2012 June 06

Things That Scared Television Executives, From Warren Littlefield’s ‘Top of the Rock’

I’ve been reading former NBC programming chief Warren Littlefield’s Top of the Rock, which is an extremely entertaining oral history of the creation of Must See TV, from Cheers to Will & Grace. There’s a lot to digest in it, from Noah Wyle’s first threesome to the question of why the networks don’t really launch shows in the summer any more. But I have to admit, I’m finding it most amusing as a chronicle of things that television network executives and standards and practices divisions are afraid of. Here’s the complete list:

1. Anyone Who Might Possibly Get Angry About Something: “NBC’s head of programming at the time was a man named Paul Klein. He had a background in audience research and had come up with the strategy of LOP, which stood for Least Objectionable Programming (I’m not kidding).”

2. The Lord’s Name taken in vain, storylines about clergy sexual abuse (the negotiations leading up to Seinfeld): “Based on the day-to-day negotiating that we were required to do with broadcast standards— you can’t use the Lord’s name in vain, you can’t say ‘penis,’ priests don’t do that to kids on our network, et cetera.”

3. Married couples having sex on kitchen tables (Mad About You): “Paul and Jamie had sex on the kitchen table or something. You don’t do that at 8:00.”

4. Maxi Pads (Friends): “Don objected to a Maxi Pad joke. Ross couldn’t throw out his ex-wife’s Maxi Pads. He was using them as arch supports. Okay, Don was uncomfortable with Maxi Pads.”

5. Penises (Friends): “The rules kept changing. For the first three years we could say ‘penis.’ Then we couldn’t say ‘penis.’ Then we could say “penis” again.”

6. Contraception (Friends): “They’re masturbating on Seinfeld, and we can’t show a condom wrapper.”

7. Medical terminology (ER): “Don Ohlmeyer had strenuous objections to the style and content of the show. He thought there was too much blood and far too much technical dialogue.”

Bonus Thing Television Critics Association Press Tour Participants Were Apparently Afraid Of: the female orgasm. “I got a question about the appropriateness of the opening scene of Sisters, where they sit in a steam bath and discuss orgasms. ‘Warren, is this acceptable for network television?’ I thought about that for a second and said, ‘Corporately, we believe in orgasms.’”

‘Bring Up the Bodies’: The History-Maker Lost to History

Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, the second novel in her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, feels somewhat slighter than its sly, immersive predecessor, Wolf Hall. Some of that is simply a scope question: Wolf Hall covered more years of Cromwell’s life and the realms, and focused on the more momentous question of whether Henry would really break with Rome. Once we know he’s done that, his struggle to justify divesting himself of another wife is less tense, more quickly accomplished. And Cromwell, who has lost his children, his wife, put the possibility of affairs and remarriages aside in favor of service to the state, is a narrower man. To a certain extent, Bring Up the Bodies is a story about a man who shapes history losing tangible contact with his own life, his place in England.

When the novel begins, Cromwell “has counted the provision carts rolling in; he has seen kitchens thrown into turmoil, and he himself has been down in the grey-green hour before dawn, when the brick ovens are swabbed out ready for the first batch of loaves, as carcasses are spitted, pots set on trivets, poultry plucked and jointed. His uncle was a cook to an archbishop, and as a child he hung about the Lambeth Palace kitchens; he knows this business inside out, and nothing about the king’s comfort must be left to chance.” But by the end of the book, he’s holding himself back, wondering “If he had a ladder he could go up and look at the state of the leads. But that would perhaps not be consonant with his dignity. Master Secretary can do anything he likes, but the Master of the Rolls has to think of his ancient office and what is due to it. Whether, as the king’s Vicegerent in Spirituals, he is allowed to climb about on roofs… who knows?” His visceral urges are subsumed by the history he’s increasingly in charge of creating.

Of course, the maintenance of history is the business of all Englishmen of the class Cromwell has ascended into:

If you would defend England, and he would – for he would take the field himself, his sword in his hand – you must know what England is. In the August heat, he has stood bare-headed by the carved tombs of ancestors, men armoured cap à pie in plate and chain links, their gauntleted hands joined and perched stiffly on their surcoats, their mailed feet resting on stone lions, griffins, greyhounds: stone men, steel men, their soft wives encased beside them like snails in their shells. We think time cannot touch the dead, but it touches their monuments, leaving them snub-nosed and stub-fingered from the accidents and attrition of time. A tiny dismembered foot (as of a kneeling cherub) emerges from a swathe of drapery; the tip of a severed thumb lies on a carved cushion. ‘We must get our forefathers mended next year,’ the lords of the western counties say: but their shields and supporters, their achievements and bearings, are kept always paint-fresh, and in talk they embellish the deeds of their ancestors, who they were and what they held: the arms my forefather bore at Agincourt, the cup my forefather was given by John of Gaunt his own hand. If in the late wars of York and Lancaster, their fathers and grandfathers picked the wrong side, they keep quiet about it. A generation on, lapses must be forgiven, reputations remade; otherwise England cannot go forward, she will keep spiralling backwards into the dirty past.

But Cromwell’s gained particular power to define England. When Anne Boleyn asserts her permanence, Cromwell’s reaction is to consider is power to rewrite her narrative, as well as changing the condition of her physical body, her estate: “Not so, madam, he thinks. If need be, I can separate you from history. ” Contemplating his role, Cromwell considers himself:

The overlord of the spaces and the silences, the gaps and the erasures, what is missed or misconstrued or simply mistranslated, as the news slips from English to French and perhaps via Latin to Castilian and the Italian tongues, and through Flanders to the Emperor’s eastern territories, over the borders of the German principalities and out to Bohemia and Hungary and the snowy realms beyond, by merchantmen under sail to Greece and the Levant; to India, where they have never heard of Anne Boleyn, let alone her lovers and her brother; along the silk routes to China where they have never heard of Henry the eighth of that name, or any other Henry, and even the existence of England is to them a dark myth, a place where men have their mouths in their bellies and women can fly, or cats rule the commonwealth and men crouch at mouse holes to catch their dinner.

But Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are fascinating correctives precisely because while Cromwell helped erase Thomas More from the world he lived in, More eclipsed him in history, cast a shadow over Cromwell’s memory. Just like Wolf Hall was a red herring, a novel about Henry’s passion for Anne negated by the final sentence, an itinerary stop at Jane Seymour’s family home, this trilogy is an explanation of why the books need to exist in the first place.

Calls for 2030 EU Renewable Energy Target

A coalition of energy companies has called for a binding EU 2030 renewables target to be included in the European Commission’s ‘Renewable Energy Strategy post 2020’ report which was published today.

SSE, Eneco, Dong, EWE, Acciona, Sorgenia, PPC, EDP Renewables and Stadtwerke München argue that a binding 2030 renewables target is required to bridge the policy gap between 2020 and 2050 and to allow the industry to mature and reach cost competitiveness.

The report says the continued strong growth of renewables could create over 3 million jobs and save the EU economy up to 550 billion Euros in fossil fuel imports by 2050.

Today’s report is part of the negotiating process of building on the Commission’s current target of delivering 20% of the region’s energy mix from renewable technology by 2020.  However, UK Energy Secretary Ed Davey says a new target is not needed and the focus should shift from renewable energy to cutting carbon emissions, claiming that “the UK envisages multiple low-carbon technologies: renewables, nuclear and carbon capture and storage, all competing freely against each other in the years to come … For this reason, we cannot support a 2030 renewables target”.  But rather Ed Davey calls for a low-carbon target instead.

Meanwhile, Stephane Bourgeois, Head of Regulatory Affairs of the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) in Brussels says

“A legally binding renewable energy target for 2030 is crucial if we want to foster Europe’s leadership in wind energy, and in particular offshore wind”

Allen & York are pleased to support the growth of the renewable energy and low-carbon industry, as leading recruiters within this field.

Current renewable energy job opportunities include: