I fulfilled another life-long dream on Thursday. I hosted a TV show.
Although it’s not what I envisioned when I moved to Melbourne – hosting a TV game show – filming the pilot for “31 Questions” on Thursday was certainly one of the highlights of my entertainment career.
This was my first opportunity to combine the host/writer roles for television. I’ve previously combined these roles for radio and YouTube, but this was essentially the first time I’ve been able to present my own material in my own style in a TV setting, which was absolutely fantastic. A very rare opportunity indeed.
The first thing you’ve no doubt noticed is my zany jacket:
I came up with the idea for the jacket before any of the segments. Let’s face it, the jacket is essentially the show. 31 Questions co-creator (& producer/director) Simon Eastwood and I found a beautiful silver jacket for $40 at Arthur Daley’s Clearance House on Swanston Street. And it fit perfectly. We couldn’t believe it. Then we ruined it by covering it with question marks.
When I arrived on Thursday and saw the jacket in its “questionable” form for the first time, I thought the idea looked better in my imagination. It looked pretty crappy. But when it’s on TV it actually looks pretty good. Thank Christ. The miracle of television! And thanks to Simon and his sister for staying up til 6am the day of the pilot, sewing on the ?’s.
Simon did a fantastic job. There’s so much to organise to film a TV show. And as it was the pilot, there were a few bugs we had to iron out. It turned out the questions were a little bit hard, and there weren’t enough of them, so we were under-time by about 8 minutes!
I had to go and write some more questions, which we then filmed. And somehow Simon’s going to edit those extra questions into the show. Hehehe… Jeeze thank God I’m not doing that. It messed up the scores as well, so the guys in the control room had to watch back the tape to work out who won.
This shot pretty much sums up how we felt at that moment:
Joining me on camera was my good friend Lachlan Cowlishaw, acting as the show’s moderator. The idea was we were going to do some back and forth gag banter in between questions, but because we didn’t have enough cameras, whenever we wanted to do that we had to do it as a “pick-up”.
That means we shot the whole segment, then at the end, repositioned the cameras so Lachlan and I could talk. But by that stage we’d lost the flow and weren’t quite sure what we were supposed to be doing.
Not to worry. Simon’s worked out how to film this in a better way if the pilot gets picked up for a series. Likewise, Lachlan and myself will try to be funnier.
It’s a good format for comedy though. We had a lot of fun with the questions and there’s plenty of room for gags and sketches, despite labelling it as a “game show”. Technically it’s “light entertainment”.
All those years of reading scripted gags for my radio shows and trying to make it sound like I’m not reading from a script paid off. Turns out that skill is immediately transferable to reading scripted gags off an autocue.
And an excellent job of operating the autocue by Emma Halfpenny. Thank you so much. Without your perfectly timed finger, I would have completely stuffed up my jokes!
You’re worth your name in coins, which isn’t actually that much. Seriously, nice work.
Thank you also to my glamorous assistant, Minky Cooper, keeping track of the scores. A particularly difficult job considering adding in the extra questions completely screwed up the scoring sequence.
And we couldn’t have done it without the crew. I’ve said it many times before: crew people are the best people. Being the pilot, it was a bit of a shambles, and our studio booking ran overtime by about half an hour. A lot of people were there from 2pm until 10:30pm, all for no money.
Everyone conducted themselves very professionally. I’m sorry I didn’t get to hang out with you all more and have a few laughs on the side. I didn’t even get to say thank you too each of you in person. I was pretty focused on the show. I think if we’re approved for a series, we’ll get our act together and have much more time for goofing around.
Thank you all so much.
And special thanks to the show’s inaugural contestants, Andrew and Carley. Thanks for being such good sports…
I have very high standards for myself. I’m happy with how the pilot went. I think with editing it’ll look good. But I also think that we can make it a whole lot better.
Practice makes perfect. Looking back at my old radio shows, whenever I started a new show they didn’t start getting good until about show 3 or 4. TV is a lot more complicated and labour-intensive than radio. And we were very fortunate to get such a great looking set for essentially no money. That’s half the battle right there.
Simon and I have already worked out half a dozen ways to make the show better if we get approved for a series. Hopefully RMITV and Channel 31 will give us a chance.
It was a goal of mine this year to move to Melbourne and make a TV show. I did it. And I’m happy. Now to do it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again…
Kind regards,
TV’s David M. Green
Thanks also to Olav Dias for taking some amazing photos. His ones are the 500×333 ones above (ie. the good ones).
