Theresa Plummer-Andrews.

Everyone I know goes on the yearly pilgrimage to Cannes exhausted before they even get there. They have spent weeks bringing their notes up to date and juggling meetings in a schedule to which is almost impossible to keep. All of this happens on top of their normal working day, and in addition to the meetings they have had with people flying in to London before going on to Cannes!

Every year myself and my colleague Michael Carrington, swear we're going to organize ourselves so that we have a schedule with some breaks in it. This wondrous thought gets more difficult as the kids business booms and the competition for good programming for the UK market gets greater. The MIP market expands year after year and we now have to try to cover five floors of the most complicated building ever dreamt up by an architect together, with the new "tent village!" We also have to cover the meetings scheduled in various hotels and apartments along the Croisette. It's hard on the brain so copious notes are made at each meeting. Mind it's a killer for the feet as well, so rule number one is never to buy new shoes to wear during the day at MIP.

A Few Givens
Most days start with the morning ritual of hunting for the MIP badge in your hotel room, finding it and losing it again as you write up the faxes to go back to the London office together with the notes from the previous day's meetings. Then you scramble around again looking for that damn badge with the dreaded thought that if you don't find it you're going to have to pay Reed-Midem a lousy 7000 French francs to replace it, and all the time it's been where you put it earlier - in the pocket of your handbag!

The little morning walk into the Palais is rather pleasant and quite interesting. Some people stroll along knowing they are early for their first meeting whilst others half-run, half-walk, with tight expressions on pale faces, having overslept and missed the 9 a.m. catch up with the boss. We've all done it at some time or another and it's an awful feeling.

The market for us is a mixture of screenings with distributors and meetings with producers, co-producers, financiers, packagers, video companies, etc. Most of these people are highly professional and have bothered to find out what type of program we show on the BBC, so they don't trouble us with anything unsuitable. In contrast, there are the meetings during which we have to patiently explain that BBC Children's cannot possibly schedule a documentary on transvestites in Outer Mongolia. It's time wasted and is aggravating because it's prevented us from seeing someone else who might have had the animation hit of the century.

There is a huge amount of children's programming at MIP and I would say 90% of it is unsuitable for us for one reason or another. Some of it is out of our age range and we spend a great deal of our time explaining what we do and don't show and what our age limits are. Other programs are so violent they're offensive, and yet more is just plain dross and I wonder how the people raised the money to produce the pilot in the first place. I could put that money to better use!