Pink & Blue

I’m having another of those days when I’d like to write something erudite and informative but nothing is surfacing from the deep swamp of thoughts that lurks somewhere in a lobe just up and back from my largish nose. So I’ll rabbit on about my current project instead.

I’m stuck for eight days in a small airless box built within a large airless box. Six women are sat around a semicircular table playing cards instead of being at home ironing or running a large multi-national company. My colleague, Craig, and I exist in a sensorily deprived state, monitoring the health and well-being of the lighting rig that we’ve put together over the last two days and ready to leap into action if anything goes bang. Most of the decisions that I needed to make of an artistic or technical variety have been made; all we can do now is sit, drink tea, and occasionally fiddle with the setting of a lamp; this is an action that involves selecting it on the control desk, waggling the fader up and down in a subtle manner so as not to frighten anyone, and then deciding you prefer it just the way it was.

After a few days the desire to change things, just because you can, becomes irresistible and it is at this stage that a voice comes out of a talkback speaker saying something like ‘it doesn’t look the same as it did on Monday’. To which you reply ‘No it looks better’ if you don’t care if you work for them again or ‘Sorry about that, I’ll have a look at it’ if you’ve not got another job scheduled until about November 2009. Whichever answer you give, the trick is to do nothing but give the impression you have – holding the show up while you get a ladder out and climb up to knock a light around a bit is normally successful as is trying out every colour you have available and flashing the lamp in every fixture capable of being flashed.

Usually you can get away with this and anyway you’ll be messing it up again in a couple of days time when the boredom once again reaches crisis point. Obviously some continuity is in order. You’re not likely to get away with starting a programme in pink and blue and ending it in green and yellow unless the production asks you to. Even so you should resist this request with all the severity you can muster. Any lighting designer who ventures into the green end of the spectrum has to be on some sort of mind-altering drug. I’ve tried Moss Green once when completely sober and was forced to lie down for some time after. I did have a colleague who could do things with this putrescent colour but he was Scottish and that may have helped.

The problem is that pink and blue are so over-used in television. What we really need is a completely new spectrum with colours like zog, snork and pnuff. That would make it worth coming to work again.