Parky delves deep again to discover the key to greatness: Parkinson: Masterclass is
on ABC1, Sunday at 10pm.

He’s 78 and has been at this game for the better part of 60 years, and Sir Michael
Parkinson says what held true for a young, green Yorkshire newspaperman all those
decades ago still holds him in good stead today.

”Parky” may since have commanded stages more impressive, and conversed with
subjects of often staggering fame and accomplishment, but the rules of engagement
have never changed. He still sees himself as a journalist, asking questions and telling
a story.

”My entire life, that’s what’s guided me … everything you do is about that,” Parkinson
says in an interview from London.

”You learn how to interview when you first become a journalist, that’s what you have
to do. And I don’t know how people who have come from elsewhere other than
journalism manage in a sense, because interviewing is the basis of all journalism. If
you’ve learnt that at an early age, or absorbed that from an early age, it strikes me
that you have a better chance of succeeding than if you haven’t.

”I always say that the first time I think I really understood what might be needed,
apart from asking a question, is how you establish a relationship. Very early in my
career, I went to a murder scene in a village in Yorkshire where nobody wanted to
speak to you, they were hostile. And I thought then that it’s as much about
establishing a contact as anything else. You begin to learn about that, about how to
get people to trust you. It’s one of the most important lessons you can learn.”

Famously, the young Parkinson learned it young, then honed it, and eventually
turned his talents as inquisitor, conversationalist and listener into a storied career.

The description ”talk show host” scarcely does him justice – particularly considering
that six years after his 36-year run in that genre ended, he is returning to our screens
again – still asking questions, though in a somewhat different format.

Masterclass – commissioned by Sky in Britain, but airing on the ABC in Australia – is
a show Parkinson says had long been in the back of his mind. There are six episodes
with only one guest a show. The concept: ”To take somebody who’s very, very good at
what they do and explore as much how they become what they are, as [to explore]
where they came from. You go through all of them, they’re all people with fascinating
stories and, more than that, who stand at the top of their tree in terms of
achievement.”

It’s an eclectic line-up: War Horse author Michael Morpurgo, jazz musician Jamie
Cullum, British portrait artist Jonathan Yeo, war photographer Don McCullin,
Chinese classical pianist Lang Lang and Cuban ballet dancer Carlos Acosta.

For Parkinson, such encounters with masters of their craft are nothing new. In his
decades as the clipboard-wielding, ear-tugging maestro of his talk show, conversing
with legends became his stock-in-trade: from Muhammad Ali to Shane Warne, from
Lauren Bacall to Madonna.

”The great thing about the job was being able to meet my heroes, and not being let
down by too many of them, either,” he says.

”I mean, to be able to meet someone like Orson Welles is a privilege.

”And Gloria Swanson, a great star of the silent era – not quite aware of the modern
world, she was a wonderful 80-year-old innocent. And Miss Bacall. To have lusted
after her as a spotty child … it was wonderful of course, dreams come true.

”But you try to do the same job with all of them, no matter what you feel about them.
And then there are people you don’t like. You think, ‘Christ, I don’t like you too
much,’ but you do the same job. It’s something that you chose to do and you’re very
lucky to have been allowed to do it.”

Regrets? The giants who eluded him: Frank Sinatra – ”He would have been the one” –
and Katharine Hepburn.

”They were the two, about the only two – but that’s not bad.”

Parkinson says that with a chuckle, still in good humour and, he says, good health,
only two years shy of his ninth decade. He has no plans to retire and says it’s a
popular misconception that he’s been twiddling his thumbs since his talk show ended
in 2007.

”I’ve had a very productive six years since I finished the talk show, working all the
time – radio, television and writing,” he says.

And besides, he jokes, those regular jaunts to Australia to visit family, friends and the
nation’s major cricket grounds don’t pay for themselves.

”I just need to earn as much money as I can to get to Australia to watch the cricket –
that’s my ambition, my drive, that’s what keeps me alive.”

Neil McMahon – SMH – April 11, 2013

The creators of Breaking Bad, Mad Men and Deadwood are this generation’s
auteurs.
Vince Gilligan created Breaking Bad | Matthew Weiner and his Mad Men | David
Milch wrote Deadwood.
In TV, as nowhere else, the writer is king—none more so than those emperors of the
air that control every aspect of an ambitious, ongoing cable drama. The show-runner
is this era’s version of the Creative Titan, and few have done more with the power
than the three GQ recently convened in the Olympian heights of a room at the Soho
House in West Hollywood, to talk deeply about their craft.
The men speak in voices as different as their shows: Matthew Weiner, the man
behind Mad Men, is a high-speed stream of sparkling copy; Vince Gilligan, who
created Breaking Bad, has the straightforward, gracious drawl of a geeky southern
gentleman; and David Milch—who wrote Deadwood, the misbegotten John from
Cincinnati, and Luck, which met an equally early end this spring after the deaths of
three equine cast members—has the baroque gnomic gravity of an archdruid. But
each of these giants expresses, in his distinct way, just how ambitious and deep the
new breed of TV drama has grown.GQ: I think we’ve all gotten used to the idea that television has evolved into its own distinct art form over the past ten years or so, rather than just movies on a small screen.
Matthew Weiner: Seeing movie people trying to get into TV now who don’t
understand that is very interesting.
GQ: What’s the mistake they make?
Matthew Weiner: It’s a different genre. It’s literally comparing a short story to a
poem. Or a play.
GQ: Nowadays nobody would struggle with feeling inferior for working
in television instead of movies, the way someone like The Sopranos’
David Chase once did, right?
Matthew Weiner: Oh, there’s still a hierarchy. Forgetting about remuneration and
public adulation, there’s still a hierarchy in terms of the writer’s Olympic Dream. I
have to warn you, journalism won’t be on this list.
GQ: Thank you for that.
Matthew Weiner: It would start with poetry, then go theater, novel, then film, and
then TV, then maybe radio.
GQ: Why is that still true, when it’s obvious that some of the best work is
being done on TV?
Vince Gilligan: It takes time. It started out when movies were the movies and TV
was this bastard stepchild.
David Milch: The symbol retains its hold long after the substance which the symbol
is supposed to represent has lost its real basis. Look. [pulls a stack of scratch-off
lottery tickets from his pocket] I just stopped and got gas, so, like an idiot, I bought a
bunch of scratch-offs.
[He distributes the tickets. Feverish scratching ensues and continues throughout
lunch.]
Matthew Weiner: If we win, what happens?
David Milch: You keep the money. Please do. What I’m trying to illustrate is that
none of us, thank goodness, needs $10. And yet we willingly submit to the hold the
symbol has on us, associated with luck. In the same way, the mystique of the film
writer holds long after the substance—in which films were a more powerful medium.
That’s not true anymore, but the symbol still has its own autonomous reality.
Matthew Weiner: Part of it is just about scarcity. You can see Jon Hamm thirteen
times a year, and you can see Brad Pitt twice. That in itself creates a magic and a
hierarchy.
GQ: And yet, Vince, you’ve said that Breaking Bad instantly came to you
as a TV show, not as a movie.

Continue reading The Men Behind the Curtain: A TV Roundtable →

This article is by Michael Idato from Fairfax Media here:

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/homemade-is-where-the-heart-is-20130327-2gsux.html

A sharp team is wielding a powerful comedic weapon.

The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting, Wednesday, ABC1, 9pm.
Michael Idato – SMH – March 28, 2013

Sketch comedy is television’s difficult middle child. Its bigger siblings – the sitcoms –
are more confident, and tend to overachieve. Its younger siblings – the quirkier
programs loved by the ABC and SBS – get more attention and are given more
freedom.Awkward, uncertain commercial sketch is wedged in the middle like Jan Brady
sitting by the phone waiting for George Glass to call. It has historically had the
toughest time finding its space in the TV schedule. And finding an audience to love it.
The successes are fewer than the failures, but Jungleboys, the production company
behind A Moody Christmas, is diving into the genre head first with the result The
Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting.

The Jungleboys (from left) Trent O’Donnell, Jason Burrows and Phil Lloyd.
”Phil [Lloyd] and I have always wanted to do a sketch comedy. We have always
scribbled down ideas for it,” director Trent O’Donnell says. ”It’s just taken this long
to come around. And so many shows didn’t do well that it scares people away.”
Lloyd, whose body of acting work – Review with Myles Barlow and At Home with
Julia, in which he played ”first bloke” Tim Mathieson – makes him a more
recognisable face, agrees. ”Commercial TV is very risk-averse when it comes to
comedy, and there are examples of where they have [been] stung by it,” he says. ”The
reality is they are more practised at making drama.”

The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting, commissioned by the ABC for
ABC1, will have considerably more room to breathe. It stars Patrick Brammall,
Damon Herriman, Robin McLeavy, Eliza Logan and Dave Eastgate. Jungleboys’
O’Donnell, Lloyd and Jason Burrows describe the series as ”random, ridiculous and
surreal”.

The first episode has all the signs it will make its mark. It delivers a mixture of the
staples – dinner parties gone awry, office politics – but weaves into them barbed
punchlines about contemporary politics and social mores. Given a choice between
silly and unsettling, it reaches for the latter.

When not making edgy comedies, however, Jungleboys is also one of the five top
advertising production companies in Australia, industry blog Campaign Brief says.
TV commercials are its ”day job”.

The blend of the two worlds, and the creative freedom that one inadvertently bestows
on the other, is what makes the Jungleboys partnership so intriguing.What is clear is that the business model for making television is changing, just as it
was when the Working Dog team pioneered using hand-held DV cameras to film
Frontline.

The company’s core business, for the moment, is filming TV commercials, a more
lucrative line than critically acclaimed comedies. ”The idea is to build up the longform TV side of the business so that it can become a very profitable thing as well,”
says Burrows, who runs the commercial side. ”Producing shows that have
international appeal is key to doing that.”

Review with Myles Barlow, created by Lloyd and O’Donnell, was a critical triumph. It
aired on ABC2, got rave reviews and was snapped up for the American market by the
Comedy Channel. The American version, Review with Forrest MacNeil, will launch
later in 2013.

That was followed by A Moody Christmas, produced with Burrows, which was
another success. It screened on ABC1, with a second series expected to follow. It also
generated international interest, but Jungleboys held it back from sale to bundle it
with the second series, a move that will, ultimately, increase its value.
In the US, the company is repped by Mosaic, home of Judd Apatow and Will Ferrell’s
production companies. In Australia, meanwhile, it has evolved into something of an
artistic collective.

Under its umbrella is an eclectic jumble of personalities: feature film director Wayne
Blair, Bondi Hipsters Connor and Christiaan van Vuuren and Tropfest-winning
writer-director Abe Forsythe. ”It’s about building up a collaborative culture of people
who don’t have such great egos that they accept great ideas can come from other
people,” Burrows says.

As for the future, anything is possible. Even a sitcom. ”We certainly are open to that,
if an idea or character is that strong.”

UCLA/Writers Guild of America Report:

by Jonathan Handel – Hollywood Reporter – 26 March 2013

Despite some slow progress over the last decade, women and minorities remain
dramatically underrepresented on TV writing staffs, according to a UCLA/WGA West
report released Tuesday. The document – the 2013 WGAW TV Staffing Report – was prepared for the WGAW by Darnell Hunt, a UCLA sociologist who is director of the
Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies.

The numbers are daunting: minorities are underrepresented on TV staffs by a factor
of 2 to 1 in comparison to their percentage of the population. Among executive
producers, women are underrepresented by 2 to 1 and minorities by 5 to 1.
“In the Hollywood entertainment industry, unfortunately, there has all too often
existed a disconnect between the writers hired to tell the stories and an America
that’s increasingly diverse with each passing day,” Hunt said.

The report looked at 190 shows on 28 broadcast and cable networks, employing 1,722 writers. “We can’t tell the whole story if only half of us write it,” said WGA West
president Christopher Keyser at a morning event at which the report was presented.
There are signs of progress, albeit slow. Minority representation doubled over the
last decade (2011-12 season compared with 1999-2000). But during that same
period, female representation inched up a mere 5% – a rate of increase so sluggish
that parity of men won’t be achieved for another 42 years unless faster progress is
made.

Hunt remarked that he had considered subtitling the report “Pockets of Promise,
Minimal Progress.” The report also looked at age-related issues, and found that for the first time, writers over 40 have over 50% of all staff positions. On the other hand, nearly a third of shows had no writers over 50, suggesting a sharp drop-off occurs.

The report didn’t look at LGBT issues because of the difficulty of obtaining data, said
Hunt.

Rutgers business school professor Nancy DiTomaso, author of the new book The
American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism, told The Hollywood
Reporter that the project-based and who-knows-who nature of the entertainment
industry accentuates the difficulty that diverse writers have in breaking into
established networks.

“It is not just a friendship network, but one that is often based on neighborhood,
race/ethnic or religious groups, people who went to the same school, attend the same
church, who are associated with the same institutions and so on,” she said. “The
impact of networking in this field and others is the perpetuation of inequality and
often the opportunity for some people to build skills that others are denied.”
As Hunt said, entertainment is “a very relationship-oriented business.” DiTomaso
was not involved in the UCLA/WGA research.

One attempt to change the dynamic is the WGAW Writer Access Project, which
attempts to open doors for diverse writers by identifying diverse writers with television staffing experience and making samples of their work available to
showrunners, producers, executives, agents and managers.

Top of the Lake starts screening on UKTV on Sunday, March 24.

Susan Chenery – The Australian – March 16, 2013 12:00AM

GREAT flanks of mountains; deep, glassy alpine lakes; primeval forests: the sheer
mythic scale of this remote South Island New Zealand landscape insists it be the
dominant character in any scenario.

Past glaciers and hanging valleys at the head of Lake Wakatipu in central Otago, is
the tiny frontier town of Glenorchy. It was here that Jane Campion came 15 years ago
to visit a friend. “It was quite a profound experience; it is real wilderness.” In the
summer twilight that lingers until after 10 o’clock she walked into the scenery. “It
just was incredibly magical and remote and beautiful”. She had found her spiritual
home in her own country.

“A lot of the people who live there have lost their lives in the lake. The lake has a lot
of different personalities; sometimes it is really glassy and other times it is really
broken up and dangerous.” She started thinking about writing a story set in this
place. And it is typical of her sensibility that she would look at the beautiful lake and
visualise a pregnant 12-year-old girl walking into it up to her neck, the central image
of what would become her first foray into television production in more than 20
years:, the six-hour series Top of the Lake.

And it is entirely characteristic, too, given an illustrious career making films about
women with all their eddies, undercurrents, struggles and complexities, that she
would park a tribe of women “who have fallen off the edge of the earth” in a camp
made of containers in a place called Paradise near Glenorchy, with a decidedly blunt
though enigmatic guru, GJ, played by Holly Hunter, with whom Campion had
worked on The Piano (1993), for which they both won Oscars.

Campion’s writing partner Gerard Lee points out that she wrote the child in the lake
scene when her daughter was 13, and about women in their 50s when she was
entering this decade herself. “No, that is personal,” she says briskly. “I personally feel
very angry about the rape of women or any sexual abuse of women. And this is an
opportunity to tell a story where you get to feel the weight of it.” She has known Lee
since film school, has shared all the significant events of her life with him, and he is
her daughter’s godfather. “She is formidable person,” says producer Emile Sherman.
“She is so smart emotionally and intellectually that she just gets everything. I was a
little bit scared of her in the beginning, I had to work out how to phrase my views and
comments as a producer”.

Top of the Lake is a vast, imaginative work that peers beneath the cracks of a
backwoods community, then goes deeper still, into an intense mystery. When they
were writing, Lee and Campion would act out the parts, something they would later
do for startled producers and the actors in rehearsal. “They are bloody hilarious as a
double act,” Wenham says.

When it was ready, they presented it to the producers, Sherman and his partner Iain
Canning, Christian Vesper from the Sundance Channel, and Philippa Campbell from
New Zealand. Ben Stephenson, head of drama at the BBC, had been on board since
the broadcaster’s involvement with Bright Star (2009).