportions, that the forces that turned those production lines to rust were born not in Japan, but in American universities. Financed by the very industries that the powers they unleashed would eventually destroy.

The work of Prof Deming and others had been largely dismissed by the captains of both American and British industry as airy-fairy academic twaddle.

So when the time came to provide aid for the reconstruction of a country they had recently reduced to radioactive rubble, popping the likes of Prof Deming on one of the first planes across the Pacific was a bit of a no-brainer.

You can't really blame them. The 'academic twaddle' that was Deming's major stock-in-trade involved endless ruminations on the precise definition of the word 'quality'. And one of the major conclusions of his many years of research was that it ought to be used as a verb, not noun.

Well. You can imagine what those hard-headed boys in the boardroom might have had to say about that!

'Do what? So we endow your university with Christ knows how many millions every year and this is the best you can come up with? They say Japan is lovely this time of year. Have a nice day.'

But the Japanese could not afford to be so complacent. So when Prof Deming arrived, they took him at his word and welcomed him with open arms.

As it turned out, what Deming was trying to say was that quality was a 'doing' word, not a thing. A dynamic process, not a static objective.

Because, producer-defined objectives are nothing more than the producers pleasing themselves. Which, in a free and open market, is like putting your head in the sand and waiting for the tide to wash you away.

According to Deming, genuine quality could only be achieved by continuous customer-led processes, not producer-defined standards, targets or outcomes. And the quality-control inspectors who policed the production lines weren't the cure for poor quality - they were the major cause of it.

That's what Deming meant when he said quality is a verb, not a noun.

And it was the application of that simple principle to the Toyota Production System that beat the US motor industry into the dust.

It should come as no surprise that most US and UK industrialists and politicians in the 1940s simply didn't want to know.

More than 60 years later, they still don't!

With a deftness of doublethink that would dumfound even Orwell, Perfidious Albion did eventually wake up, smell the coffee and climb on the quality bandwagon. But not before they had succeeded in turning the definition of the word 'quality' back full-circle to where it was before Deming first turned it upside down.

For nearly 20 years now, we've had an ever-expanding army of quality-control inspectors policing everything from primary schools, prisons and hospitals to old people's homes. Testing for outcomes against static, producer-defined objectives.

Witness the website of the QAA. The Quality Assurance Agency.

'Our mission is to safeguard the public interest in sound standards of higher education qualifications and to inform and encourage continuous improvement in the management of the quality of higher education.

We do this by working with higher education institutions to define academic standards and quality, and we carry out and publish reviews against these standards.'

Notice how, in the first paragraph, the phrase 'to inform and encourage' is so deftly placed between 'the public interest' and 'continuous improvement.'

(If you think that's just an accident or an oversight, think again. The QAA polices all higher education in the UK. No way the lawyers didn't go over it with a fine-tooth comb.)

Remove the phrase 'to inform and encourage' and the mission would read like this:

... to safeguard the public interest in: (i) sound standards of higher education qualifications and (ii) continuous improvement in the management of the quality of higher education

Which would give 'continuous improvement' an equivalent status to 'sound standards', as something the public has an 'interest' in, and the QAA has a mission to 'safeguard'.

That would be genuine quality.

But adding those four weasel words, 'to inform and encourage', makes all the difference in two crucially important ways.

Firstly, the public interest is now confined to 'sound standards', leaving 'continual improvement' the sole preserve of the QAA.

And secondly, the mission of the Quality Assurance Agency is now not to 'assure' or 'safeguard' continual improvement, but merely to 'inform and encourage' it.

So, in the very first sentence of its mission statement, the Quality Assurance Agency has assured us that it can do nothing of the sort.

Well! If customers can't have anything to do with continuous improvement then at least they need to be involved in the definition of 'sound standards.' Right?

What? Are you mad? Those are British Standards. Letting the public loose on those would be anarchy. Haven't you read the second sentence of the mission statement? How else could standards be defined except by the higher education institutions.. and of course the QAA?

In other words... The Producers!

So there we have it. A thin veneer of quality concealing a jerry-built structure of pure MDF.

According to Deming, a producer-led inspectorate like the Quality Assurance Agency would be an oxymoron. An organisation which, by its own definition, is designed to destroy exactly what it was created to 'assure.'

And you know what? After almost two decades of qangotastic, quality-controlled bureaucracy - and a mind-boggling hike in administration costs which now overwhelm many of the processes they were supposed to improve - there's very little evidence to show that anything has got any better. But quite a lot to show they're getting an awful lot worse.

There are at least as many school kids who can't read or add up as there were 20 years ago. A lot more patients dying from preventable infections in hospital. And a heck of a lot more old people being abused in 'Quality Care' Homes.

And to top it all, the GCSE exams - the foundation on which all higher education and future prosperity is built - are now so worthless that our leading universities are calling for them to be scrapped!

A simple mistake in the fundamentals, for sure. But we're so far down the road, there's no going back now. Too many upper-middle class dynasties built on it. Too many professional jobs at stake. We've started, so we're going to have to finish. All the way to the bottom, if that's what it takes.

Which brings us back to the good old British Broadcasting business.

As in the automobile industry - customers run like rats from the Titanic - profits plummet - budgets and employees get slashed - companies get taken-over, merged and eventually sold-off for scrap - tumble weeds blow down the high street - whole communities sink below the bread line - whilst captains and owners take their sad farewells and final round of golden handshakes before heading off for a life of penury in Tuscany.

Now, the news that the BBC is to sell Television Centre truly marks the end of the age of the great broadcasting dinosaurs.

As in the automobile industry 25 years ago, the producers blame deregulation, increased competition, the rate of technological change - anything but themselves.

As in the automobile industry, this is not even half the truth.

Walk out onto the street and ask any passer-by what they think about television. They'll tell you, 'not much.' Too many repeats. Too many cookery and property shows. Too much of the same old same old. Too many channels with nothing on.

It's not that they don't want to watch television any more. It's just that now the TV is no longer the only screen in the living room and the broadcasters the only production line in town, any colour you like as long as its black just won't wash anymore.

If it was good, they'd watch it. The Saturday night renaissance of what they're now calling 'together TV' proved that.

But mainly, when they switch on their televisions what they discover is the decaying remnants of a monopolistic broadcasting culture so brilliantly satirised by Nathan Barley and The Secret Blog of a TV Controller (Aged 33 and 3/4). A culture grown lazy, complacent, decadent, arrogant and corrupt. With a cynical contempt for its customers - 'the punters' - it no longer knows how to conceal.

If further proof were needed, witness this latest venture into the reality game show format.

Get Me the Producer takes the idea of turning television production into a reality game show and grafts it onto a me-too remake of The Apprentice, starring Greg Dyke as Alan Sugar.

And what an embarrassment that turned out to be.

If the The Apprentice and Dragon's Den set the standard, then Get Me The Producer ought to have equalled if not surpassed it.

After all, the mould was already set. The producers, Princess Productions, are 'one of the UK's top ten independent television production companies' who 'supply constantly fresh, funny and ground-breaking programmes across a variety of genres,' Greg Dyke is the most down-to-earth and popular Director General the BBC has ever had. And television has got to be a lot sexier than the average brown goods business.

So how come a 6 week long competition ends up not running over a period of 6 weeks in prime-time, but stripped across a single week in the school's morning slot, with the semi-final and final dribbling out together on the Friday?

A throwaway if ever there was one. A suspicion confirmed by a recent visit to Princess Production's website, where 20 projects are listed under "Recent Formats", more than 70 under "Full Catalogue", 3 under 'Other Projects', whilst Get Me The Producer is listed under none.

Funny that!

Five minutes into watching any of the programmes you know why.

The tasks the competitors are set are so dull. The scope for new ideas so limited. It's just too depressing to watch.

Contestants are challenged to produce a five minute quiz show... a five minute comedy slot... Oh, do me favour. How can they possibly turn a business, so sexy that many people will work in it for nothing, into something so utterly boring and miserable?

The answer is in the stultifying atmosphere of awe that seems to permeate every pore of the production, with the sole exception of Dyke, who seems strangely bemused and out of place.

When Alan Sugar fires people you get the feeling that if the cameras weren't there he might not be so nice. But when Greg Dyke does it he just seems embarrassed, like he's not really convinced that's the way it should be done at all.

But, apart from that, the message oozing out from behind the cameras is that television is hallowed and sacred ground... Religion, rocket science, quantum mechanics and brain surgery all rolled into one. If there was a God he'd have to have a television producer to call the shots. What real producers do is just way too clever by half to be placed in just any old Tom, Dick or Harriet's hands.

The punters can appear in front of the cameras, jump through as many hoops and make as big a fool of themselves as they like.

But no way they get to decide what hoops to jump through.

No way they're really going to be sitting at the back of the gallery wearing the Ringmaster's hat.

Because standards of quality have to be assured.

And only Producers can do that.

This in a business where the only real rule - as American novelist and Butch Cassidy screenwriter William Goldman famously said - is that nobody knows anything!

In fact, as the Guardian's Media Monkey points out, the production team were in the market for fresh new ideas. But not in public or on TV. Only in private, behind closed doors.

'TV wannabes who want to take part are asked to outline a 150-word idea for a TV programme they would like to make. No suggestion the producers would nick their ideas, of course, but they are warned that Princess Productions "is in the business of developing programme formats and may have formats currently in development that are similar to the programme ideas submitted as part of applicants' entry forms". Welcome to the world of TV!'

Unfortunately, the arrogance that demands that kind of droit de seigneur doesn't stop at the door of the broadcasting dinosaurs. It spreads like MRSA to many of the educational establishments, government agencies and grant-funded organisations who are supposed to be nurturing the small furry animals that will eventually take their place.

Witness the CEO of one of the UK's leading regional media development agencies - with a mission to develop 'an accessible and diverse screen culture' and 'maximise opportunities for the development of regional talent' - who, when asked if he thought that members of the public might not be able to play a valuable role in the television production process, replied that he didn't think they couldn't, he knew it.

That was two years ago. Since then, the mission statement of that particular qango has been subtly changed to move the emphasis away from accessibility, diversity and the development of talent, towards 'attracting' talent, and developing 'specialist' networks and 'expert' guidance.

Well they would, wouldn't they?

How else could quality possibly be assured?

***

Telestars is a television concept that aims to put an end to all that!

Not so much a proposal for a prime-time reality game show. More the first step on the road towards a new production culture. With a mission to get rid of the producer-defined standards that brought the industry to its knees and replace them with a continuous, ongoing process of customer-led quality and choice, hard-wired into every stage of the production process, from design to delivery.

If you want to know more, contact us now.