LONDON LIFES 2
PETER TASSELEDBAT

Peter Tasseledbat is the head of Endemetriol Productions, the London based production company responsible for a host of hit Channel 4 shows including Teen Street, Street Slag, Shit Street, Teen Shit, Street Teen, Slag Shit, Teen Slag, Slag Teen, Street Shit, Shit Teen, Slag Street, Shit Slag, The Friday Night Project, Big Brother and Celebrity Big Brother. He lives in Hetrfordshire and works in Soho.

It’s half term at the moment so my driver picks my daughter and I up at home, and on the way to the Endemetriol offices I drop Sophie off at her clarinet lesson in Muswell Hill. She’s up to grade six now and is starting to get to grips with some of the simpler works of the major composers, which is wonderful, and so we’ve started taking her to concerts at The Barbican and The South Bank. I think it’s so important for young people to know about classical music, and luckily we’re secure enough to allow Sophie to pursue her dreams. At the moment her ambition is to play in one of the major European orchestras and I couldn’t be happier that she has set her sights on something genuinely worthwhile.

Next I arrive at the Big Brother offices and immediately begin work on approving edits of drunk female housemates masturbating with wine bottles, or, as is the case at the moment, of a young Indian film star being racially abused behind her back. One of the things I found amusing about the wine bottle incident was that when the idea of introducing alcohol into the house was first mooted, there were discussions as to whether we might get a leading wine manufacturer to sponsor the show and provide us with a few bottles of cheap plonk in to the bargain. Imagine if a wine company had sponsored it, and then one of their bottles had been put to the sort of use! It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘screw-top bottle’! I think sparks would have flown. I enjoy a good wine but try to drink in moderation. We let the children have wine once a week, on Sundays, but we try to set them a good example about alcohol consumption and the kind of adverse effects that result from over-indulgence.

There’s been a load of fuss about the supposed ‘racialist bullying’ in Big Brother, but our brief from Channel 4 is to provide television that pushes back the boundaries, and if those boundaries happen to be only at the bottom, then so be it! I’m not racialist. One of Sophie’s friends is Asian. Her father is a surgeon and he’s on the parents’ assosciation at one of the better schools in the area, so I would hardly do anything racialist would I? The thing about Big Brother is that it holds up a mirror to society, and it shows us what ordinary people, such as chavs, are really like, I should imagine. Sophie wanted to go and see the new English National Ballet show, and when we got there we had to cross a picket line because one of the dancers is in the BNP. Luckily the dancer’s racialism didn’t spoil our enjoyment of the piece.

If it is racialist to deliberately engineer ratings-driven conflict by putting an attractive, talented Indian woman into an enclosed environment with insecure, inarticulate people whom anyone could have realised would inevitably resort to racially-derived insults in order to assert themselves in the face of her perceived social superority then yes, I am a racialist. But I’m not because is isn’t. Is it? Hold on there’s someone on the other line. What? Oh come on, you cannot be serious...

Peter Tasseledbat was talking to Stewart Lee