I went along to the Midlands Arts Centre to take part in the 4Talent Inspiration Day in Birmingham.

By Pamilla Sidhu

Jake Taylor, Kym Langer and James Abadi from Combined Mind were running the workshop. Practised in their fields, they guided and shared their expertise with us throughout the day. Thanks guys!

Pictured: Kym and James with myslef. Kym, a producer, has worked on Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway and Big Brother. She is one of the exclusive people who has done the voice of Big Brother! Whilst James and Jake have both worked on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!

Exploring TV shows, genres and audiences is thought-provoking, and that’s what we started off with. TV shows are categorised by genre.  We later found out how useful that can be when coming up with an idea for a new TV show. Looking at what genre target audiences may like can allow you to stem ideas from it for new TV shows. Comedy for example, I can speak from experience when I say teens like their comedy. My friends and I are into Russell Howard, Frankie Boyle, David Mitchell etc, and most of us like watching The Inbetweeners. This is how drawing upon personal knowledge is useful when discussing who might watch a TV show, and developing a show aimed at a specific target audience.

After establishing and discussing the most liked and disliked programmes of our group, we got onto ideas for shows. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it could be to come up with a new show. After all, some appalling programmes do make it onto the small screens! The group came up with 8 main ideas, and after splitting into smaller teams we each worked on an idea. Having been thrown into a group with people who didn’t know each other at all, is always a little unnerving. However, I got on well with my team and I enjoyed working with them as we delved into the task.

[ My team mates Shay and Marcus ]

It sounds fairly simple, but the aspect we found most challenging was actually writing down the fundamentals of our show.

I’ve seen it intimidate adults on The Apprentice and Dragon’s Den, but now the time had come for us multi talented young people to have a go at the pitches! I led my team’s pitch for a TV show aimed at students. It was not a formal pitch, so that took the pressure off a little bit, but we had some fairly tough groups to follow. We spent the time explaining how we had developed the idea into something more commercially viable, and how we expanded it from the initial thoughts.

The pitches concluded the work we had done, followed by the chance to grill our workshop leaders! Thank you to James, Jake, Kym and Lauren for the truly inspiring workshop!