I, Partridge - Alan Partridge [75]
It’s hardly fulfilling to pour your heart and soul into making TV content only for it to be used as an audio-visual backdrop to a man doing a crossword or a tired mum smacking one or both or all of her children.
The same cannot be said for corporate, marketing or public information videos. In watching them, your audience has made a conscious, active decision to view. They’ve gone out of their way to remove the free DVD from its polythene sheath, to turn off their BlackBerries for a health and safety induction, or to shuffle their way to the recreation room to learn about the dangers of diabetes.
They’ve made an appointment to view, and that knowledge makes the work utterly thrilling. It was this exciting realm that formed the next stage of my broadcasting career.
I hope this doesn’t sound vulgar but the money is effing brilliant. It’s borderline grotesque. I was not complaining. These people will pay through the nose for a presenter who has the gravitas, humility and time on their hands to front content that will be seen by less than a thousand viewers. I had that humility. And time. And gravitas.
Markedly different from publicly available TV work, this kind of presenting was a real learning curve. And I learnt plenty: you must smile when you say the name of the product – even if it’s for a genito-urinary complaint. There’s no need to speak louder for a geriatric audience.176 And there’s no budget for wardrobe so dress smartly before leaving the house.
Between 1996 and 1998, I became quite indispensable in this specialist strand of broadcasting, having seen off Rob Bonnet and John Stapleton in the land-grab that followed Nick Owen’s back injury. Until then, Nick had earned – and this is only my estimate – more than £12 million a year, and while I didn’t even approach those kind of numbers, I earned enough to pay for a hire-purchase vehicle and a static home.
Play your cards right (and I do) and this kind of work can provide a deliciously regular source of income. This sort of ready dosh can be handy when you need to pay for life’s essentials – groceries, utility bills, the slush fund you set up some years ago to defend yourself against the odd bout of unavoidable legal action.
But I say again – it’s not just anyone who can land these kind of jobs. You need to hit a certain level of ability before the really big boys start knocking on your door. You don’t seriously think that just anyone can be trusted to record a ten-minute sales video for, I dunno, Beccles-based Startrite Intrusion Detection Systems? I mean these alarms save lives.
Pick the wrong man (Rav from Crimewatch, for example) and potential customers will take one listen to his voice and zone out. The net result? People are going to wind up dead. Try sticking that on your CV.
So it makes me proud to say that during those years I have fronted over 60 corporate videos for everything from potato-based processed food products to Latvia.
Of course it wasn’t always plain sailing.177 I was once cow-bombed while stood on a traditional East Anglian narrowboat178 fronting a piece of sales collateral for the county’s leading off-land holiday operators.
It was a sunny afternoon and out on the Norfolk Broads the mercury was nudging 90. On the river-bank beyond, holiday-makers and the unemployed were sunning themselves in 32 degrees of pure British Celsius. It was then that my marketing patter was interrupted by a cow falling on me from a motorway bridge.
Incredibly, a group of militant APFs (anti-Partridge farmers) had decided that revenge was a dish best served deceased.179 They had waited for me to cruise beneath them and then tipped the big dead Friesian right on top of me. As I lay there, fighting to catch my breath, trapped