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HOW TO PITCH TO ... MARK BELL
Do Use ecom – Bell is happy to shape ideas, but ecom is “crucial to the process”
Frankenstein’s Wedding This is a key part of one of Bell’s
recent projects, Your Paintings – a multiplatform event in which pictures of 200,000 public artworks, many of them kept out of view, will be made available online. Bell sees the initia- tive, announced alongside a raft of programming last week, as a vital part of the BBC’s role in educating and informing the nation.
Delivering event TV This has also fi ltered through to other art forms. The BBC was recently instrumental in the organisation (and broadcast) of World Book Night, in which 1 million books were given out free around the country. This event, heralded by many in the publishing industry as a great success, also fea- tured as a central plank in the Year of Books, and ticked the box of providing exciting ‘event’ viewing, as well as the educational element. Yet Bell received criticism for the
BBC’s coverage, which some authors described as “wholly counterproduc- tive”, saying the season had a “sneer- ing, derogatory tone” towards genre fi ction, particularly sci-fi . He brushes this aside, noting that
fantasy author China Mieville is a reg- ular on The Review Show, and other genres have featured throughout the season. “I would push back quite hard against allegations of elitism,” he says. “Good literature needs to be taken seriously – I don’t think it’s elitist to do a two-part Imagine on Tolstoy – but lots of genre fi ction has been cov- ered this year.” Beyond the criticisms, Bell sees the
Year of Books as an overall success. Ratings were middling – Faulks On Fiction, fronted by popular novelist Sebastian Faulks, drew 1.23 million (4.89%), while Ann Robinson’s My Life In Books drew an average of 1.22 mil- lion (5.8%) – but he is happy. “It’s never going to outrank Britain’s Got Talent in the ratings, but it’s still important we do it.”
www.broadcastnow.co.uk Seven Ages Of Britain
‘Good literature needs to be taken seriously – I don’t think it’s elitist to do a two-part Imagine on Tolstoy’
He is tight-lipped about future
‘Years of…’, although he is enthusiastic about it as a concept that also spawned the Year of Science in 2010. “It’s a great way of emphasising our commitment to a particular space”, he says, but stops short of naming future areas of interest. His reticence to be tied down can
perhaps be explained by the domi- nance next year of arguably the big- gest cultural event in the world: the Olympics. “That is slightly occupying people’s minds at the moment, but from then on, the emphasis will be very much on other things.” And so he encourages indies to approach him with ideas for a full
HEALTHCHECK ... BBC ARTS RATINGS HITS Shopping List
TARIFF FROM £50,00-100,000 OR MORE PER HOUR, DEPENDING ON CHANNEL
More ...
New approaches Great stories Discussion of new formats Interpretative approaches that give the viewer a new understanding of arts and culture
New presenters and approaches that illuminate areas of the arts that are not regularly covered by TV
Less ...
One-off interviews with cultural fi gures
Short-form programmes or magazine shows
Vague subject areas without a clear approach
1 Seven Ages Of Britain RATED 4.3 MILLION/15.1% (BBC1) January-March 2010
2 Paul Merton’s Birth Of
Hollywood RATED 1.8 MILLION/7.6% (BBC2) May-June 2011
3 Arena: Rolf Harris Paints His Dream RATED 1.6 MILLION/6.5%
(BBC2) 29 December 2010 4 When God Spoke English: The
Making Of The King James Bible RATED 600,000/2.15% (BBC1) 21 February 2011
UPCOMING SHOWS Jeremy Paxman’s Empire (BBC1) Arts Troubleshooter (BBC2) Fry’s Planet Word (BBC2) Melvyn Bragg: Class And Culture project (BBC2) Impressionists (BBC2) British Masters (BBC4) Regency: Elegance And Decadence (BBC4)
DATA SUPPLIED BY BBC
Make sure that talent is committed to the programme
Have an idea of the channel/slot for the programme
Don’t Don’t pitch any arts magazine shows – BBC has plenty
season, as well as single programmes. “They should come and inspire me, just as I hope I can inspire them. I won’t plant a fl ag in the ground and say ‘come in this direction’, because that just places limits in people’s way. It has to be a two-way conversation.”
1 July 2011 | Broadcast | 15
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