Taking on kids and animals
A few weeks ago, I got a new job. That is a momentous enough occasion in anyone’s life, but this one was a real change for me. I’m working on a brand new kids’ telly show called Fanimals .OneI definitely did not expect to nab.
To use the correct marketing speak, Fanimals is ‘‘the cutest show on TV’’. And yeah, sure, it’s for kids, I’m 45, childless and living with three cats, but if I had to give it some marketing speak I would basically make a long and highpitched ‘‘squeeeeeeeee’’ noise and squish a cute pet until it exploded in my hands.
I left permanent employment from The Press three years ago and drifted in the land of the freelance gig economy.
I always had an alert on job hunting website, Seek, that would pop up every day or two employment opportunities but nothing grabbed me enough to apply.
Then in one week, just before Christmas last year, two situations vacant ads arrived in my inbox that sounded interesting enough to dust off the CV.
One of them was a job researching and writing for a new TV show about children and animals – the two things people say you should never work with, and this promised both.
With that all-too-familiar feeling of ‘‘well, I won’t get it, what’s the point in applying anyway?’’ I applied.
The night I found out I had an interview, I dreamed I’d found someone who had a professional ant circus. This was to be the first of several vivid dreams about weird animals.
Once I got the job, I had a nightmare to do with sharks. Let’s not read too much into that.
Anyway, dear reader, I got the job. Ten minutes of thrill turned into days of terror before Day One. I’d never written scripts before. I didn’t know what I was doing.
But Fanimals is made by the team who make What Now, which is in its 38th year and incidentally, one of its previous presenters taught Young Me how to juggle, so if that’s not safe hands I don’t know what is.
Fanimals is about children and families, and their relationship to animals. The ‘‘sweet spot’’ is 7 to 10-year-olds, but I am a cat lady and I am not ashamed to say (nor is anyone twisting my arm to say) that I would watch it on the daily. (They are twisting my arm to say it screens weekdays at 4pm on TV2 though). It’s held together with instudio content by a host called Jess. Jess is joined by a vet called Stacey. He is objectively one for the mums.
On meeting him, I should have said ‘‘congratulations on the job’’, but instead I showed him through my extensive library of cat photos.
We have a show dog called Molson who comes in twice a week for studio days. He is utterly ridiculous. I’ve never seen such a calm dog. He got the role through an audition process during which he showed zero interest in chomping the show chickens or kittens. He has no diva tendencies so far as I’ve seen, and if I had a chicken of my own, I would totally let him babysit it. Alpacas, however, are divas. They would not allow Molson to look at them, so he was vanquished from the studio while five of them arrived for their star turn.
Molson was typically unbothered by the Spurning of the Alpacas and promptly came upstairs where he fell asleep on my leg while another colleague took the opportunity to stroke his golden retriever ears.
Molson did not care about this either. Molson is a good boy.