Hot Topic: Commissioning

Delissa Needham

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New commissioner Delissa Needham on how not to pitch.

Dear Diary, today I is a comishning editer. Yesterday I thought all commissioning editors were a useless, feckless bunch.  Today I can see they're actually very hardworking, kind, intelligent and deeply troubled people with extraordinary skills and great, if not enormous, inner beauty.

Three months ago Geoff Metzger left his job as MD at The History Channel after 12 years. In that time he turned one small UK channel into five different channels on three continents. His departure was a sad loss for the broadcaster - but to quote Oscar Wilde, "to lose one executive is unfortunate - to lose several is a terrestrial." So with no one at the top to manage the stationery everybody stepped up one leaving a gap at the bottom soon filled by me. I went from poacher to gamekeeper  and now I'm in the sweetie shop. When my contract is up either Mr Morgan or Mr Melman will have to drag me out of here kicking and screaming. And yet in the past three months I've looked out from the broadcaster's building, searching the horizon for production talent and had the depressing thought that it's a wasteland!

A few weeks into my contract we had a "screening day" watching around 70 programmes for acquisition. The majority were so bad I wondered how they'd got funded.  That day was probably a turning point for me - very quickly the schizophrenic stage of still being a half independent producer was over and I became a broadcaster's wench who thinks the majority of producers need to sharpen up - and here's why.

Proposals - the majority of those we receive are just a history lesson with no mention of how the producer is actually going to tell the story. Odd isn't it but we need to know what we're going to see.  And clearly a lot of producers went through school without a name tag in their knickers. Put the contact details on the proposal and we might be able to find you.

"Hitler is alive and well in the Bahamas" so can we have 200k to go find him? No - you silly billy. You should know that our budgets are 25 to 30k an hour and something tells me that even if we had 200k we wouldn't get much of a film.  For History Channel think UK stories for commissions and co-production for larger budgets.

135 pages for just one idea! Those proposals you send in really do get made into paper aeroplanes and come flying at me from the Morgan and Melman offices more frequently than 747s at Heathrow. The more paper in the proposal the less chance we'll get it off the ground so think short sentences and don't tell us the obvious.

"I never really watch the History Channel but I thought you might be interested in this."  Don't send in ideas that really belong on Animal Planet. Thoroughly research and understand the channel's output. Be bang on brand and bang on target with one precise arrow.

Big whoppers and a lot of bluff. Be honest - we buy where we trust to deliver.

Hugging and kissing commissioning editors. This assumes they recognise you. Most commissioning editors wouldn't spot an ex-wife in a line-up.

Flattery is a sure-fire way to get a commission. Truly.

I know that the latter particularly works on the suave and sophisticated Mr Melman (Sir) who has most generously just renewed my contract. Since I'm not being thrown to the lions just yet I can stop hiding in the cupboard. And that charming Mr Morgan (yes, boss) has just launched some more paper planes in my direction.  
Delissa Needham is executive producer, The History Channel and The Biography Channel