Cliche Of The Week No 1

"We're making a movie every week." Do TV people actually believe that? As the list below proves, they've been trotting this old chestnut out for so many years it's a wonder they can say it now without requiring an emergency tongue-in-cheek-ectomy. Let's face it – if making a TV show was like making a movie, all TV drama would be about 10 minutes long. That's about how much footage your average movie gets shot in a week. Unless they mean, "It’s like making a cheap, indie movie with no budget" every week. But you can't envisage Stargate getting shown at the Sundance festival.

"I’d love if we can get close to something that we created with Lost that was just a really good quality TV show, where we were aiming to make a movie every week." Jorge Garcia on Lost, 2008 (not sure why he's referring to Lost in the past tense – maybe the actors are flitting through time as well)

"Man, we make a movie every week." Milo Ventimiglia on Heroes, 2008

"So I always just applied that mindset, which is that I’m making a movie every week, you know?" Anthony Michael Hall on The Dead Zone, 2008

"We shoot it like a movie – it’s like we are doing a full length feature film every day." Hayden Panettiere on Heroes, 2007

"It was like working on a feature film every week, which just doesn't happen in television.*" Composer Greg Edmonson on Firefly, 2004

"I feel like we make a movie every week." Sarah Michelle Gellar on Buffy, 2002

"We're making a feature film every week." Gillian Anderson on The X-Files, 1997

"It's like doing a feature film every week on a television budget." Producer Jonathan Glassner on Stargate SG-1, 1998

"Doing Voyager is like doing a feature film every week." Robert Duncan McNeill on Star Trek: Voyager, 1997

"We're effectively making a feature film every week." Producer AL Katz on Tales From The Crypt, 1996

* You try telling that to the rest of this lot, Greg

Feel free to provide your own examples…