What Are You Doing Here? by Floella Benjamin

Author:Floella Benjamin [Benjamin, Floella]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529071085
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2022-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-three

‘I’d love to become a television producer,’ I’d said one day to one of the BBC producers, some time before Play School was axed. Her response was crushing.

‘Oh Floella, you’ve got to be terribly, terribly clever to be a producer.’

So, she clearly thought I wasn’t clever enough.

I could have been completely deflated. But Cynthia’s great faith in me ensured that I didn’t give up my producing ambitions.

In the autumn of 1987, when Play School’s fate was clear, I met a woman called Rosemary Shepherd one evening at a party and realized she was the commissioning editor of children’s programmes at Channel 4. So, I said the same thing to her:

‘I’d love to become a television producer.’

‘Well, why don’t you come and show me your ideas,’ she said warmly.

Channel 4 was then the baby of the media world, launched in November 1982 with commercial funding, but effectively publicly owned. The first ‘publisher-broadcaster’ with all content made by independent producers, it was set up specifically to provide programming for minority interest groups. So, diversity was part of its remit, and they were always looking for different ways of doing things.

This is easy, I thought. In the car on the way home, Keith and I discussed what we might do.

‘How about a programme centred round a tree?’ he said. ‘A talking tree, who interacts with real children?’

‘And a treehouse?’

‘Yes, good idea, and in the root of the tree there’s a gnome.’

‘Great. Let’s call him Tommy.’ We began bouncing ideas, and the next day Aston joined in.

‘Tommy can make things, like the Elves and the Shoemaker.’

‘And Floella invites children into the treehouse, and with the talking tree you do songs and stories.’

‘And we can get guest storytellers who come in and tell a story or sing a song or play some music. We can have a piano and a guitar.’

We went to see Rosemary a few days later and talked her though our proposal, which we called Treehouse.

‘Sensational!’ she said. ‘I’ll have thirteen episodes.’

What? Keith and I had to stop ourselves from laughing out loud. We didn’t even have a production company, yet Channel 4 wanted us to make their flagship pre-school programme.

‘Go and see Godfrey, and he’ll get the contracts done and tell you what you have to do next.’

Rosemary sent us off to another department. And that was it. We were given a total budget of about a quarter of a million pounds. We rushed off to Companies House that very afternoon and bought an off-the-shelf limited company for a hundred pounds. It was called Crystalrowe. As we were so new to the game, Channel 4 gave us a production manager, called Sally, who drew up the budgets and payment schedules, and sensibly included a huge contingency. I watched over her shoulder, getting her to explain every column and category, how everything worked and was cross-referenced, so that I could learn all about every detail and completely understand the infrastructure of programme-making. Although I was completely confident about the content of

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