"We don't want people vomiting. Andrew Newman likes that." So THIS is what it's like to pitch an idea to ITV controller of entertainment Duncan Gray.
Festival delegates had a peak into the commissioning process today after film-maker Lee Kern went undercover to pitch programmes with a fictional independent production company called Monkey Tennis.
Amazingly, naming his company after the comedy format invented by Alan Partridge didn't blow the gaffe, and he got all the way into a face-to-face meeting with Mr Gray.
The ITV man came out of it rather well, give or take his penchant for sprawling over a sofa while he listened to Mr Kern's ideas.
Vomiting was out though - he helpfully referred Mr Kern to Mr Newman, head of entertainment and comedy at Channel 4 - as was the rather self-explanatory Rolf Harris Reads The News.
Porn? No, said Mr Gray, who was captured on hidden camera. Celebrity GCSE? Er, no. Eighteenth Century Doctor, in which 18th century techniques are used to cure modern illnesses? Pass.
"I have been hoaxing people for 15, 16 years, you got me good and proper," said Mr Gray today.
"I will always take a meeting," he added, explaining how he was taken in. "It is only one hour of your life and it could be the next Beatles."
Mr Gray has a cardboard cutout of a 52-year-old mum of three from Hull on his desk. She's called Doris and if a programme is not for her, then it is not for him.
ITV came off rather better than the BBC, where Monkey Tennis got stuck in the hell of e-commissioning over the net and never got to meet anyone at all.
The system was defended by the BBC's controller of entertainment, Elaine Bedell. "If you want to get in to a meeting then you have to target the commissioners. Those were standard emails," she said.
"I don't think it's bureaucratic. It just did not feel like a direct enough approach to the commissioners."
Ms Bedell denied the commissioning process needed to be delayered. "It could not be more delayered. I have seven executives to cover all the entertainment programmes on four channels and online," she said.
"It's pretty delayered already - it is us and the channel controllers."
And Ms Bedell revealed that Celebrity GCSE and 18th Century Doctor had actually been pitched to her for real.
Some of Monkey Tennis's other ideas - World War One Quazar and Animal Bouncy Castle, were presumably all its own.
