Before we go any further, here’s a story to inspire you, and perhaps to warn you. It’s the true tale of a week-long foreign shoot for a teenage show for ITV. The programme is a BAFTA-winning factual series called The Scoop. The budget is tight, but production values are high. In other words, it’s an ordinary week’s filming for an ordinary programme – this is how you make television. If you can’t work at this pace, then forget television as a career choice. Budgets get smaller every year, and the only way producers can still make programmes is by packing more work into every day.

On each Scoop shoot, there are two production people: a senior researcher or a producer, and a director. There’s also a crew of two (camera and sound), and a presenter (for this shoot, it’s Australian actress Isla Fisher).

FRIDAY 1 MAY

09.30, Room 806, Parc St Charles Hotel, New Orleans

Script meeting with Patrick the director. Just a few hours to go before the others arrive; we start shooting tomorrow. Spend the morning going over the shooting schedules and scripts for the six days’ filming ahead – we shoot, on average, enough material for one five-minute story per day.

We’ve been in New Orleans for five days, doing ‘recces’, which means checking out the locations and the stories that I set up on the phone from England. Nothing is quite as we expected: some of the stories are better than we hoped, and some are not so good. But all of them need a re-think. So we’ve been re-working the scripts as we go along – sometimes late into the night. Now we have six strong scripts, and just time enough to put in those little touches that make a good story great.

By the time the rest of the team arrive, the shoot should be planned like a military campaign. We need to produce clear directions to all the locations, with maps and instructions on where to park. We also need detailed shooting schedules – giving breakdowns of every shot and piece of action, and where it takes place – because the stories will be shot out of order, in several locations.

Here are the stories:

• The ritual of the American high school prom.
• The technology behind the biggest indoor sports arena in the world, the New Orleans Superdome.
• How the invention of poker changed the look of playing cards, and added new riches to the English language.
• The roots of rock: why New Orleans was the birthplace of pop music.
• The amazing skills of the rodeo families of Louisiana.
• The strange story of the only white alligators in the world.

Late afternoon we pick up our presenter from New Orleans airport. Isla Fisher’s enthusiasm for the city and the stories and the sunshine and anything else she can think of lifts our jaded spirits. Suddenly, we’re looking forward to this shoot. I help Isla unpack. She’s exhausted from her flight, so I iron her clothes and order her some food. (I’m in charge of the presenter, which is fine by me because Isla is a peach and a treat to work with. But some ‘talents’ are hell on earth, and you’ll feel more like strangling them than ordering them room service.)

While I look after Isla, the director goes to the airport to greet the crew, and help them organise a hired van for the shoot. The lighting cameraman Matthew and sound recordist Tim have been travelling for 18 hours with 13 heavy flight cases. These kinds of shoots used to be crewed by three technicians – camera, sound and a spark – but cuts got made, and now the camera operator has to carry all the lighting gear, as well as all the camera equipment. So Matt and Tim are tired. Very, very tired. But when they finally get to the hotel, they have to get out all the kit and check that it survived the journey. Everyone thinks that baggage-handlers chuck their stuff around. Matt knows it. He’s turned up in foreign parts before with a camera that’s in three pieces. Seems the baggage-manglers are not much impressed by the big yellow FRAGILE stickers on the side of flight cases.

Later we meet for a light supper, a production meeting, and just the right amount of alcohol to calm our nerves.

Sometimes, just thinking about how much work you have to do is harder than actually doing it.

SATURDAY 2 MAY

08.00, Parc St Charles Hotel

Day one of the shoot – it’s magic time! We’re working until midnight tonight, filming at the high school prom, so it’s a late start for the crew and presenter, but not for production. We’ve got costumes to hire: a Southern Belle dress for Isla, and a Tuxedo for Tim-the-sound-recordist, who’s going to be her on-camera prom date. (Well, we thought it was funny!)

12.00, Bourbon Street

The shoot starts for real. First we grab a PTC (piece to camera) from Isla in Bourbon Street for the story about the roots of rock. We don’t have a filming permit for this, so it’s done very quickly, with one eye out for police cars, and the other on the drunk guy who wants to marry Isla. (See Chapter 8 for information on filming permits.) Next, we stop off at the New Orleans Historical Society to get tape of archive photographs and drawings that we need to illustrate the poker story. The people at the society are wonderful, but very laid back, which makes us nervous – we have little time for small-talk. By the time we leave, we’re already behind schedule. On the way to the next location, we pick up a ‘beauty shot’ of the port of New Orleans, which we also need for the poker story. This one shot takes 20 minutes to shoot, and another half-an-hour to get to the place where we need to shoot it (over on the opposite bank of the Mississippi), but it’s worth it because it adds richness to the story. This is what the phrase ‘high production values’ means. We grab some sandwiches for lunch, and eat them in the van.

15.30, A beauty parlour deep in the suburbs of New Orleans

The girl we’ve chosen to follow to the prom tonight is getting her hair and makeup done, along with her best girlfriend. Isla gets made-up too, and does some funny impromptu PTCs as she gets the New Orleans ‘prom look’ makeover (think overkill: great coils of piled-up hair and country-singer makeup). Because this is a ‘just-keep-rolling-and-let’s-see-what-happens’ bit of the story, the crew have to shoot everything, otherwise they’ll miss one of Isla’s remarks. Which means that I have to log hours of material. It’s part of my job to take notes on every shot, so we can edit efficiently. There’s no point shooting good material if you can’t find it again later, so accurate notes are invaluable (more about this later, in Chapter 6). It’s also my job to keep an eye on the schedule, to organise the next set-up for the director (so there’s never any delay), and to keep everyone supplied with drinks as they work (there’s rarely time for coffee-breaks on a shoot like this, even though the crew nag for one, pretty much all the time – it’s part of their job description).

17.30, Still at the beauty parlour:

The ‘make-overs’ have taken longer than promised, and the director is getting grumpy. The girls look quite astonishing in their prom makeup and hair, like 50-year old extras from a pantomime.

The prom queens drive home to finish their transformations. We follow them, and set up to film in the house. We’ve arranged all this in advance, of course. The girl we’ve chosen to follow is called Jenine, and she’s lucid about the importance of the prom as a rite of passage into adulthood for American teenagers. At least she was on the phone – in front of the camera, she whoops and giggles a lot and sprays glitter all over the cameraman.

Our angle on this story is the astounding amount of money these 17- and 18-year olds splash out on their prom: the hair, makeup, corsages, new dresses and hired suits, limos and pre-prom dinners, can add up to over a thousand dollars.

18.30, Jenine’s house

The girls’ dates turn up late, looking like bouncers from a sleezy nightclub, and we film them as they step grandly from their hired limo in their hired white suits – in fact we film them several times, as they keep laughing and spoiling the shot, and this puts us even further behind schedule. Next, we ask these two testosterone-soaked, probably slightly drunk teenage boys, to do some serious acting. The director wants to get a shot of them opening the door to Jenine’s house, and smiling on cue, so he can put a ‘ting’ starburst on their teeth in post-production. This takes another half-hour, and much hilarity ensues. Honestly, you’d think these boys were here to have fun. Then we follow them into the house and catch their reactions as they see what the girls have done to themselves (they seem suitably impressed, but it’s hard to tell with Americans).

There’s much kissing and cheering and picture-taking by the assembled parents. (Annoyingly, they do all this kissing and cheering in a particularly dark part of the room, away from the area where Matthew has carefully placed his lights.) Then the boys whisk their dates off to a relaxed meal. We, on the other hand, have less than an hour to record one more PTC from Isla at the house, extract ourselves from the clutches of the weeping parents (who seem to think we’re kindred spirits because we shared this moment with them – now they want to relive it endlessly!), then pack up all our gear, grab some food somewhere, and travel across to the other side of New Orleans to the hall where the prom is being held.

20.30, The prom party

We set up camp in the party room which is darker than anticipated. In fact it’s almost black, with small pools of light (see Chapter 6, The Shoot: things to check on a recce). I can just about make out the cameraman’s face, and he looks worried. This is what’s known in the trade as a ‘bad lighting situation’. But no time to worry – first we have to dash outside to get some shots of limos and horse-drawn carriages arriving. Except we can’t find the way out of the massive building where the prom is being held. I recced the entrance, and where we should park our crew van, but I forgot to recce the exits. So we spend ages going round in circles, and up and down echoey corridors. We miss most of the limos, and we lose a lot of time. This is bad because we have a lot to shoot tonight, under difficult conditions: eccentric lighting, throbbing music, and hoards of aggressive prom-goers, who, we’ve just discovered, don’t want us mucking up the most important day of their lives. Now this, I certainly hadn’t anticipated. The teachers who organised the prom assured me that the students would be ‘thrilled and honoured’ to be filmed for British Television. In fact, they look murderous. I don’t think that the teachers explained about us needing to turn off the music so we can record pieces from Isla ...

23.30, Still at the prom

Isla has been threatened with a good beating by jealous girls who don’t like the fact that she’s so beautiful, and I’ve been jostled and jeered for turning off the music. All of us are tired, sweaty and half-deaf from the noise. But we’ve got some quite good material, and at last, we’ve finished shooting for the day – just 15½ hours after I started work this morning; 13½ hours after the crew clocked on.

00.10, Back at the Parc St Charles Hotel

We retire to the director’s room for the obligatory how-was-the-first-day-of-the-shoot-for-you conversation over many, many beers. Everyone agrees it could have been much worse, which is encouraging.

SUNDAY 3 MAY

Day off

Spend the morning marking up my script (see Chapter 6 for notes on how to mark up a script), and the rest of the time worrying about the next five days. The crew go to a Doobie Brothers concert at the New Orleans Music Festival. They know how to live ...