China TV team for London venture
PRODUCTION staff from China Central Television (CCTV) are to move to London to help edit and dub into Mandarin the mainland's first foreign-made, original programming due to be screened on the national broadcast service from next January.
Ovation, a division of New York-based Communications Diversified, is to begin supplying World Sports Report, a weekly 90-minute sports magazine programme to be screened and repeated in prime time.
'Initially, the programme will be for broadcast only in the Beijing region but, after four to six months, we expect the signal to be uplifted to a satellite then beamed to an audience of up to 600 million in places such as Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou and Shenzhen,' the president of Ovation, William McKanna, said.
'The programming will include a total of 10 minutes of commercials before and during the show, which I believe is also a first in China,' he said.
Hong Kong-based Martin Clinch Associates will handle the media sales and other partners include the production house, Chrysalis Sports, in London, where the programme will be edited.
The CCTV staff will transfer to London for blocks of three to four weeks at a time and work intensively on groups of programmes. The completed tapes will be flown to Beijing to be cleared by the official censors before broadcast.
'This transfer of technical and production experience is an integral part of the contract,' Mr McKanna said.
He declined to divulge the financial details of the three-and-a-half-year contract, but said: 'It is expected to be significantly profitable for Ovation. Even if we only sell 75 per cent of the ad time in the first year, we will still be OK.
'Even in our worst-case scenario, it should still be a lucrative operation.' Mr McKanna, with 27 years' experience in television sports production - primarily with US network ABC, where he was responsible for the station's Olympic coverage, and more recently with his own company, American Gold - said the project's origins dated to 1990.
'I spoke with Zhang Weiping, a former captain and coach of the Chinese national basketball team, now resident in the US, and he engineered an introduction to the visionary man who has really made this whole thing happen - Ma Guoli, head of the CCTV sports department,' he said.
'We began negotiations in 1992 and signed an initial contract on October 28, 1993.
'The design we agreed on required World Sports Report to be entertaining, educational and informative.
'This means that, as well as a 'sports bloopers' section, there will be pieces about sport's cultural and lifestyle aspects, both contemporary and historical.'
