A Touch of the real world...

Today was the first day of my placement at Touch Productions on queens Square in Bath.

What an amazing day to start the two weeks I have there! It has to have been the hottest 

day of the year so far.

The day started with me meeting members of the team, mainly Alex and Simon. They are the leaders of the Development team. I soon learn that this is the department I will be spending most of my time with. After being introduced to the business and who they are and what they do they get me straight to work.

My first task is idea generation. I am given a couple of newspapers and they ask me to look through the articles for any headlines that jump out, any subjects that seem to speak TV.

I spend over an hour doing this task, nervous that everything i'm coming up with is utter rubbish! My inital ideas consist of:

• Briton – time left in power
• To what extent is terrorism justified
• Cancer – curable?
• Crazy obsessions – p11 the sun, collecting horse hair £5000
• Football idols – new celeb culture
• Cleep walking – man drink driving
• Secret dare devils – new york skyscraper p19 sun
• Sand sculptures – unpaid hobbies
• Elephant under a house – p27 sun
• Sarah Fergason – loosing weight
• Life on a submarine
• The Sleepless Elite
• The Press – Life as a photographer/jurnalist
• Diets – prove/disprove diets
• Can you live happily without sex?
• Too Old Too Young – pressures of growing up
• Insomnia

I then collected the ideas and put them into smaller categories that would be easier to discuss:

Crazy Obsessions 

• Collecting Horse Hair 
• Collectors in general 
• Sand Sculptures 
• Unpaid Hobbies 

Football Idols 

• Obsession with Footballers
• New Celeb Culture 
• Past, Present and future of the game 

The Sleepless Elite 

• People that sleep for 4 hours and lead fuller lives 
• Sleep Walking – drink driving 
• Insomnia 

Secret Dare Devils 

• Man Caught in new York Base Jumping 
• Human Spider 

Diets 

• Series of programs testing different diets 
• Celeb Stories (Sarah Ferguson) 

The Press 

• Life as a photographer 
• Waiting days for one photograph 
• The lengths a reporter will go to just to get a story

I then had a meeting with Alex and Simon about my ideas. 

We discussed all ideas, of which 3 or 4 stuck out. I loved the way we bounced the ideas off each other and got them off the ground. We then honed these ideas even further to make them work better as TV shows. 

• The decades of celeb (footballers)
• Sleepless Street (office, or two families) 
• The Press 
• Defying the law for a thrill (secret dare devils) 

I then spent the afternoon working on the shows research, looking into ideas for them and digging deeper.

On finishing the day I found that the decades of celeb wasn’t going to work, they all seemed to inter link from the 50’s onward. I managed to come up with 4 main sections for the last 150 years; Explorers (pre 1900), Inventors (1900 - 1950), Performers (1950 - 2000) and Footballers/Reality (2000 - present). This might work but we'll have to see tomorrow!

All in all it was an interesting and exciting day. Its off to work now, but Im looking forward to tomorrow already!