Whiteboards

A good clue that someone might have once worked as a TV entertainment producer is a camera roll full of pictures of whiteboards. Several times a month, my photos app’s Memories tab will surface a picture of a whiteboard; it’s a fun game to try and guess the year from what’s written on it.

Here is an early whiteboard from 2016’s edition of Big Fat Quiz of the Year, not exactly a slow news year:

This is a long-list of topics we considered for inclusion in the show. We would gradually strike through stories we discarded, and then periodically photograph the whiteboard, wipe it, and rewrite it from scratch, like an incredibly lo-fi version of tracked changes. (In 2016, we colour-coded stories stemming from the EU referendum and the US election so they didn’t crowd out other topics.)

Here is an early pass at topics for 2012’s Big Fat Quiz of the 90s - the one with Mr Blobby, who is curiously absent from this list. (We may have been in the process of trying to book him and keen not to tempt fate.) I was always supremely jealous of my co-producer Ben’s superb whiteboard handwriting.

The advantage of this sort of system (and its close cousins, the post-it notes on a whiteboard or the postcards pinned to a cork-board), is that you can ‘sit with’ a show’s running order for a while to make sure it feels right while you work on other things - unlike a tab on a computer, which disappears the minute you need to focus on something else. I was delighted to see that the Saturday Night Live UK writers still work in this way.