Micheal Jacob retiring! Page 4

He isn't thinking of starting the BBCG

The better British Comedy Guide?

I think it speaks volumes about Micheal that, on his last day at the Beeb, he still made the effort to find time to read and give feedback on a couple of scripts by an unknown comedy writer. And this being a writer who has savaged one of his shows on a tediously regular basis.

Have a great evening, Micheal.

Good blog, Michael. Although Marks, Gran & Jacob does sound the worst band ever.

Well Chip, we were called Spoon, because our manager thought we resembled three items of cutlery - knife, fork, spoon. Since someone once described me - possibly here - as looking like a walnut (I've always aspired to W H Auden but he had a medical condition), the question of whether I'm a fork or a nut is something that will haunt me forever more. As a band, we played in some then prestigious venues, and Rod Stewart was very kind, as was Al Stewart. Anyone called Stewart really. Shame we never met Moira.

Quote: Micheal Jacob @ March 31 2011, 11:36 PM BST

Well Chip, we were called Spoon, because our manager thought we resembled three items of cutlery - knife, fork, spoon. Since someone once described me - possibly here - as looking like a walnut (I've always aspired to W H Auden but he had a medical condition), the question of whether I'm a fork or a nut is something that will haunt me forever more. As a band, we played in some then prestigious venues, and Rod Stewart was very kind, as was Al Stewart. Anyone called Stewart really. Shame we never met Moira.

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Arising from Micheal's blog there's a perhaps interesting fact about the introduction of computers.

Micheal mentions that in a TV production, the writers tend to think that they are in the right, not the rest of the production team and it is a fact that when Alomo was created, I had already been the sorter-outer of computers for Marks & Gran for a while before. At that time they wrote in Laurence's house in Southgate, but they realised that they would be spending lots of time and lots of discussion with the rest of the team that they were assembling and that would be at the production office (which by then had been rented at Elstree studios).

So I was commissioned to provide and setup computers for the offices; the main reason being, quite obvious to Marks & Gran was for the the WRITERS to amend their scripts in situ. They had I think already planned to have many writers, modelled on the Hollywood techniques, so I was asked to provide 4 (or maybe 5) computers & suitable printers etc and by then I was really trusted by LM & MG so the chairman of Alomo cheerfully handed me a cheque, in advance, for more money than I had ever held in my hand before.

So I had a busy few days getting the computers from trade distributors & setting them up (they were simpler in them thar days). We started then with DOS and Wordstar I think and migrated to Windows 3 and MS Word a year or so later.

But of course once the computers were in, the writers hardly ever got a look-in because the computers were almost immediately adopted by the production team (including Micheal) as splendid tools to replace the typewriters and photocopiers that they had used on earlier productions.

So I don't know exactly how much I had to do with the introduction of computers to TV Production Companies. Possibly Alomo with my assistance were among the earliest, but the use of computers in this way was inevitable I expect.

I recall that I was frequently at the Alomo office, probably about a day per week, either fixing computers or printers or training the staff how to use them. My templates for writing scripts (now called the Scriptwriters' Toolkit) began in those days after we switched to Windows 3, in the early 1990s. The earlier stuff was done by wrestling with Wordstar keycodes (no mice or GUIs then).

Very interesting billwill.
I too remember using DOS writing software. In my case it was the first version of Wordperfect. The screen was blue and the writing white.
You had to stick a template on your keyboard above the 'F' keys to remember all the functions.

Almost all writers used Word Perfect, but TV production preferred Wordstar because it had one little feature that no other Word processing program did.

Wordstar, like a typewriter, has the capability to return to the beginning of the CURRENT line enabling you to overtype the line. This enabled the Production Assistant to type in the Camera Shot indicator lines in the left half of the Sitcom style script.

Word Perfect or MS Word (or any other GUI word processor) just can't do that without a large amount of fiddling about