Don't Scare The Turkey

The hare is dead: frankly, it never looked very alive to me.

The news that BBC1 has decided to axe its infantile game show “Don’t Scare The Hare” after just three disastrous and expensive episodes must come as no surprise to anyone who has actually seen it: which isn’t many (the ratings have plumbed new depths for Saturday night viewing).

For those who haven’t, it’s a show with dubbed laughter, a strange and superfluous music track, a scary presenter with giant glasses and a cap hiding his baldness, and an animatronic hare which trundles around the studio like a dalek. Grownups play children’s games and if they fail, the hare runs off “scared”. Oh, and someone wins some money.

Wow: somebody actually sat in a darkened room and came up with this drivel, and the BBC paid them a couple of million quid to stage it. It looks like cheap Bulgarian children’s television. Suspecting that it was designed for two-year-olds, we tried it out on Izzy. She didn’t last twenty seconds, angrily demanding we switch to Peppa Pig. The BBC clearly cast the wrong animal in the lead – it should have been a turkey.

Mind you, all producers have made them: turkeys, that is. When Mark Thompson quit the BBC as director of programmes, at his leaving do he gave a speech about his career highs and lows. Robot Wars, which I produced when he was running BBC2, was a high; but the lowest of the lows was a Saturday night game show called Happy Families.

It seemed like a great idea at the time: Gladiators had just completed its first series on ITV, and arena shows seemed to be the in thing. So, rather than lycra-clad superheroes with false names like Jet and Wolf, I came up with a show that pitched extended families against each other. We staged it at the London Arena: a barn of a place so big we had to build giant games to fill it. In the middle were two metal cages in which the contestants imprisoned their grandmothers. The contestants had to “Hoist up their Grannies” a hundred feet to the top of the building. Yes, I was responsible for this nonsense.

The show opened in the roof, with a giant roller coaster made up of hand-powered bikes. One by one each family member pedalled furiously to link up with the others into one long hand-powered train, which began a terrifying descent to the ground, hitting more than 40 miles an hour on the bends with no safety net. I was scared that we might dump an entire family onto the heads of the audience. Sometimes the bikes got stuck and the contestants were suspended in mid-air: one woman broke her arm on the pedals. We also built absurd games like “Terrorball”, in which someone had to answer trivia questions about their family while being spun upside down. There was even a game for the family dog.

I was terrified one of the grannies would suffer a heart attack. In fact, the biggest problem was incontinence: you wouldn’t believe how many times they needed to go to the toilet during filming. Each time the wretched cage had to be slowly winched down so they could be released. We went wildly over schedule, frequently filming into the night, by which time the audience – all 5,000 of them, had drifted off home. So instead of a mass spectacle, we had to shoot everything in close-up and cut in shots of audience cheering from the afternoon.

Right now I feel the pain of Don’t Scare The Hare’s producer. After so much effort, realising you’ve created a turkey is no fun. But at least the hare won’t be lonely, as it lies buried in the Saturday night television graveyard: it will have two granny cages and a load of rusty hand-pedalled bikes for company.

How to Start a Business

According to a recent report, the North East of England needs another 30,000 businesses.

That's an awful lot of business cards, I should start up a graphic design company. Apparently we need to "develop a more entrepreneurial culture".

The name "entrepreneur" sounds like a member of some exclusive sect. I became one because I had a phone call from Andrew Lloyd Webber. He asked me to direct a television version of his musical Song & Dance, and he wanted me to cast his then girlfriend, and subsequent wife, Sarah Brightman.

At that time I was at the BBC earning £2,000 a month. I was thinking about going freelance, but never had the courage. Obviously I jumped at the chance of working with the great man, but I had no idea what to charge him for the month's work it was going to take. So I rang an agent, the late Richard Armitage, whose father Noel Gay wrote The Lambeth Walk and Run Rabbit Run. He was the wisest man and most loyal friend.

"What would make you happy?" he said.

As anything more than two grand would have been a bonus, I said "Do you think he would stretch to three?"

An hour later Richard rang back. "I said you'd accept £45,000".

After I regained consciousness he said, "Let that be a lesson to you. Andrew only employs the best, and I told him you are the best director in the world. So that seemed about right to both of us."

Of course, it was nonsense. I was way down the directors' pecking order, but it's undoubtedly the most important lesson I ever learned, and which I recently passed onto my son who has become a director himself.

So I had £45,000 burning a hole in my bank account, and at that time Richard was reviving his father's hit West End show, Me and My Girl. He was looking for backers, so I offered to invest my entire earnings in the show. Richard refused the money with two other pieces of great advice: "Never invest in a friend's business, and never put all your money into something you can't control". Shame, really, because the show ran and ran. Instead I quit the BBC and put the cash into setting up a TV production company. Within two years it was the largest in the UK.

During the next fifteen years, there were incredible highs and utterly miserable lows. The most important quality an entrepreneur can have is the ability to cope with failure. Television production is like Norfolk: turkeys come with the territory.

Mark Thompson, now director general of the BBC, once said that his most disastrous commission was Happy Families, a terrible Saturday night spectacle that involved Grannies being hoisted into the air in giant cages. One of my many turkeys, which viewers voted off with their remotes. Occasionally out of the gloom would emerge a couple of shows which would become part of popular culture and make it all worthwhile, like Challenge Anneka and Robot Wars.

Now I've launched another production company in Newcastle, which has cost me ten times as much as the last one. Reducing the North East business start-up requirement to 29,999.

Talk about risk money: I know I can lose the lot, but that's what entrepreneurs do. The venture capitalists (who actually take almost no risks at all) call it "skin in the game". It's the adrenalin of potential failure which keeps you awake at night and drives you to success. It requires courage and a good sense of humour. And I know those are qualities that people in the North East of England have in abundance.

Which makes it all the more galling that just as One North East is calling for more entrepreneurial risk, our government is trying to stifle it by increasing Capital Gains Tax by 80%.