| » Home |
| » About Us |
| » Events |
| » Publications |
| » Sponsors |
| » Advisers |
| » Projects |
Jonathan Shiff
Jonathan Shiff, Executive Producer, Jonathan M Shiff Productions
I do understand that drama for children is expensive. What I don’t get, frankly, is that we live in a regulatory environment mandating that networks each provide 32 hours of C drama, yet the networks only pay 15 per cent of the cost. That leaves us to find 85 per cent of the money overseas, while the network keeps approval rights over the projects from an intellectual property point of view, and then argues that they don’t like the scripts that their own people have approved and encouraged.
The Cybergirlexperience is a very misleading exercise. Jenny Buckland can provide more information about that, because she will know from the Round the Twist experience that some of these figures are very misleading. The FACTS submission sets out Cybergirl’smeasure of appeal to a 17-year-old audience. When I was told that Cybergirl was going to be put on at 6.00 p.m. I was horrified. My audience of kids, battling as they are to find us at 4.00 p.m. (when most of them are not even home, but playing sport or at school or being outside in Australian fresh air where they should be), were not going to know that we are on at 6.00 p.m. And who is going to command the TV set, if they are seven to twelve years old? I certainly never made Cybergirl to be measured against the 17-year-old index. Had I made it for 17 year olds, I can assure you that Cybergirl would not have played with quite the same dramatic choices: it probably would have been a teenage version of Debbie Does Dallas, for which we would have had spectacular ratings and masses of free publicity. Cybergirdid indeed have some promotion, although not quite as indicated in the FACTS submission, and frankly 50 per cent of the promotion occurred because I paid our publicists to help foster some of it.
I keep coming back to the same thing. It is impossible to expect a children’s audience to follow a program that is lost at 4.00 p.m., or moved, or scheduled when there is something better on, or split up mid-series. The current series of Horace & Tina, which whopped all competition in the ratings for the last six to seven weeks, was split in programming over six and a half months between one storyline. In other words, kids were led up to an episode half-way through, and then in a cliffhanger told to come back in six months to see what happens. It is incredibly hard to build an audience under those circumstances, and incredibly misleading to then indicate that the programming by creative content should be competing for a child’s attention with a massive machine like the Simpsons. We can get into discussions about what the Simpsons and Big Brother are about. Certainly, they would not qualify under the present requirements; and they should not do so under future requirements.
« Back
Network Insight sponsors include:
