CONTENTS:

1. Interview with Bob Mills

2. Email from Dan Clapton

1. Interview with Bob Mills

This site had been online for just a few weeks when Bob Mills himself emailed me to say he was pretty chuffed with my work! After firing a few emails back and forth, Bob kindly agreed to let me interview him. "In Bed With Medinner" is clearly a programme he's pretty proud of, and in the following interview he provides some really interesting information on the prog as well as talking about his television work, football, and wanting to be an HGV driver.

Bob: It's great to see the interest that people still have in Medinner, but I'll admit, I'm staggered by the number of hits your site has received. It seems more people are logging on than ever actually watched the show!

Bob: I have had a pretty varied career, in a 'nicking a living' sort of way. I've been able to get by, because rather than any one specific talent, I've always been a bit of a Jack of all Trades. There are definitely a large group of people who know me mainly from Medinner, and I'm immensely proud of that. Basically, you need to understand, what Medinner gave me was, the ability to move on and do other things, without the nagging doubt about whether I'd fulfilled my potential on TV, which haunts a lot of performers. You and I both know, that if I'd have hung round on the box for the next 100 years, I'd never have come anywhere near close to matching 'Football/MuggyBoneHead' or 'Pershunchilliallymelba'.

Bob: Medinner came about thus; LWT were going to do a series of 6 1 hour shows with Danny Baker, tentatively called 'World In Acton' At the last minute Danny pulled out, and they were left with the slots. I happened to be around the building at the time and pitched my idea for a show where, basically, people came round my house, watched bits of video, listened to music and generally had a laugh. From the first meeting, to the first recording was about a month!

Bob: The first two 'pilot' shows were, I think 1 hour. Then the series with the bands followed...Stiff Little Fingers, The Damned, The Buzzcocks, Heatwave, Gary Numan, Terry Hall. We also used proper actors for the sketches! After that it was a question of budget. No bands, no actors, and just a half hour slot.

Bob: No. Medinner was always a late night show. It just wouldn't have worked with a sober audience. It's constituency was the drunk, unemployed insomniac, student, loners that understood my passion for the minutia of television.

Bob: I've met a couple of people who were featured on the show. The lads from the 'Knockers' often pop up, and the Christian guy who found the numbers '666' on the most mundane articles.

How much of the content of Medinner came directly from your input? 

Bob: The way we made the show was that the researchers got together a big box of tapes of shows that they thought looked suitably weird. I then sat for up to 40 hours per show, and watched them, making notes! Most of the other stuff, the books, the magic microwave, the dodgy products, we just made up between us on the day of filming. We also spent a couple of days per series just wandering around London making up 'out and abouts' and 'casualty location man'

Bob: I've actually not seen Harry's show, or 'Screen Wipe', but I've been told they are 'Medinner-ish' Then again, there's nothing new under the sun. The same with Heaven/Hell. It's not surprising that this genre has escalated, as audiences become more TV literate. I like to think we were pacesetters!

Bob: Of all the 'lost' clips, the one that hurts the most is 'Kenny'. We actually filmed a show using it....a doc about the moodiest kid in the world and his Dad. Then, the day before broadcast we were told we couldn't use it, and had to bodge together some other clips and a couple of sub-standard 'out and abouts'

Was Medinner a good stepping stone into further TV work for you? 

Bob: Funnily enough 'Medinner' never really did me any favours career-wise. It made TV bosses very nervous, and meant I was never going to be in the running to host mainstream, primetime shows.

Bob: Bob Martin was a great thing for me, in that it was the first thing I had ever written that got made into a series. It was based largely on my own experiences as the host of Win Lose or Draw. As well as writing the series, I also produced it, so was able to maintain a lot of control. It was, obviously, compared, not always favourably, with 'Larry Saunders'. But I think it can honestly say that it was a forerunner of things like 'The Office' (although that was actually, I think, derived form 'The Fast Show' sketch set in a very similar office).

Bob: For every twenty script proposals that you submit, one, if you are lucky, might make it as far as the treatment stage. Of these, maybe one in five actually gets made. So, the majority of my life is now spend ducking and diving in meetings with production companies, trying to flog ideas for comedies/dramas. As we speak I am working on five different projects, one of which may ever see the light of day.

Bob: The reason I switched to writing from presenting is quite simple. Shelf Life. Unless you are at the very top of the tree, then you have to accept that a career as a TV host is an ever decreasing circle. The bars and clubs of medialand are full of faves who hosted late night or morning shows, who are hungrily fighting to stay afloat, always one meeting away from the next big break. It can be a soul destroying way to live. I am lucky in that I can earn money in a few different ways. Writing is my favoured one, but I also work the corporate stand-up circuit, conferences, awards ceremonies etc.

Bob: The '100 Greatest' shows are, along with reality TV, a result of accountants taking over the world of telly. Just think about what it costs to make, for instance, and episode of 'Cracker' Well, for that money, you could have 200 hours of  '100 Best...' shows. I get involved purely and simply because, well....it's my job. I know a little bit about an enormous range of things, people pay me to talk, hopefully wittily about things, so there you go. Like any plumber, mechanic or decorator, my first thought is to make a living.

Bob: As to the mechanics of these shows, I'm sure that a lot of stuff is off the cuff, but obviously people are told in advance what they are going to be talking about. The only shows I have never got involved with are the 'Celebrity reality' shows, for no other reason than I don't really think of myself as a celeb, and, as touch wood, my writing seems to be taking off, don't really need the oxygen of publicity. I don't mean this in a bad way. If you are a 'face' then you need to be seen as often as you can.

Bob: The last stand up tour I did, some years ago, was a real blast. Me and Otis Cannelonni, schlepping around the theatres of England. I've not really done the clubs since, just corporates.

Bob: Their tends to be a telly on somewhere here all the time. The rest of my family are quite selective, but I watch anything. US comedies, repeats of Lovejoy, Extreme Makeover....the lot!

Bob: Now then....Medinner and the Welsh! Many of the gags in the show were aimed in that direction. As you rightly suggest, there is a reason for that. No, my wife isn't Welsh, but.... all my family are. I was born in a pikey part of Chester (which is why I was able to identify with the 'Shameless' characters). As you may know, the city is right on the border, so women who went into labour were taken to the Maelor Maternity hospital in Flint. All my brothers and sisters are, therefore Welsh by birth. I was premature, and so born at home....in England. Therefore, all those gags were a little private joke between me and my siblings.

If you hadn't got into the entertainment industry what do you think you'd be doing now? 

Bob: If I hadn't gone into this business, I would undoubtedly have been what I was before I started. A driver. Probably HGV like both my stepdads. Driving is still my favourite pastime. I very rarely stay in hotels if I'm working away as I love driving home at night, even from Manchester or beyond.

Bob: Finally, The Orient. Yes. However proud I am of Pierrepoint or Shameless or any of the other things I will write for telly, nothing compares with the thrill of seeing my page in the O's programme every home game!

Any final comments Bob? Anything to say to the fans reading this interview?

Finally. The great thrill of Medinner is that, after all these years, people still shout across the street to me.... 'Oi...Millsy...there should have been a clip on that ladder....the games f**ked!' No-one else knows what they mean, we smile, give each other the thumbs up, and move on. It's the closest I'll ever get to being a mason.
God Bless 'em all!

So there you go people. Mr Bob Mills, a man constantly working in television and still able to keep his integrity! So as we leave Bob to continue his successful career as a writer, you've got to think- whilst we may miss him as a presenter, it's good to see he has found a suitable niche for his talents in the world of entertainment. So rent 'Pierrepoint' from your local Blockbusters, encourage your company to hire him for your annual corporate do, buy Shameless series 3, and the next time you see a new comedy/drama programme on TV and you really enjoy it, check the end credits. It could well be that it's another great comedy from the legend himself.

So fans, Bob Mills has left the building. It's that time of the night again, he's probably out and about!

Many thanks to Bob Mills for the interview.

2. Email from Dan Clapton

Early in his career, Dan Clapton worked as a researcher on In Bed With Medinner. He emailed me to tell me that he liked the site and was happy to support us, saying:

"The great thing is that for a whole variety of legal reasons the series will never be shown again on TV so your site and YouTube is great for a whole new generation of viewers to appreciate IBWMD."

Bob is an amazing guy - never truely appreciated by the public but tv types love him.

Working on the show was strange - it was 10 years ago - think about it - no email or internet  - to find the clips I remember being given a print out of every show that LWT / Granada had ever made that existed. Then myself and the other two researchers, Conrad and Tim, would start to watch them... firstly the ones that we thought were bizarre sounding. The early days of LWT were interesting - I remember a regional series that Janet Street Porter made i think called the Sunday Programme or something. It featured a whole episode on the rise of jeans! One was on snooker and was the first time we ever saw a young Steve Davis. There were loads of shows about youth tribes and stuff.

We would watch them and if it made us laugh then we could assume Bob would find it funny.

I remember we recorded the first series of 26 shows in three batches of eight - three shows on a Friday, three shows on Saturday and two on a Sunday then a couple of months later we did it again - the whole production lasted six months. It was made for such a small amount of money!

Obviously we took risks that could never be taken again - without giving too much away we did things that would never be allowed in a million years to get the clips in - lets just say we never got sued but we should have done! we basically ripped off some of the biggest names in British TV to get the clips in.

Do you remember the British Sumo team? i had to send the cab drivers wife flowers cos we had been rude about her! Every Monday after a show had gone out we had to field loads of calls from irate people and TV producers.

Dan's take on the making of Medinner certainly rings true. There are so many episodes where you think 'how on earth did they get away with that!' and it's kind of sad to know that, as Dan says, there will never be another risk-taking programme like Medinner again. Still, kudos to you all for taking the risks and producing such a funny piece of television history, Dan!