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So there I was, I’d been offered a job on House Doctor only to find I couldn’t take it.
Now as the year went on, the move happened and my work quietened down. I began to regret more and more not taking the job making House Doctor, as decorator and chippie.
Eventually I called up Andrew Anderson to ask if there were any more shows being produced. He said “sorry ‘No’ we can’t wait around for people, the show has to be made to its schedule, not yours!”
Oh well.
Having been bitten by the TV bug, to be honest my partner couldn’t understand my desire to work on TV and was rather relieved that the whole thing hadn’t come off, I was left feeling I’d let a great opportunity pass me by.
This feeling didn’t lesson as I chatted with other people I knew who worked in TV who all said the same thing “are you MAD?” “ You were offered a job with Talkback and you turned it down!”
Well I just had to put the whole thing behind me and get on.
Then late in November I got a call from a new series producer on the show. They were going into production early in 2003 and would I like to consider being part of the new team making House Doctor?
This time I wasn’t saying “No”.
As it happened they had decided that they needed someone to take on the role of Location Coordinator, a sort of master of ceremonies on a TV shoot.
The job was to help organise the behind the scenes before filming and then once the crew were on location to …well coordinate the shoot…well shoots actually as two programmes are filmed simultaneously over a two week period. Very hectic, as I found out.
They particularly wanted someone with a design eye who had event organising capabilities and could help keep the team happy, healthy as well as arrange the on site facilities for Ann, her food, accommodation, transport etc.
In fact the position was a great one to take as I wasn’t specifically hands on for the makeover… this meant that I could observe the whole process of making House Doctor, the show, and get a great overview of how Ann Maurice and the team actually carry out House Doctoring on a property. I still think there is no better way to learn the skills of Home Staging than watching The House Doctor, Ann Maurice, in action.
My role in the office meant that I assisted in finding suitable properties for the show, quite a tall order.
You’d think that there would be people falling over themselves for a virtually free makeover from The House Doctor and her team wouldn’t you?
Instead of spending months and months struggling with DIY it can all be over and paid for in just 2 weeks!
Yet finding willing contributors for making the House Doctor show was a tough job. Either they or the properties didn’t have anything that would make for good TV. Remember that House Doctor, like all TV shows, needs to tell a story and entertain. It can’t repeat things that it has done in the past, viewers would just get board.
Further the public have become wary of letting TV crews into their homes. Well there have been some nightmare stories over the years. These stories have usually been urban myths but no less potent for that. Also contributors have become savvy to what may be on offer and have become quite demanding as a result. TV companies don’t pay all the bills and some punters weren’t prepared to put their hands in their pockets for anything…even if they were going to get a fantastic makeover and sell their home for a big profit.
The third problem is that the property itself has to be just right. Home Staging is a process of working on the cosmetic issues of a property. If the property isn’t selling because it is next to a busy road, mortuary or factory or because it is structurally unsound, then no amount of house doctoring will get it to sell. Further, although in reality any home can be better presented, for the TV show we needed properties that could be ‘House Doctored’ in just 7 working days! So a 10-bedroom mansion was out of the question.
So the property finding process follows calls to Estate Agents all over the UK, looking for properties that just wont sell.
Now back in 2003 properties were flying off the estate agents books like hotcakes, so this made the job even harder. The properties that weren’t selling were either really over priced, really not suitable or just really REALLY bad! Either way, not for making House Doctor material.
The poor researchers would spend half the week on the phones and the other half tearing up and down the country looking at possible properties.
Whenever the phone rang I’d answer with my fingers crossed. “Any good?” I’d ask hopefully…”dire” “but not in a good way!”
Oh well back to the drawing board…with only weeks to go before the shoot was scheduled to begin things were getting desperate.
Now you may wonder why finding the properties are left so late. Well you can’t go finding properties months before filming…remember that these are real properties with real people needing to sell them. More often than not if you find a great property months before, it will have sold before you get to make the show…it’s called sods law!
So just shift the schedule…no can do!
You see not only would you need to pay all the crew for waiting around and twiddling their thumbs, but Ann Maurice lives in the US. She books out just so much time to come and make the shows, she has other commitments like her House Doctoring Seminars, her private work and, well her family life…so the show schedule is rigid and doesn’t move by even one day.
In a way this focuses everyone’s mind to get the job done, so having this deadline sort of works…but you don’t half burn the midnight oil to make it work.
Whilst all this panic is going on over ‘Where’ the houses/ properties are and ‘What’ the actual issues will be…the stylist are trying to make decisions about what they will need to do in order to get the houses up to scratch… a bit of a tall order when they don’t know what or where the actual houses are!
But we all know that there are some things that we will need whatever the properties…paint, carpet, materials, blinds, basic accessories like soaps, toiletries etc…so at least we could all get on the phone and start sourcing these.
The same is true for the redecoration work. Again without knowing what the actual issues are, it is hard to know what will be needed, but you can be sure that we would need painting equipment, basic tools, radiator covers…though who knows how big (and even then they end up being the wrong size…read about that later). So I worked with the project manager sourcing what we could and schmoozing the suppliers to let us use their products on screen.
The whole process seems chaotic, but there is the steadying hand of the production manager who has a great overview of the whole process and can see how things are coming along. They can tell, from past experience, if things are coming on track.
Well I won’t go into the finer details of getting a team ready (but do email me if you really want to know more about that).
Suffice to say that with two weeks to go the office was humming with the sound of phones ringing and people talking.
Then breakthrough properties 1 & 2 seem to appear overnight, everyone goes into a new gear. The block 1 team who will be working on this property suddenly perk up and orders are being place, deliveries are arriving and everyday the teams are out visiting the first two properties…measuring up and making decisions…the poor contributors must wonder what they have let themselves in for…a team descends on their home and begins to talk about it as a problem, pulling open cupboards, rearranging furniture…and this is before the makeover even begins.
Now let me remind you that these shows are REAL, unlike many other makeover shows that ‘stage’ the properties and even use actors for contributors!
On House Doctor that simply doesn’t happen – What you see is what you get.
What you see is really what the houses were like, and remember that you can’t smell those properties, you cant see behind the fridges and freezers, like we could…often they are a lot worse than they appear on TV.
In my next piece I’ll tell you what it’s like from the contributors point of view…one of my jobs is to be a friend to them, a link to the team and a shoulder to cry on…something that happens quite a lot on this show.
The House Doctor has a House Doctoring formula that works and Tracy Gullen, senior stylist on the show knows what this formula is. She has worked with Ann many many times and so can begin to make some decisions that Ann can fine tune later.
By the final day before the vans are loaded with all the materials, tools and styling stuff to carry out the first two makeovers of the first block of filming, the office looks like we’re expecting a siege. Or perhaps we look like an outpost of B&Q!
Everyone is excited, nervous, thinking about what will happen over the next two weeks…hope it doesn’t rain.
Next time we all meet the first block will be truly over and done with, the first two shows of House Doctor in the can…literally…the next two properties found and hopefully under way.
Oh well when I next write I’ll tell you all about being on location, how the team work, how the contributors deal with the invasion…oh yes and what my first encounter with Ann Maurice, The House Doctor, was like….
Until then
Take care |
