My Exciting Life in ROCK (part 2): b3ta TV

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B3ta TV was an idea briefly propagated by The Ginger Fuhrer Of B3ta, Mr Rob Manuel. Mr Manuel is a top chap who lives in a strange quasi-Universe of GROOVE where people keep on coming up to him and asking him to do GRATE things - every time I speak to him, some besuited webvert has offered him a million pounds (roughly) to lark about creating something KRAZY for them, and occasionally, like that bloke from out of Mission Impossible, he gets other people to join in.

He'd been asked by someone at at Cable TV Channel to put together a pilot for a possible TV show based on the output of b3ta i.e. the best of the internet, home-made stuff, and JOKES. People on telly have been trying to do something like this for YEARS, they are AFEARED that The Interweb is going to DESTROY them so attempt to ABSORB it. Sometimes it comes out pretty good - "The Wrong Door", I think, looks AMAZING although could probably do with a few more actual JOKES - but most of the time it's something crap like Graham Norton pretending to be surprised by things on YouTube or that awful Lenny Henry programme.

Anyway, this time they'd asked Rob to put something together, so he asked various Interweb Types to come up with SEGMENTS, and one person he asked was ME. His plan was that each of us would contribute a series of 60 second BITS that could then be put together to make whole programmes. We even had a couple of meetings about it - OK, they were in pubs, but they still count as MEETINGS.

During these meetings we did some BRAINSTORMING. BRAINSTORMING is, for me, a bit of a rum old do. People who do This Sort Of Thing for a living seem to be VERY keen on it, and I can certainly see why - if you've GOT to have something ready by five o'clock that day you can't REALLY use the sort of idea generation methods I tend to stick with (e.g. Going To The Pub then writing down the best bits of the conversation the next morning) but it always makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. Everybody else is going "YEAH! And it could be on a SPACESHIP!" or something, and I'm sat thinking "I really really really want to go home now."

My methodology was SURELY proven valid though, as i DID go home and came up with what I thought was a GRATE idea - a one minute version of The Monkees, featuring The Validators all working in an office together! Every week some HILARIOUS situation would arise, be resolved, and then have a song sung about it, all in a minute, INCLUDING time for a theme tune.

Yes, I can see what you're thinking "That idea is SO AMAZING that, SURELY, it got picked up and turned into a series in it's own right?" That IS what you're thinking, right? You will thus be surprised to discover it never happened - I think there was some sort of pilot put together, but Hey Hey We're The Validators (yes, the title was THAT fantastic!) wasn't part of it. I can't think why - surely NOTHING could be as hilarious as an Indie Band trying to reboot a server?

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