Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [39]
No, better than a winner—TV Gold.
1 TV Talk. Many TV executives today have no idea what will make good television or what shows should get made. And those that do are often too scared to back their hunches. After all, they have mortgages, car payments, and kids to put through school. So, as a rule, and rather than endanger their family's security, they outsource the really important decisions to focus groups. Focus groups are ordinary people who know absolutely nothing about television either. But they are very good at telling TV executives what to think. Synergy, I believe this is called.
2 The Santa Barbara News-Press. This excerpt is reproduced with their kind permission.
3 No it wasn't. A crass, foolish pack of factual oversights possibly! Not lies.
4 No I shouldn't.
5 No I didn't.
6 Yes I would.
7 No it wasn't.
8 Yes I can.
9 No I'm not.
8
The phone rings. A crisis meeting is being called.
When I finally track down Eric he's in the cavernous white lobby of our hotel, agitated, pacing up and down, wearing his usual uniform of plain T-shirt and cargo shorts, pale anorexic legs rattling around inside them like bell-clappers. Tasha's off to one side, hunched on a couch, chin resting on a clipboard, Director Mark beside her.
“Dude, this town is super boring.” Eric sighs. “Tasha went out yesterday and scouted around, and there's …”
“… nothing,” she picks up. “It's a quaint little coastal village, but that's all. There are churches, hotels, bars, a monastery, some ancient ruins … I mean, it's a vacation place. Really beautiful, and quiet and stuff, but…”
Not enough to fill a thirty-minute TV show.
Deep in thought, Eric migrates to the bay window, juggling his cell phone between hands, tossing, catching, tossing, catching, as he squints out into blinding sunlight at a sweep of unbroken olive groves descending to an oceanscape of such improbable blue that it looks like it was painted indiscriminately by an ungifted child, the way it does in cheap postcards.
Tasha's right about the quiet. It's suffocating. The entire town is in a round-the-clock coma. Nothing moves in the heat, except maybe a lizard or two, or a bedraggled peasant plodding along the lane outside with a donkey and cart piled high with cheese. Evidently, we've been sent to a place that, to someone in a cubicle in L.A., must have sounded like dynamite, positively packed with promise, only to find that many of the things we came here for don't exist, and the ones that do are too boring to make a show about. As a holiday resort, a place to rest and unwind, this would be ideal. As a location for an entertaining adventure travel show, it's pure anesthetic.
Stifling a yawn, I collapse into a chair.
These are early days, but already the workload from shooting this series is starting to catch up with me. Tanna Island left us for dead. And that was only our fourth trip! Since then there have been seven more, including New Zealand, Moscow, and Transylvania, all of them shot rat-a-tat, one after the other in rapid succession, and it's utterly exhausting.
To complicate things further, I was so busy at the start, impressing on everyone my prohibitive list of food sensitivities, that I completely forgot to mention my prohibitive list of phobias too. These include heights, enclosed spaces, spiders, high speeds, authority figures, flying, wild animals, large dogs, genitalia,1 snakes, horses, and, ever since a time years ago when a psychic told me I would someday die by drowning, water. Of course, none of these things figures very much in my world back home in Hollywood, where life is comfortable, bordering on luxurious, and I have total control over my environment. But out