Category: children’s tv

Happy birthday, Lyca!

Lyca Benitez-Brown was my boss for 7 months, April to October, in 1983. She was the executive producer of the Pinoy Sesame and I was her headwriter for the first 45 (of 90) shows of the season.  We found each other again 27 years later on Facebook.  I was working on my 3rd book on EDSA and she graciously shared her story of Radyo Bandido. I haven’t written a love letter in ages, LOL, but one is never too old, I find.

Dear dear Lyca,

I’ve long been wanting to thank you for making me kulit back in ’83 to take on the headwriting of Sesame just on Ketly’s recommendation, even if I had no experience writing for children.  You refused to take no for an answer until it was djahe na — like I was making pa-importante — so finally I said yes, okay, fine, I’d give it a try, even if I was scared half to death.

It was a most challenging, and crazy, time for a free-lancer who never before and never again worked fulltime (except on my own books).  But as it turns out, it was worth the fears and tears, not to speak of the hard work — living breathing Sesame 24/7 for the many months it took me to get the hang of it, and a seventh month to come up with a writer’s guide.

As I moved on to write TV docus and books and blogs, atbp., I found that the rigorous Sesame training always stood me in good stead.  It’s not just the discipline of working / writing with clear goals in mind, but also of taking and handling criticism creatively, rather than tearfully, haha.  I have you and Feny and Sesame to thank for that.

THANK YOU ALSO for Radyo Bandido in the time of EDSA.  So sorry that my EDSA books don’t give you the credit YOU deserve pala for the BANDIDO handle, which was absolutely inspired and so serendipitously appropriate. (Ipapasok ko sa reprint, promise!)

Nation was fortunate to have you and Peque, with your production peeps, on the side of Ketly (and the two boys :-) in those crucial 12 hours of the revolution when the danger of bloodshed was oh-so-real!  Your 2006  essay, “AIR WAR: The Story Behind Radyo Bandido,”  is certainly one for the history books of that wonderfully radical time.

Who would have thought that 36 years later we’d be back battling the Marcos curse yet again, this time on social media where YouTube, Facebook, and Tiktok videos twist martial law and EDSA history to favor the villains.

What works best, I find, are the simplest formats — one falsehood at a time, straightening out the skewed, and skewering the Marcoses in turn.  Yes, time to get back to Sesame mode, but for adults only, for a change. Hope springs eternal.

Happy 70th, Lyca, and cheers to a happy new trip around the sun!

Love,
Angie

TV RULES

Satur Sulit

Advertisements on television
directed at children
are eminently dangerous
underhanded and insidious

They trick children’s attentions
and arouse their desires
then whelm them with products
to want their parents to buy

Held captive by the designs
of self-promoters and profiteers
their little minds are kidnapped
for ransom in patronage

It is an unchecked subversion
of parents’ prerogatives
to define the parameters
of their children’s upbringing

Their options are pre-empted
they are helpless against
the subliminal effects of
a medium that is the message

The effects are immediate
the children are hypnotized
they cannot tell the difference
between virtual and real

And soon they are weaned
from the rule of their parents
their fancied lives but a mirage
of illusions for sale

rene villanueva – before batibot, there was sesame

i met rene villanueva in march 1983 under not very easy circumstances for either of us. he was already a two-time palanca awardee and (if memory serves) teaching literature in u.p. while i, i was a u.p. psych-major drop-out writing a showbiz column notes of a tv junkie for a weekly magazine. yet i ended up headwriter of the philippine sesame street project, and rene was just one of my writers.

ang totoo niyan, january pa lang nabalitaan ko na that imee marcos was negotiating for a philippine version of sesame street. i had been looking forward to reviewing the show, not writing for it, so i almost fell of my seat when june keithley and then her friend project director lyca benitez-brown called, asking me to take on the job. i hardly felt qualified. my only experience writing for tv was for keithley’s late-night talkshow for adults, and my only experience writing in tagalog was a couple of adaptations of broadway hits staged by leo martinez and susan calo-medina, also for adults. besides, i told lyca, i wasn’t hot to be part of a marcos project. why not tap tv gagwriters instead or creativewriters from academe?

lyca begged me not to think of it as a marcos project, rather as one heaven-sent for filipino children, then gave me a sob-story about how professional gagwriters had too many bad habits, like resorting to slapstick and put-downs and other no-no’s to get a laugh, while the academics who went all the way to new york for orientation still had to get the hang of writing for tv in a tagalog that was light and simple. besides i was a mom with two kids and grounded in psychology, so she was convinced I could do it, learn the ropes and teach it to six new writers.

i still didn’t want to do it, i wasn’t sure i was up to the task, and i didn’t want a full-time job, no matter how great it paid. but my kids, ages 9 and 6 then, were so disappointed I changed my mind, dropped my column, and plunged in.

as it turned out i had to play catch-up with my pool of writers who had been through workshops and chosen on the basis of scripts they turned out after. rene was easily the best of them, the best of us.

as headwriter i was expected to produce scripts for a season’s 90 shows, to start airing in october, just six months away (akala nila ganoong kadali). each show required scripts for 10 segments of varying duration – from 15 seconds to 3 minutes – at least 3 segments to be written for two puppets, pong pagong (as huge as big bird) and kiko matsing (as grouchy as oscar) and the 6 adult characters they lived with in a sesame-like street; the other 7 segments to be written for other formats, such as light-action film, limbo, and animation. given the notoriously short attention-span of 3- to 5-year olds, every single script had to be funny, complete with a “tag” or punchline (!), and it had to be visually appealing and constantly moving on in surprising ways (like cartoons and tv commercials) even if we couldn’t count on help from special effects (pinoy tv was so low-tech then). writers also had to hew to a set of values that did not allow props or toys or accessories that would “raise material needs” or slapstick routines that would show disrespect of others. the 10 scripts per show were each pre-assigned a specific “goal” by the research team so that in every show, the whole person of the child was addressed—the physical, the intellectual, the emotional, the social, and the child’s relationship to home, neighborhood, and environment.

i lived and breathed sesame, no time for anything else. scripts went through rigorous review and comment by the executive producer (lyca), the research team (of psychologists and educators headed by feny de los angeles-bautista), the art department (headed by rodel cruz), the studio directors (kokoy jimenez & bernardo bernardo), the laf directors (noel anonuevo & herky del mundo), and last but certainly not the least, the ctw co-producer tippi fortune, a big egay who didn’t speak a word of tagalog. i learned (with great difficulty and humility) to take criticism without batting an eyelash (!!!) and to rewrite, rewrite, rewrite until everyone (as in every one) was happy.

i was just getting the hang of it when exile ninoy aquino came home in august to lead the opposition against marcos. i was heartbroken when he was assassinated at the tarmac in broad daylight. and when my car with its yellow ribbon was refused entry in sesame‘s studio grounds in imelda’s university of life, i knew it was time to go. contracts were being extended/renewed all around. i asked only for another month, time enough to finish writing 45 of the 90 shows, put together a guidebook for the writers, and prime rene to take over when my time was up.

it was painful, tearing myself away, not so much from the job and responsibility, but from the friends i had made, people i had worked and struggled and created with for seven months. maybe i would even have stayed if not for rene, if i weren’t convinced that i was leaving the writing in good hands. a year later when sesame morphed into batibot, i knew i had done the right thing. ang galing talaga ni rene.