I made a TV show about lawn bowls without actually ever playing the game.

I still find it hard to believe I hosted a community television program about lawn bowls, a game I had never played before.

Back in 2005 my younger brother agreed to help create a lawn bowls instructional DVD. We knew nothing about lawn bowls, but we’d both done media studies at high school and owned a handycam. How hard could it be? We shot and edited the DVD, which was not only fun to do, but also resulted in a popular product that we sold all over the world.

Following the success of the DVD, we decided to set our sights on a new challenge and resolved that we would make a lawn bowls television program for community TV station channel 31. The whole process was a Luna Park rollercoaster and the result was a TV show watched by over 50,000 people weekly and a nomination for a community television award. The real benefit of this program however was the experience it gave me and lessons I learned by throwing ourselves in the deep end.

To spare you the effort of making a television program, this week I’m sharing the 5 lessons that still to this day continue to help me in my career.

1. Plan meticulously

Let’s not tread lightly — making a TV series isn’t just one weekend’s work. We identified early that the key to the success of the program and our sanity would be careful planning and chasing efficiencies. We started by brainstorming all the different segment ideas. We then split each of our 13 episodes into 4 segments, calculating we needed 52 segments (top maths student here!), as well as a top and tail for each episode. We planned out all our production shooting days so that we could film multiple segments at the same club. We also picked a day when many of the bowls leadership were in the office together and interviewed them one after another for lots of great content. In the end we were able to shoot a TV series in 7 shooting sessions. The careful planning saved us hours in production time.

Lesson: Look early and often for efficiencies and opportunities to reduce waste.

2. Things go wrong; don’t sweat the small stuff

It must be impossible to complete production on a show without running into a few problems here and there. For us, our biggest problem was caused by Sony. Specifically, their mini disc player. When we were shooting the series, we made the decision to record the audio on a separate device to the camera itself. Unfortunately, we had a bit of a disaster when all the audio files on the discs magically disappeared. We checked back to the camera audio, but it was generally too poor to use. We were unable to use many of our interview footage and I had to spend a few awkward hours trying to dub my voice over the footage.

While we still occasionally talk about this mini-disaster and how it resulted in wasted interview effort, ultimately, we were still able to create a good quality production. Perhaps for every problem we faced, we narrowly avoided two others that might have been twice as worse.

Lesson: Accept the reality of the situation and plot the best course of action going forward.

3. Find good stories to tell

One of the regular segments in our program was a profile piece about a local bowling club. Before heading out to the club, we did as much research as possible, digging through the web and asking contacts for any information that might be useful. On the shooting day I aimed to put it all together on the spot and come up with a unique angle for each club. I quickly realised after shooting scenes at a couple of clubs that many bowling clubs were not overly different to each other. I quickly found myself thinking, ‘now what am I going to find special about this club?’ When talking to club personalities, they’d generally talk to their trophies — 2nd division North-East champions 1997. I learnt to ask different questions, e.g. “Tell me about your most interesting club member.” “Has your club ever been in the news?” These questions produced many more interesting stories and brought the human side to our club profiles.

Lesson: Forget the stats, find interesting stories about people to tell

4. Don’t be so honest with strangers

I used to travel into the station HQ every week to drop off the tape for the latest episode. One day I was sitting in the waiting area waiting to speak to a station producer when a friendly gent came over and struck up a conversation. He must have recognised me from the show and was asking me about how it was all going etc. I gave him a friendly though candid account that it was providing to be a lot of work and wasn’t anywhere near as profitable as having other part time jobs. After a jovial chat, my new friend continued on his way just as the producer came out to meet me. “Oh,” she said as she greeted me, “I see you’ve met our general manager.” My mind quickly raced, thinking about all the things that I wouldn’t have said if I’d known who he was!

Lesson: Don’t be so openly candid when first meeting people who may end up being key stakeholders.

5. Take on feedback, iterate quickly

Who would have thought that someone who’s never made a TV show or even played lawn bowls before could make a TV show about lawn bowls? It goes without saying that I had a huge opportunity to learn a few things. I made mistakes along the way. I annoyed club members, spoke like a robot on camera and asked some pretty awkward interview questions at times. I am happy to report that each of these errors proved to be excellent opportunities for learning about production management and how to communicate effectively with a diverse range of people. If we ever made a second series, the lessons from the first series would have been invaluable. Alas it was not to be, but still these skills have served me well in my endeavours since.

Lesson: Mistakes are unavoidable. Stop trying to prevent them and instead focus on learning from them and improving.

The 5 key lessons

To summarise the lessons and for those who did the old TL; DR (too long; didn’t read):

1. Look early and often for efficiencies and opportunities to reduce waste;
2. Accept the reality of the situation and plot the best course of action going forward;
3. Forget the stats, find interesting stories about people to tell;
4. Don’t be so openly candid when first meeting people who may end up being key stakeholders;
5. Mistakes are unavoidable. Stop trying to prevent them and instead focus on learning from them and improving.

Now equipped with these nuggets, you have learned in 3 minutes what took me many hours and sweat to discover. I really hope you find them useful in your future endeavours.