I have loved being a television researcher. It’s the best job in the world: sometimes exhausting, often frustrating, but always, always fascinating. I’ve interviewed war heroes, foreign leaders and striking miners. I’ve been to teenage Supermodel school, and I’ve met the guy who invented mountain bikes, up a mountain in California. I’ve spent a day in Hollywood with the movie-trailer-voice-over-man, and I’ve flown in a First World War biplane. I have home contact numbers for brilliant scientists, Hollywood stuntmen, and some of the world’s most beautiful people. Dannii Minogue has worn my bikini.

I wrote this book because I felt there was a need for it – three needs, in fact.

The first was the need to explain what working in television is really like – the good bits and the bad. Lots of books will teach you how to do research, but they won’t tell you how to be a researcher. Plenty of technical manuals will show you how to frame a shot or pull focus, but they won’t prepare you for what it’s like to work as part of a crew.

I’ve been doing this job for 20 years now, and I’m still learning, because there’s so much to learn. And I’m not just talking about understanding the nuts and bolts of programme-making. In some ways, that’s the easy bit. The tricky skills to master are the people skills – how to get people involved with the project, how to treat interviewees and artists, and how to deal with the rest of the team: crew, directors, presenters, actors, editors, and everyone else that you need to get along with. Because that’s the secret of getting on in television – knowing how to get on with people.

The second reason for writing this book was to help you find the TV job that’s best for you. Unless you know where you’re heading, you’ll be rejected on the spot when you write your first can-I-have-a-job letter. TV bosses get too many letters that start ‘I want to work in television, and I’ll do anything’. These sort of letters make the writer sound desperate, as well as sadly misinformed about the television industry. Every television job is specialised – if you think that being a researcher is just like being a floor manager or an editor, then you are so far off the mark that you need to read this book today, this moment. It’s imperative that you find out what you want to do before you start applying for jobs.

The third and most important reason for writing this book was to encourage the right sort of people to come into television. This might surprise you – isn’t there a glut of applicants for every job in British TV? Sure, but most of them want to be in television for all the wrong reasons (glamour, status, money) and are therefore entirely unsuited to a future in making programmes.

Television doesn’t need people who are interested in television. It needs people who are interested in the world and how it works: people who want to share knowledge and ideas and tell exciting stories. It needs people with energy and enthusiasm, vision and vigour, a sense of humour, and the sense to spot a good story. Because telling stories is what television is all about, no matter what job you decide you want to do.

A friend of mine heads a department at a major network company. He’s constantly on the look-out for new talent, and constantly disappointed by the kind of people who apply. Rarely, someone bright and interesting comes along, dazzling him with their passion and enthusiasm, and it cheers him up for weeks. More often than not, though, he has to deal with applicants who are stuffy, self-important, or downright dull. Here’s a secret – there are not enough good people to go round. TV needs more people with passion.

Once you’ve read this book, you could be the next Bright Young Thing in British Television. I can’t promise you that it will bring you great riches, but I can guarantee you adventure and excitement, a job worth getting up for in the morning, and some fascinating tales to tell your friends.

Things change fast in television, and there’s an awful lot of change around at the moment.

Just a few years ago, ITV was a federation of medium-sized companies. Now it’s nearly completed the move to become one big one. Inevitably, this evolution is having an impact on training and job opportunities. Meanwhile, Channel 4 and the BBC are vying to increase their share of the ‘TV multiverse’ by setting up new channels to broadcast their old programmes. But at the same time, the corporation is shedding staff jobs – which is bad news for BBC staffers, but good news for independent producers.

Television programmes are changing too: they’re becoming increasingly polarised between low-budget, home-grown shows, and high-end, expensive co-productions made for transmission in several countries. The ‘medium-sized’ shows – the kind of programmes that used to be part of the learning curve for trainees – are slowly but inexorably disappearing from the schedules.

Production technology is also undergoing a revolution. The fully-digital newsroom is now a reality in many regional TV stations – so no more jobs for news VT editors, but lots of exciting opportunities for the new breed of journalist/presenter/picture editors who are trained to produce their own stories, from beginning to end. (The good VT editors, of course, will move on to the high-end, big-budget, international co-productions).

But in all this upheaval, one thing hasn’t changed. TV bosses are still looking for the same kind of people – people with passion, ideas and enthusiasm. People like you.

This revised and expanded edition of How To Get a Job in Television tells you how to use these industry changes to your advantage, and get your first foothold in the exciting and satisfying world of television production.

As always on a project, lots of people helped. Programme makers: Ian Cundall; Andrew Hill; Dee Marshall; Stephen Haggard; Dave Selwood; Adam Severs; Helen Scott; Matthew Rook; Neil Shand; Alison Turner; Tim Wybrow; Sheila Fitzhugh; Barbara Govan; Anna Kost; Mark Witty; Paul Bader; Richard Maude; Nick Gray; Graeme Pollard; John Smith. Managers, trainers and recruiters: Emma Clifford; Robert Alcock; Liz Westbrook; Lance Tattershall; Sue Clark; Sara Harrison; Karen Illingworth; Terry Mounsey; James Mackie; Cherry Ehrlich; Neil Walker; Steve Jenkinson. Health and Safety experts: Jane Curtis; Alice Holden. Regulator: Isobel Reid. Educators: Chris Wensley; Paul Inman; Diane Dalziel; Fiona Thompson; Kate Mulhoy.

Thanks to you all, and apologies to anyone I inadvertently left out. Any mistakes are mine.

And finally, special thanks to my husband, Patrick, for everything: for helping with the research and writing, for proof-reading the manuscript, and for sharing his twenty-five years of experience.

Four things to note:

• I’ve used the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’ indiscriminately and interchangeably.
• Some names have been changed, to protect people who told me stories, but got shy about seeing them in print.
• I’ve cheerfully broken old-fashioned rules of grammar and syntax. That’s because this book is written in the style of a television script, and TV writing should sound like everyday speech. So please don’t write and complain that I split an infinitive or ended a sentence with a preposition – that’s how people talk.
• Most introduction-to-TV books have a list of useful addresses. This one doesn’t, because TV companies are changing so fast that any such list would be out of date within a year. The industry training organisation Skillset, and its sister organisation Skillsformedia, have excellent websites – use them to put together your own list of useful addresses!