ABSTRACT
The previous chapter explored how and why someone aims to enter the television comedy industry: this chapter examines how and why someone develops and maintains a career in that industry. In doing so it draws on interviews with a number of writers who have worked successfully in the industry for many decades. As will be shown, statements of ‘success’ need to be qualified, given that all interviewees experienced peaks and troughs of work. Furthermore, for some a pragmatic choice has been made to diversify their labour in order to ensure they could continue making enough money to live; this diversification might be into other media (such as radio or theatre) or other genres (such as drama). This diversification might also be a response simply to wanting to try new kinds of writing, rather than a purely economic choice. But the key aim here is to explore this longitudinal aspect of working within the television comedy industry, and the consequences of carrying out labour which requires individuals to be repeatedly creative. This chapter focuses on writers for pragmatic reasons, and does not do so in order to imply that all such creativity comes from writers. The conditions of working within the industry as outlined here are applicable to all within the sector for whom precarity and project work is the norm. But it remains the case that writers occupy a position within the sector where their career is dependent upon them repeatedly and consistently coming up with new, creative ideas. To be sure, workers who carry out craft labour (Banks 2010b) – such as directors, editors, technicians – are highly creative in their work; but we know of no example where the initial idea for a programme was first thought up by people with those jobs. Those people are dependent upon networks of contacts in order to continue working, and their conditions are similarly precarious and project based. But they are not typically tasked with the origination of the creative ideas that underpin a project as a whole. It is the case that producers also initiate ideas – indeed, some of our interviewees suggested this was becoming more common, and the examples outlined in Chapter 3 show how producers are
active in this regard – and are similarly dependent upon a string of projects for their continued career. We therefore draw on interview material from some producers active in this way in this chapter. But it is the case that contemporary industry structures assume writers will be the originators of ideas (even if this isn’t always the case in practice). Furthermore, the precarious, project-based nature of creative work was most evident in our conversations with writers, many of whom had up to twenty different ideas – at very different stages of development – on the go at any one time. The question here, in terms of creativity, then, is how someone manages to maintain such sustained productivity over a long period of time, in order to maintain a career. The notion of a career has important implications for debates about creativity, as it highlights the significance of ongoing, regular, routinised, unceasing creative work, demonstrating creativity to be a lived experience that has to be worked at by an individual. If creativity “is the ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising and valuable” (Boden 2004: 1, italics in original), then having a creative career involves finding ways repeatedly to carry out this process within the confines of the relevant industry. This idea of a career is important because it points towards a context central to understanding long-term work; age. All of the interviewees in Chapter 3 who were taking their first steps into the industry were young, predominantly in their twenties. But the interviewees in this chapter were instead older, having worked in television, in some cases, for decades. This has significant implications for both working styles and the role work plays given that for these writers personal, domestic contexts become important. All these writers had families and other commitments, meaning that maintaining a steady income becomes a responsibility more weighty than that for younger writers without such commitments. Tellingly, none of the writers discussed in Chapter 3 brought up concerns about income related to their need to support others; their worry about a lack of money was related solely to themselves. But the interviewees in this chapter often referred to their partners or children or other commitments as a context within which their work took place, and sometimes cited them as reasons for particular career decisions being made. This points towards these pressing personal contexts within which creative labour occurs. That is, while economic and personal contexts were not the primary driver for career and work decisions they were a factor within which all such decisions took place. These interviewees juggled the personal and the professional, often seeking to find ways to ensure the pragmatic, mundane concerns of financial need did not unduly impact upon the pleasures of creative work. That they were long-time members of the industry demonstrated that they had found ways of achieving this balance that they felt was acceptable. Here the idealised, romanticised notion of what creative work could be rubs up against the concerns of income, family, responsibility, and commitments.
