Getting fired and crying in the street

On the upside of both.

I couldn’t find a picture of me being fired in real life, so here’s my being fired in Football Manager.

When something really isn't right for you, or you're really not right for it, it can sometimes take a pretty brutal shock to realise it.

There was a stage in my early career when what I wanted to do more than anything is direct documentaries for TV in Britain. It was what I’d been brought up to believe was the path for British documentarians. My heroes had done that, my peers were moving towards that, and it felt like TV was a space where I could make interesting documentaries that millions of people would see. People like Angus McQueen, Kim Longinotto, Brian Hill, Morgan Matthews… These were all people making brilliant documentaries for television.

I’d made a set of shorts for Channel 4, I’d been nominated for a Grierson award, but I couldn't really get anything of my own commissioned. It turned out that period of British TV really wasn't interested in what I was pitching. By then, I'd started the direct commercials, but I didn't have enough of a reel to get many jobs in. And besides - I really believed in documentaries for television.

(In hindsight, I had massively misjudged what I thought TV was interested in making. These great filmmakers were either anomalies, or had such an impressive track record that they couldn't be turned down, or were struggling themselves to get anything original made.)

In almost every meeting I took, I was told my ideas weren’t really what the channel was making, and that I should really be trying to direct an episode of a series. Something mainstream that would get me reps. Charlotte Moore told me I should direct an episode of Secret Millionaire, to build up my track record. And she became the controller BBC One. The thing is, she wasn't wrong – if I wanted a career in television, I should've been trying to get episodes of multipart series that ran and ran and ran. That's the backbone of television.

I was so desperate to get some work, to earn some money, to make anything, that I didn't really see any of this. So when I got offered what seemed like an incredible job directing a series about a year in a high school I snapped it up. I was going to be working with a more experienced director and it was going to be 10 months of work. A massive job. The EPs told me how they wanted my non-traditional TV approach and I was delighted. I started spending multiple days a week in Bradford (where the school was), and threw myself into filming. But from the start it felt slightly off. The producer clearly did not rate me. The AP didn’t really think my ideas were good. I didn’t get to speak to the other director as much as I needed. All slightly off.

But when they called me into the office three weeks in and fired me though, that was a shock. Pretty visibly, I think, because the senior director took me across the road to the pub immediately afterwards and said nice things about me. After a quick drink though I made my excuses and left. And then started crying quite a lot (this is going to be a recurring theme on this substack).

By the time I’d got home though, I'd stopped crying and resolved not to work with British television. It wasn't TV, it was me. I was totally wrong for it. I wanted to make curious, maybe rambling, definitely artsy, films. I didn't have the chops to deliver on a TV series. In fact, I'd sort of worked out that was why they got rid of me. They fired me for all the reasons they hired me.

I decided that they could fuck off. I was going to direct commercials for a living, and made the films I wanted to make with the people I wanted to make them with. And that TV was dead to me.

(This was probably a bit of a lie to myself, and a way to not make myself feel like such a massive failure. After all, being fired three weeks into your first big TV job can put you off the medium a bit. And three weeks is just the right amount of time to tell everybody you know. It was a brutal lesson. But probably necessary. Being told I wasn't right for something made me realise more clearly what I wanted and what I was right for).

Ever since, I've tried to put every single job through that lens. Am I convincing myself that I'm right for this when inside something isn't sitting right? Am I taking on a job for what I wanted to be rather than for what it is? And do the people hiring me want what I have to offer or do they just need a body to do what they have in mind?

If I get that not-quite- right feeling right about a project now, but commit to it anyway, then getting fired is the best thing possible.

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