TVYP, MGEITF, BBC, ITV, OK? (Edinburgh in General)

Member Name: chooflafla

Product:	Edinburgh in General
Date:	02/09/04 (699 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Once in a lifetime experience, Free food and FREE ALCOHOL, Make lots of friends

Disadvantages: It's on the other side of Britain to where I live!, Saying goodbye to new friends

This review is loosely about Edinburgh and more about my experience at TVYP (Television and Young People) in association with MGEITF (Media Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival) (I bet the title is starting to make more sense now!)

===TVYP===

TVYP is an annual scheme that people aged 18-21 apply for if they are interested in working in the TV industry. Thousands of hopefuls apply every year, but only 150 make it on, and those lucky enough to make it are subjected to an intense day of masterclasses/seminars and a practical, hands on workshop whereby we learn the tricks of the trade.

===FOOD===

Food and accommodation is provided free of charge and three designated buses ferry us around to the venues of some speeches and parties. Yes, parties! Parties with free booze! Parties with UNLIMITED free booze! Wooooooooooooooo! The free booze extended to both red and white wine as well as various types of beer. It wasn?t cheap generic beer or supermarket own brand either, it was stuff like Grolsh, Bud and Stella. Since I?m not a fan of beer, I stuck to the white wine, and for teetotallers out there, there was also orange juice as well.

The food was of an excellent standard and the accommodation was top notch, with many rooms overlooking Arthur?s Seat (an extinct volcano), unfortunately, I had a ground floor view of a car park!

More about the food, eh? Well, all the meals (three square meals a day, each meal lasting an hour ? Breakfast: 8ish. Lunch: 12ish. Dinner: 5ish. There?s a slight change each day) were served in the John McIntyre Centre and involved a vegetarian option every meal as well.

I was su
rprised at the high quality as things like steak, lasagne and stroganoff were available, as well as pizza, pasta and garlic bread. The desserts were LOVELY, and involved individual cheesecakes with exotic fruits and oh so sexy chocolate cakes!

Cereal is provided for breakfast, but if this isn?t your thing, a good ol? fry up (there was no haggis! I was looking forward to that!) is available too. Tea and coffee, as well as an array of fruit juice and soft drinks were available.

I was most impressed at the tray bussing system, as there was a conveyer belt on the wall that rotated slowly into the kitchen with three tiers so that the poor dishwashers in the kitchen could clean our dirty plates. Breakfast on the first days was great but exhausting as I found myself shmoozing with a TV executive over coffee at 730am!

===ACCOMMOD 5;TION===

As I mentioned earlier, most rooms offer you great views, and the corridors are all covered by CCTV so you don?t have worry about valuables being stolen.

I stayed in Grant House on the ground floor and the basics in each room includes a sink, towel rail, wardrobe,
four drawers, a kettle, mug, tea and coffee, large desk, telephone, bin and desk lamp as well as two comfortable chairs, a Bible and bookshelves.

Each day, a cleaner would come around and top up any used tea and coffee, empty your bin and make the bed. I don?t think the sheets were changed though, as I have eczema and thus can tell if I have clean sheets (let?s not go into that) but at least they were made up nicely every day. Every other day, fresh towels were provided and complimentary shampoo and soap can be found on the initial day set out on the towel.

The shared bathroom and shower facilities were of an extremely high standard a
nd each one had a toilet, as well as individual toilet stalls available as well. These were also made spotless every day by the hard working cleaners.

Each wing on each floor offers a stairwell and a pantry, and in each pantry is an iron, ironing board, oven, microwave, fridge, sink and table and chairs. The only bad thing is that since every pantry is located in the centre of each wing, there are no windows and it feels rather dingy and dark in there.

The beds were very comfortable, hell, they were TOO comfortable at times as I missed breakfast a couple of times as I couldn?t bring myself to leave the security of the bed!

The rooms are all non-smoking.

===BACK TO TVYP===

My TVYP week started last Friday and ran through until Monday morning.

As soon as I arrived to the reception area of Pollock Halls at Edinburgh University, I was blown away by the amount of people in the waiting room, baring in mind I got there at the time that we were supposed to begin registration, yet at least 100 people were waiting already!

After about 10 minutes of mingling, a group of 30 of us were called up to pick up our keys and lead to Grant House, whereby we were given 5 minutes to grab what we needed and sort ourselves out, before we had to meet in the foyer again to be lead to Holland House (where the majority of my lectures and workshop was) for an introductory talk. During this talk, I coyly volunteered to work on the technical team of what would be known as ?The Presenter Experience? whereby I had to attach a mic to whichever delegate wanted to try their hand at presenting on TV for two minutes, and I was also in charge of burning the footage onto a CD for them to take away. This is where I met my first c
ontact in the media.

I got friendly with the crew of Picture Canning Company (it turns out that these guys were running my weekend workshop as well, bonus!) and even ended up getting drunk and dancing with some of them on Saturday night as well!

Anyway, after spending a couple of hours doing the technician job, I went to pick up my goody bag, which included a handy satchel, lolly pops, disposable single use toothbrushes, a disposable camera, programme of events, list of everyone on the course and contact details, alarm clock, breath mints, a rubber cow(!) and much, much more. Finally, and most importantly, I picked up my ID badge, which would entitle me to free booze and entry into restricted events solely for television conference delegates! I felt so important then! Wooooooo!

On the primary night I was there, we were ferried to a talk from Justin and Colin from TV?s ?How Not To Decorate? as well as Rhona Cameron from ?I?m a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here?. The delegates were all required to wear their T-shirts that we were given at the beginning as we were sponsored by the Sky TV channel, Trouble. After the introductory talks, we were ferried to the ground floor of the EICC building (it was huge and posh and had doormen!) for free booze (yay!) and a casino night whereby everyone was given 10 chips and told to gamble away playing games such as Black Jack, roulette and craps. The person who got the highest number of chips in 2 hours won two concert tickets to someone or other (sorry, I was drunk at this point) and the highest scoring female and highest scoring male also won some decent prizes too.

At this point, we were lead outside, onto our buses, and back to Grant House.

Zzzzzzz?

The next day saw ever
yone taking four master classes out of the 24 that were running that day. Before going up to Edinburgh, everyone had to put down a first, second and third choice of what they wanted to do and places were allocated from these forms.

The ones I did were:

===Raising The Stakes===

This was the first class of the day with Jonny Webb, the channel controller of Challenge TV on Sky. This was in a posh (but garish) room in the Salisbury Green music room on campus and is only a short walk away from where Holland House is.

Jonny has positioned games entertainment channel Challenge as the TV home of poker in the UK. Poker mania is sweeping the globe, with Hollywood A-listers flocking to the tables. Jonny puts on his best poker face and reveals how it has become addictive TV

===Turn Up The Heat===

This was run by Boyd Hilton who is the TV editor for Heat magazine. Poor ol? Boyd had a plaster stuck to his chin the night before as he was in a hurry to get to Edinburgh from London Paddington and tripped over a curb and slammed his chin into a pavement! Two of my new found friends stuck plasters all over their faces, spelling out ?TVYP? the night before and had a photo taken with him! :-D

Anyway, Boyd is the man in the know on all things telly. Working on top celebrity magazine Heat. What does he think of this year?s Big Brother and how does Heat consistently manage to grab those celebrity scoops? This was all answered in the class?

===Telling It Like It Is===

This was with the television presenter of Hangover TV, Simon Amstell. Well, he actually presents Popworld on Sundays, thus the Hangover &#
84;V part, if you get what I mean. ;-)

As host of Channel 4?s hugely successful Popworld, Simon has built a reputation as one of the wittiest popstar-ego-deflators on TV (he has been banned on interviewing Schooch and was also sacked from Nickelodeon for being too sarcastic to guests!). He is now putting his sharp tongue to good use in stand up comedy and he talks about how he got into the TV presenter business and all the while making the entire class laugh out loud and evoke a huge round of applause at the end, this must have really annoyed whoever was taking the class next door! :-)

===Lighting Up Five?s Future===

The CEO of Channel Five was good enough to take time out of her hectic schedule to come in and give a seminar about what she does and how she goes about it.

Jane Lighting began her television career with John Cleese?s production company, and then later becoming the Managing Director. In 1995 Jane founded Minotaur, an international programme sales company, and then went on to become CEO of Flextech Television. She talks about her vision for Five and even let us watch a five minute clip from the pilot of Joey (Friends spinoff) that hadn?t even been released to the press yet!

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After a day of masterclasses and dinner, we were moved onto McEwan Hall to listen to an hour long MacTaggart lecture about reality television. There was a big feature about this in Monday?s edition of the Guardian in the Media section, but I didn?t pay too much attention to the lecture as I was sat 6 inches away from a giant pillar and the speech was somewhat muffled. Since there was nowhere else I could go, I went to sleep!

Anyway, this was the only night that all of the delegates had fr
ee, so a bunch of us went to explore Edinburgh and ended up at a crowded little pub called The Last Drop. Drinks were flowing freely and though it was quite small, there was adequate seating as we convinced people to give us a table by telling them that we were all big shot TV executives with out paltry little ?Sponsored by the Discovery Channel? badges! There was also seating outside until 9pm, so a few of us hung around out there for an hour or so because being so crowded in there, also meant that it was very hot.

After drinking our fair share here, we moved onto a place called the Smirnoff Iron Underbelly where we caught a comedy show for £10.50 (about CAD$25) to see Rob Deery, a stand up comedian. It was a fantastically funny show, and lasted for an hour. The best thing was that Rob could also sing and play the electric guitar as well, so this added to his charisma.

After the show and copious amounts of whisky (maybe that?s why I found him so funny? Kidding!) we blagged our way into a rock concert using our Discovery Channel ?credentials? to see an American amateur rock group called The Lovegods. This lasted for about an hour and a half after we got there and their music was exactly what you?d expect from a rock group. They weren?t devoid of talent, but I?m more of a punk/ska person so I guess I?m being biased. After this wound up, myself and the three guys I was hanging around with got lost trying to find a kebab shop, then finally found a taxi rank, waited for over and hour, and made it back to Grant House, at about 4am, bearing in mind breakfast was at 8 on Saturday morning! *Groan*

===Workshop===

Ahh! The weekend workshop I took was my first choice and I wasn?t disappointed. I?ve done a similar thing during my second year at uni,
working in a studio, but this was more intense and thus more useful to my career.

As I mentioned earlier, I?d already gotten to know some of the people from here, both the technicians and a few of the people actually doing the workshop.

During the first day of hands on experience, we played around with lots of technical toys and I ended up vision mixing (deciding with the director what shots to use and when, bearing in mind that this was technically ?live), shooting and editing the VT (video tape) for a one minute sequence that was to be spliced in, and sorting out the lighting. I can honestly say that I learnt more about lighting in a studio from a technician in half an hour than I did at uni! I thought it would be very easy, but there are books written on the subject about 2 inches thick, and technicians who can get the lighting spot on in a studio are paid a lot of money as there is a demand for people who can do it perfectly.

At the end of the first session, we were told that we would be working on filming of two hours worth of presentations the next day from the other classes. No pressure then. On top of this, lighting, director, floor managing, sound engineers et al were all delegated to us! Eek! I was in charge of the VT and had to project them onto a giant screen when prompted, and also had to tell the rest of the crew how long each clip was, as well as how long we had left to go, and count them down. This sounds quite simple, but when you?re relied upon by over 200 people to get it right, handed footage 30 seconds before it is due to be aired, AND work on the LIVE broadcast of the lunchtime news on Sunday 29th August 2004 on BBC Scotland (I hope someone saw that!), then you?re under a lot of pressure! Suffice to say, I only shouted at a few people but we pulled it off in the end, and I
even won an award for keeping my cool under pressure (that?s because I snuck out periodically for cigarettes!) on the final day.

A two hour comedy line up was exclusively held for us (free booze, again) at the George Hotel, whereby the organisers of TVYP footed the bill. The only comedian?s name I could remember was Rob Deery. Sound familiar? Damn! I paid all that money to see him, only for him to perform for free! Grr!

After this, blah blah blah, dinner, blah blah MTV party!

This included free entry into an overpriced club in town and free drinks (my mate paid £5.50 [CAD$12.90] for an Archers and lemonade as she doesn?t drink beer or wine! Glad I drink wine) all night long. Food was circulated around the place as well and this was both free and tasty.

It wasn?t the type of party I expected as I associated ?MTV? with lots of stars, but there were people there who were famous to me in m own right, as I mingled with, and obtained business cards from, a lot of people who work in the TV industry including managing directors, CEOs and high level executives. The music was your run of the mill cheesy crap, but I was more interested in the free eats! :-) Needless to say, I got drunk again. Well, it?s all FREEEEEEEE EEE!

Sunday was the aforementioned filming of the presentations from other groups and the LIVE NEWS, LIVE NEWS, LIVE NEWS? ahem?

There was a quiz show type thing held between three high level big cheeses in the TV industry versus three TVYP delegates held at the EICC (the Industry won) hosted by Richard Bacon. It was a t
ake on British TV?s ?Telly Addicts? and the entire crowd were of course biased towards the delegates to win. :-) The new head of ITV Day Time, Nick Thorogood, put on a private show for us at this event, i.e. he wore a pair of crotchless panties over his trousers, then tripped on his chair and fell on his ass! Heehee!

After this, more drinks and closing speeches, then we were shuffled off to the final party (more booze) to say goodbye to all of our new friends.

Throughout the time we were here, a TV crew were following us around and made a little promotional film about us all. They held little interviews as well (I didn?t mine slightly inebriated, I hope they don?t use it!) with random people that they?re going to use on their showreel next year to attract more people to do it.

Monday morning was the worst time I had at TVYP as it was time to say goodbye properly to everyone. It felt like I had been there for a few weeks rather than a few days and I made a lot of friends there that I will hopefully keep in touch with over time. Who know, I may see a few of them again next year as I?m applying to be a Steward at the event next year. Wish me luck!

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TVYP runs every year over the August Bank Holiday weekend. For more details on how to apply, go to: http://www.tvyp.co.uk

Capital letters courtesy of: http://www.chuckleweb.co.uk/fixit.php

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