Grandad's Back In Business
Production company: Twenty Twenty
Broadcasters: BBC 1
Length: 4 X 60 mins
Genre: Reality Documentary
TX: 2007
Dir: Various
Synopsis:
A great why-didn't-I-think-of-that type reality idea. Two people - one an old person who wants to go back to work because they're bored or skint, the other a fresh faced graduate - gets given a month internship at company within their industry (hairdressing, advertising etc). Whoever does the best gets the job.
Score notes:
Right. My first idea was granddads. Grandads = ukuleles. I don't know why I thought that but it seemed right. George Formby and all that. So I went to see a band rehearse - The Dulwich Ukulele Club - in a pub in south London with a view to writing the whole score for them to play. They were great but, as with all my ideas I think they're great at the time, the practical side finally catches up. The only Uke I had was a rather dodgy one a mate of mine got me from Australia. He'd carried it half way around Oz on some nonsense finding-himself type escape. Lugged it on the back of his rucksack, up mountains, on beaches, everywhere. 'What a great present for Dan' he thought. He gets back home six months later to find that the music shop at the top of his street is selling EXACTLY the same uke for £20. Ha ha ha. Anyway I found it funny. He didn't so much. Still I caned it on the first series of Love Island so time to get a new one. I went and bought a super duper top of the range one, despite the fact I didn't mean to. Good salesman.
Anyway my new one sounds fucking ace. Infact everything I did around this period seemed to have ukuleles on it. So I started recording myself playing loads of bits but it wasn't really happening how I wanted it too so I tried to rethink the whole 'all ukes and nothing else idea'. I then thought Grandads also = gramaphones. So I started sampling up loads of my old gramaphone records and sampling horn blasts, piano noises, twisting them, cutting them up and then weaving them into the score. Then I thought - 'what about all the kids in the show?'. Well we all know what the kids like. They all like record scratching. Yes they do. So I got a lot of record scratching done on it, chopped up some beats, improved my uke skills and stuck it all together. The tracks even passed the dancing test where if I find myself hopping around the flat while I'm listening to them you know they're good. Lots of bad dancing was done to this on my own. Please don't try to visualise this.
