Jeff Ornstein 0:01

Hi everyone, and welcome to Next Act with Jeff Orenstein. I am Jeff, and on this show we celebrate people on the cusp of greatness. Those building on past successes in some of the curious and inventive and sometimes unexpected ways they have achieved those, and stepping into moments that could define their legacy. We'll talk about current projects, lessons learned, and the extraordinary opportunities ahead. So the best is yet to come. Alf Laurie is a BAFTA-winning television executive, showrunner, and screenwriter with a career spanning decades in factual and entertainment TV. From rebooting British staples like Married at First Sight to creating groundbreaking hybrid dramas like the jury murder trial, Alf has shaped the UK's television landscape with daring creative storytelling. Well, welcome to the show, Alf.

Alfred Lawrie 0:54

Thank you very much. I'm gonna have to get you to go on my LinkedIn profile.

Jeff Ornstein 0:58

Okay, super. I love it. So um particularly we're interested in you because you come to storytelling and the theater with such a rich, you know, intellectual background and from various perspectives. I understand you studied philosophy, politics, and economics at at Oxford. And you started your career by writing letters to TV companies landing entry-level roles. Can you share a little bit about that? Because everybody likes to hear the genesis of a career.

Alfred Lawrie 1:29

Yeah, well, I studied philosophy at university, which was completely fascinating, but not very useful for getting a job. And I left it and I used to lie around on the living floor watching telly. And one day my mum came in and said, You've got to get out of here. You've got to get start your life. And so I didn't know what I wanted to do, I had no idea, but I knew I loved watching telly. And I thought maybe this is what I should be doing for a living. But this was like the 90s, and it was possible then, in a way that it isn't quite now, to write letters to TV companies and expect them to actually open your letter, read it, and take it seriously. And okay, not many. I wrote probably a hundred letters, but Tim did. I like the letter.

Jeff Ornstein 2:10

One of them gave me a job. Well, you know what? When I started my company, I borrowed a typewriter that didn't type W, and I hand wrote in all my W's, and guess what? After a week, I got some projects. So it's the creative approach sometimes pays off, floats.

Alfred Lawrie 2:29

And the persistence. And so I I was happy to do anything, obviously. And my first job was literally opening someone's mail. I was opening the mail he opened to get my letter. And he was this kind of incredible flamboyant character who, in the end, I sort of um, I sort of uh slightly modelled myself on, I suppose, in some fat fantasy. He he was an intellectual and he wrote books and he he made television programs, and he had what I thought was a very sexy byline on his books, which is Stephen divides his time between Brooklyn, London, and the north of France. And I thought, God, what a what an amazing lifestyle. That's what an artist should do. And I've never quite managed that. But he had this wonderful ability to take an interest in a huge number of different fields, and he could make popular television as well as very write very academic books. And he and I really hit it off, and he employed me to start helping him with one of his books, and he started to get me in at the bottom on some of his television projects. And so gradually I sort of established a foothold in in TV and writing, actually, both of them, and began to work my way up from there. So that that was, if you like, the the lucky break that got me into documentaries in the first place.

Jeff Ornstein 3:33

That's fantastic. My first job, I was making blueprints, and I hovered over an ammonia machine making blueprints, and from then I went on and had, like you say, lucky breaks, someone who believes in you, someone who inspires you, and one thing leads to another. And always saying yes. Always doing what is asked of you. Consider it done. That was my phrase. Consider it done. Okay, so tell me about the brief comedy stint, because everybody likes a funny tale.

Alfred Lawrie 4:05

Well, uh, again, look, TV careers, I don't know about other professions. TV careers are the most random things you can possibly imagine, right? You never every project lasts six weeks, eight weeks, you know, three months if you're lucky. And then your next project, yeah, especially when you're starting out, is just determined by who you happen to bump into and what they happen to be up to. And I was in a building making documentaries, and upstairs they were making the Ali G show. That was like the hot new thing in Britain at the time. He was just starting out, he knew he was gonna be big. He's an incredibly talented guy, Sasha Baron Cohen, but he but he hadn't yet sort of become a global superstar. And I sort of would hang around upstairs, I was like, well, if there's another series, I'd love to do it. And amazingly, they did need someone because Ali G, Borat, and um Bruno, the way they all work is to have someone very sensible set up the shoot. And then mayhem ensues, right? But if if if obviously if some lout phoned up the head of the UN, Boutrovsk Boutros Gali, and said, I want to make a film, it's not gonna happen. So they need someone very sensible who can kind of walk the walk and talk the talk in a sensible way to set up the film shoots and reassure everyone something nice is gonna happen. And that was my job. So I was a sensible guy. So I uh, you know, Boutrovsk Boutros Gali is literally stuff up one of many people who I uh I said we're gonna make this wonderful program, the making of modern America or whatever it was. I can't, you know, we had some spiel. And and he came to this hotel in Paris, and I was sitting in the chair, he thought I was the interviewer, and I was saying, you know, what a wonderful life you've had and what an extraordinary career. And then at a certain crucial moment, you hear the director, right? We're ready, and camera rolling, sound, yep. And I stood up and said, Enjoy your interview, sir. And he said, What are you not doing? My interview, and I said, I don't know. And Ali G sat down, but of course the camera's rolling. So it's very disconcerting for the poor guy, but what can he do? And he, you know, there's this sort of rabbit in headlights quality that the in many of those um interviews have because people are completely dumbfounded. But uh, you know, Sasha's a genius. It was it was um a hell of a shoe.

Jeff Ornstein 6:09

I'm impressed. I mean, that takes a lot of hood spa for you, like you just jump into it and play the straight man in a and then let this thing descend into Ally G mayhem.

Alfred Lawrie 6:19

Well, the moment I always used to dread, this was back in the days when we used to shoot on tape, and the tape lasts 40 minutes, and I just knew you I'd be in the wings waiting. And the moment the cameraman said, Right, take change, can't help! You knew, you know, whoever the interviewer was, they were like, right, what the hell was that? And then everything kicked off, and that was the end, and everyone started packing up as fast as they could while I was sort of trying to explain, you know, everything's okay. How about it?

Jeff Ornstein 6:48

40 minutes. Right, I love it. Now, you've had some really big projects and some real success. What can you tell me about the BAFTA-winning the jury murder trial series one?

Alfred Lawrie 6:59

Uh well, one one of the privileg I worked at a British podcast called Channel 4, and one of the privileges of working for it was it it kind of um it was and it's uh quite an anti-establishment channel. It likes to take risks and do slightly punky things, and you know, it also do stunts and and that was where Ali G was from, Channel Four originally. So it's a provocative channel, but it seeks to have a purpose and say something, it's not provocation just for the sake of it. And um we share with you guys a medieval idea called the jury system, and we just get 12 random strangers and we chuck them in a room and we let them decide, you know, whether someone goes to prison for the rest of their life or walks free. It's a big decision. But we don't train them, you know, and in Britain we don't even we don't even screen them. I mean, at least you screen yours. We're just like 12 names out of our hat, off you go, we don't want to know how you did it, just tell us what you decide. And uh a lot of people who've been looking at this are you know are worried, like experts are worried. You know, maybe this isn't coming up with quite the right verdicts. And you know, every now and again, if someone was released recently, who've been in prison for 30 years, and yeah, there's a lot of different reasons to wonder how how reliable verdicts are. So we came up with this idea to test juries. It's illegal to talk to them in Britain, it's not like America. You can't talk to them, it's illegal to publicize anything about them, you can never observe them or ask them how they reached decisions. We came up with an idea to restage a real trial word for word with actors and have it watched by not one jury but two juries, and neither jury knew the other existed. So they used to come into court from separate entrances and we had them in special booths, watching the same actors at the same time, unaware of each other. And then we just watched how their deliberations compared with each other. And obviously, you'd like to think in a sensible world, they'd run in rough tandem, they'd be in parallel, they'd broadly see the same things in the same evidence. Of course, what we discovered is, you know, it's a completely random process, obviously. And obviously, whoever is the noisiest person in that room and the most forceful is gonna carry, carry that room. And if they happen to have a background that pushes them one way or has a certain bias to it, that's gonna be very interesting. So, in the end in our program, you know, at the end, we reveal to both juries before they've revealed their verdict that there's another jury, and they were obviously very shocked. And we asked them both to file it informant for the first time. We pulled down all the screens, they could see each other, and they both reached their verdict, and the judge asks them, What's your verdict? And both four people stand. One said guilty, and the other said not guilty. And it was a kind of electrifying moment, entirely real. And so, yeah, it turned it was one of the biggest hits on Channel Four for many years, and it won a BAFTA, and you know, it was very celebrated. So that that was that was the project and the purpose of it, but it was um extraordinary showing.

Jeff Ornstein 9:47

I bet you it made a lot of people second guess how they might approach you know the concept of they're they've got someone's life in their hands, and what you know, biases or or how open-minded they might be to coming to the real verdict or just want to slap through it. And maybe it makes people a better person at the end, you know, it makes them more reflective.

Alfred Lawrie 10:12

Oh, yeah. No, I mean all not jurors found it an extraordinary thing to go through. So powerful.

Jeff Ornstein 10:18

Yeah, that's fantastic. I have to ask you also uh about the the face with Naomi Campbell, because I was not familiar with it, so I watched a quick episode or two before our interview. And what I what I realized is um, you know, as a viewer, you feel like you know actors because they're they're interacting with other people, they're speaking, they're moving, their body language, and you feel like you know singers, they're singing, they're telling a story, and you feel like you know models because you see them all the time, but you don't hear them for the most part. Absolutely. And I was really struck by how intelligent and professional Naomi Campbell was, and the the way she mentored these young girls and her advice, and the way these girls were so profoundly impressed with wow, she's just that beautiful walking up, she knows what she's doing. Did she strike you? Did you have a different impression of her once you worked with her and heard her words and her instructions as to before when she was just this beautiful woman that paraded through the world?

Alfred Lawrie 11:30

Obviously, she had a reputation that preceded her for being a tough character. Yes. And um, so I I knew I knew she was an extraordinarily accomplished person who was known to be a tough character. That was all I knew. And it turned out that both of those things times a hundred was the reality. Right. So she's an incredible person, like an extraordinary person, and has unbelievable personal qualities that I sort of have never met the like of. And she is also, and is part of it, one of the toughest characters I've ever seen. I saw what I saw that come out a little bit too. What what Naomi wants, you know, Naomi gets, but at the same time, she works in a career. That that is one of the ways you you become a global, I mean, becoming a global superstar. I mean, how do you do that, right? And she is someone who has done that, but she is uncompromising in every detail about how she comes across and about how others around her act. And if you put a foot wrong, as I did on day one, not knowing it, you find out about it. She tried to get me sacked at the end of the first day. I'm as a showrunner. Whoa. But then we got through that and I understood, okay, there are certain things you don't ask Naomi to do. You know, we'd asked her to repeat a line, which is a completely normal part of television, right? I mean, I've never in my life made a tele show where you don't ask someone to repeat a line. You know, there's a sound problem, there's something, there's a lighting was off. Something happened. Could you say that again? And we'd asked her to say something again, and she didn't want to be asked to say things again. And so the project was briefly shut down. I survived and continued. And we went on understanding that there were different parameters, right? I wasn't going to be bossing Naomi around like you do, you know, as a showrunner. You're like, go here, do this. You wait for Naomi, right. And you respect Naomi's space, and you don't, you do why you barely, you barely tell her anything. You barely direct her. But when she turns up, and it wasn't on time that she turned up, but when she does turn up, it was unbelievable her energy and intensity and what she delivered. And you know, again, in a television officer, and you'll roll with someone, right? Like I've made the apprentice, right? A boardroom with Alan Sugar, right? You roll for three or four hours and you use, you know, you make a 15-minute scene, right? Use the best bits of that. That's a standard shooting ratio. With Naomi, she would come in often late, and we would have with her maybe 15 minutes, and then she would leave again. And all 15 minutes would end up on screen. And she is just so intense and so driven. And she worked, you know, it was a mentoring show where you had to mentor people. She took those people on a just an extraordinary journey of like self-confidence and growth. And you know, most people are shy to say, I want this and I need that, and you will do this. And look, it's not necessarily my personal style, right? But I I really respected it as a way to achieve what you want to do. She was kind of an extraordinary role model in that sense.

Jeff Ornstein 14:34

I came away with more respect for her, even though I also recognized a lot of her determination is my way or the highway kind of thing. It's see it's your scene.

Alfred Lawrie 14:45

No, she's tough, but she she's she's amazing. Amazing woman.

Jeff Ornstein 14:48

How did you come to discover that factual entertainment that suited your storytelling style?

Alfred Lawrie 14:55

Well, I I was around, so I started out when television was documentaries. And so if you wanted to, let's say I wanted to make a film about you, you know, I'd get a camera and I'd follow you around for probably six months, and we'd use the best bits across the six months because most most of the time, most people's lives, nothing much happens, right? It's the same. You go to work, you have your day, you come home, you're telling, and you go to bed, right? The average day for most people is often not that dramatic. And the moments of drama, marriages, and deaths, and big decisions and trauma or whatever it might be come sporadically. So when you're making observational documentaries, which is what television used to be, it takes months to make a great film. But I happen to be sort of in television, just you know, becoming a director, right at the time when people started to think of taking ordinary people and putting them in artificial situations that were pressure cookers, where their characters would suddenly they they had no option but to display their character and make decisions and be part of drama. And wife swap was one of the very first where two couples were put together, they swapped each other's wives, and the husband and wife would live together and live by each other's rules, and obviously they married very different kinds of couples. So this was become incredibly dramatic for both couples. Like they were living with a stranger who was bossing them around in ways they they weren't not accustomed to. And they kind of grew and flourished as people, but it was high conflict and high drama. And I had the fortune, in a way, to work. It was actually the same company that Ali G that launched on. Also, they they they won the contract to make the first series of the Apprentice. So I got in on the ground floor of the first series of the Apprentice. So that's when you understood it. You could make an hour of television, not in eight months, but in one day. If you write the rules correctly, and you have 16 people who are desperate for something, you know, in this case a job, you could ask them just to sell flowers five hours, and their sheer passion and the obstacles in trying to beat each other will give you this rich hour of television. I mean, it was kind of extraordinary. And so it obviously revolutionized television, and suddenly all kinds of ordinary people who you might never know what characters they have or what potential they have would have a chance in that one day to show, you know, often it went terribly wrong, they might show terrible ineptitude or brilliance, you know? And that was kind of the the the amazing thing about factory entertainment as a genre.

Jeff Ornstein 17:14

I'm flabbergasted to find out that Wiveswap was as genuine and authentic as as you make it. In the early days. I mean early days. So now, like the a lot of the reality shows, you know, the word is that they're scripted and they set up the conflict or they give them.

Alfred Lawrie 17:32

Well, we play by slightly different roles in the UK. So, you know, in American shows, obviously it's quite standard to start with a disclaimer saying none of this is real, and we've made up some scenes. In England, there's it's not how it works. And um, we have something called Ofcom, we have a code of conduct, it has to be truthful. So British TV actually is remarkably truthful, in fact.

Jeff Ornstein 17:53

That's great. That's great. Because that's what turned me off about reality TV, because it became clear that it was not reality and that it was just drama for the high seas.

Alfred Lawrie 18:02

It's true. What you need to do, well, I don't know. What we try and do in Britain is people get used to a format, and so you try and surprise them in some way because you're already trying to get to the truth of a person. You don't want the act they planned and the things they thought about before they come on. You want to construct situations where that real person emerges because they are thrown into something new and they have to grapple with it. You know, that's it. When you get it right, it is kind of amazing.

Jeff Ornstein 18:33

Right. So in shows like Married at First Sight, how do you think that reality television can meaningly impact viewers? What do you think the viewer takeaway is how they're personally impacted?

Alfred Lawrie 18:46

Well, again, I'm I, you know, I've I actually I have seen a fair bit of American Married at First Sight. Obviously, my experience is British Married at First Sight. For me, Married at First Sight is a genuinely enriching program, right? That's my view. I know some people think it's trash or whatever. I actually think it is a genuinely powerful, important program. And it's expert-led, right? You have real experts who genuinely are trying to create lasting relationships. So it's coming from a genuine place of wanting to do good for these people. And relationships are hard, right? I mean, we know how many people are single, we know how many people are divorced. It's not easy to get into a lasting relationship and stick at it. And although the situation is obviously incredibly artificial, the rules of engagement, the ways to succeed and flourish, or the ways to fail are the same, whether you've met someone in a bar or you're on this television program. And so the lessons which we're constantly trying to help people understand about judging someone by their values and thinking beyond the trivial surface things that we all judge people by at first blush and thinking about something deeper. That that's an important lesson. And not everybody, especially now when people are growing up as the product of broken homes, right? I I grew up in a single-parent family, right? I never saw in my own childhood a functioning relationship. And so I actually found well before I ever worked on it, I found it a fascinating program just to see inside relationship dynamics of all kinds and have the deconstructed and analyzed. To me, that is, you know, that's public service television. When you get it right, you know.

Jeff Ornstein 20:20

Right. Well, I have to tell you, I am absolute love with Love on the Spectrum. I just adore the characters and their authenticity about what they're searching for. And equally so, what I love about that show is I love the families. I love the support system that these people have. And to be fair, many of the stars that are featured come from very well-to-do families. And you can see that there's a lot of support because there's a lot of financial resources available to them. But the dynamic between the family and the Love on the Spectrum candidate is also touching as the relationships that develop between the the two Love on the Spectrum guns. I just love that quote. I just think it that really affects me. So we're running out, we actually got over time, but I've loved this interview. So I guess the last thing I'd like to ask you about was what lesson did you learn, like from your earlier series, that you said moving forward, this is a lesson I'm gonna take with me, and it's gonna be like the benchmark of how I develop and continue to develop as a producer or editor or director, writer.

Alfred Lawrie 21:33

For me, um, probably the thing that I will take forward the most is something I learned as a commissioner at Channel 4. Is uh because I I was commissioner there for seven years, and I commissioned, you know, hundreds of hours of programs, you know, over that time. And um what you learn is that in the end, if you can make something brilliant that you love, but that in a in itself is no guarantee that anybody's gonna watch it. And it's making as sure as you can, integral to the design at the beginning, some kind of hook for the audience. Some some understanding of why someone's gonna come to this. Because we can all make passion projects all day long and make stuff that we find fascinating and lovely and show off friends and family. But it's a tough world out there. And people have short attention spans, and there's a hell of a lot of demands on their attention. And so it's the thing I'm gonna try and to take forward is to put my time into things that have a chance, a maximal chance of getting an audience.

Jeff Ornstein 22:33

Right.

Alfred Lawrie 22:33

And try not to, because it's tempting, right? I love making stuff, I love I love creativity and all of that. And so you you you can constantly, if you're not careful, put your time into things you love, but that actually nobody's ever gonna kind of come to. I'm just gonna try and marry both things I love that there's a chance other people might love them as well. That's the dream is there.

Jeff Ornstein 22:53

I I think that that's an excellent takeaway because there is the crossroads of creativity and commercial viability. Exactly. And, you know, who if you want to create this beautiful testimony to some existential thought that's so important to you and no one's gonna see it, then like did the tree fall in the woods? Did anybody hear it? Exactly. So and I think that that's a very, you know, fine line for it's a crossroads between an artisan and a businessman. Yeah. So I will definitely carry that with me. I've got to wrap this up. Alf, it's been a delight having you on the show, sharing your insights and a very storied career and some interesting characters along the way. And I will be tagging you and following you and tagging your career to see what's coming up next for you. Great, Sal. Thanks so much. Thank you so much for joining. Thanks. Thanks for tuning in to Next Act with Jeff Orenstein. Follow, subscribe, and stay connected to your favorite socials at www.nextpodcast.com. Keep chasing your next act. The best is yet to come.