For those who may have missed all the blatant promotion, I’ve recently been working with Renegade Films on their new television show Studio at the Memo with Tim Rogers. They engaged me to work with them on developing a program of appropriate artists to appear on the show, which I describe as a sophisticated (but a little bit edgy) variety show, sitting somewhere between Later with Jools Holland and a night at the Famous Spiegeltent.
There’s been lots of fabulous media coverage on the show, and recently Richard Watts published a great article on ArtsHub about the opportunities Studio at the Memo has provided for artists. He also captured this quote from Peter Bain-Hogg at Renegade about our approach to programming the series:
"We wanted to have an eclectic mix and we’d always said: okay here are our touchstones. It’s got to have music but we don’t necessarily want music that would be on the pop charts or on the rock charts, so it’s something that’s going to be a little bit different, a little bit showy … We [also] wanted to have cabaret artists, and there aren’t terribly many opportunities outside of morning TV for cabaret artists to perform on television … and we wanted something that’s a little bit more physical theatre, if you like, so that’s when we started to look at people like KAGE and The Dirty Brothers and acts like that…"
My remit was to work with Peter to flesh out the programming aesthetic for the show, in particular the performing arts element. In doing that, we also worked closely with host Tim Rogers and Executive Producer Ken Connor to make sure they shared our direction and enthusiasm for certain performers. For anyone who has undertaken arts programming by committee, things can get difficult when you have a number of people all wanting input on programming choices. Through good communication and a shared vision, we managed to make most of our decisions with mutual approval of the team, but we certainly had a few good debates along the way.
Studio at the Memo is one of the very few entertainment shows that has been directly commissioned by Foxtel and represents a huge investment in something that hasn’t really been done on TV for quite a long time. In fact, with the huge proliferation of reality TV shows in production, we initially got push back from a number of artists who were concerned about being exploited for television. It took some explaining to reassure artists that we were actually providing an opportunity for them to showcase their talents in their own way. Once artists understood what we were trying to do, we quickly gathered strong support amongst the arts community.
The previously mentioned ArtsHub article also included this great quote from the artists’ point of view, by the Executive Producer of Briefs, Linda Catalano:
"We don’t have enough opportunities to showcase the practise of artists in this country, and I think it would be fantastic if there was a television platform that could raise awareness among your average person, because they don’t even know that it’s out there. If you don’t go to live gigs regularly you wouldn’t even know that people like Anna Lumb or Briefs even existed – it wouldn’t even be on your radar. But the minute you put that on TV, it can reach a different audience, and it might even ignite their interest in going to see people live."
In a little over 12 weeks, we researched, programmed, booked and contracted over 70 artists to appear across 6 x one hour episodes. Including the producers, crew and support staff, over 100 people worked on the show. In terms of investment in the arts industry and the Melbourne economy it’s already been a great success. And so too, in entertainment value, with fantastic feedback on the series flooding in, including this weeks review in The Australian.
Studio at the Memo is currently screening on Studio Channel (132 on Foxtel), 8:30pm Tuesdays
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