Go Team!

I had the pleasure of working the most sweetest Researcher during a reality TV shoot I was filming in the New Forest. She was a star when I lost the hire car keys and had no time to look for them, she searched high and low for them without letting on to the rest of the team so to save me from the embarrassment of everyone knowing what a school boy error I made. I really treasure these types of people because they are the ones that can make a terrible working environment a hell of a lot more enjoyable.

Freelancing comes with its ups and downs and one of the ups is having a great team. When you move from one production to the next you get to meet a whole spectrum of personalities in all degrees of emotions. I have an entire library full of horror stories of working in TV which would make your hairs stand on end. Like the time a Director made me take three human poos home in tupperware boxes or the time I discovered a story written about me in trashy tabloid newspaper due to my filming with a particularly nasty Z-list celebrity. Believe me when I tell you that the horror stories far outweigh the good. So meeting this lovely Researcher, with her really positive and calm manner really made a difference to what could have been a very stressful shoot.

Telly people are not all that bad but when you do get a bad one they can be bloody awful. I really do love my job but if you don't have the support from your colleagues it can make for a very sorry situation indeed. I generally believe in working as a team, combining skills, sticking together and looking out for one another. I guess that makes me pretty soft and maybe even venerable at times but I like to create as many harmonious conditions for myself as possible in this life.

At times it seems that the majority of the population are just out for themselves seeing their own faults in others first. If I have the unfortunate situation of working with an exceptionally retched Producer I get depressed, loose all my confidence and generally feel like I'm wasting my life making shit TV that people only watch because there's nothing else on. And what's even more distressing is when you work with a Producer on one production where everything goes as planned and they are as sweet as pie to you, only to discover a few months later when working with them again on another production fractionally more stressful that they are in fact the devil. Thats the most disappointing working situation because you realise almost all people are evil if pushed to a certain point. Everyone has a has a threshold for stress and some people deal with stress by projecting their negativity onto you. When I find myself in a stressful situation I pull all the people who I trust and work well with close to me and subtly remind them that we are all working to the same goal and that we can make it a whole lot more bearable by keeping our heads and not turning on each other. I started a new production today on a program I love and I will be doing everything I can to get this marvelous researcher on my team. She deserves it, its people like her that should get rewarded with good jobs not the cut throat aggressive types.