Behind the scenes at the One Show - take 2

Posted by Roo - 06/11/08 at 01:11:53 am

Tonight I sat in an edit suite in Broadcast Centre and watched the One Show being put together, live and on-the-fly. Writing up my notes on the way home, especially after a beer, I’m afraid I am liable to gush.

As I mentioned when I visited the studio last week, it’s a half-hour show, and the preparation beforehand is pretty intense. Tonight: Sir David Attenborough. In the edit suite in the minutes before the show does live there are regular update on how many minutes to go. As the news finishes the audio is turned up and the edit suite drops into a different gear.

The room is dominated by an impressive control desk facing 38 monitors. One shows the autocue (someone sat just behind me was editing the text on the fly when necessary); another shows graphics (”Viz”), which were overlaid onto the screen, needing to be counted in and out; two monitors showing 4-way split screens (including ‘The Rivals, showing what else is on air right now); another three monitors displaying three possible outside broadcast feeds (not used tonight); four monitors showing taped VT (VT = ‘videotape’, but of course they’re actually spooled from hard disks); five monitors showing the five different cameras in the studio (including a lovely swoopy wide-angle job) and, despite about ten being blank and unused this evening, many more.

The suite is pictured in the photo above (not taken by me. It appears in Ciaran’s recent post on the One Show Backstage blog).

Camera operators are referred to by both their name or their number. So I heard instructions like

  • “Four, give me Hardeep”
  • “Give me a three-shot, Richard”

and so on.

At one point, 5 minutes before the end of the show, during the pre-filmed VT segment about the Highland Clearances, the editor asked the guy sitting next to him something like “doesn’t McCain have Scottish blood?”. It was a question he couldn’t answer of the top of his head, so he dashed to a computer and brought back a whispered answer to the editor just in time for him to pass his tip on to one of the presenters. Seconds later, as the taped segment comes to an end and the studio is once again live, Adrian Chiles chips in to the conversation with Hardeep, “McCain is of Scots descent…”, to which Hardeep responds to a (IMHO) rather weak joke about oven chips, but never mind. The point is that it went from an idea in the editors head to conversational point in a presenter’s mouth on live TV in the space of a few seconds.

After the show was over, Sir David stuck around for a short interview for the website, based on questions submitted as comments on the blog. He talked about user generated content and spoke charmingly about dragons. A consummate professional, and a lovely man. The video on online here).

Once again, I feel very glad to be working in television. Especially that weird and relatively small bit of television that handles how we engage people as participants (rather than just viewers) online. Ciaran, and the others behind the scenes at the One Show are carefully giving a very broad audience something more than just 30 minutes of live telly. They’ve providing an opportunity for a conversation.

The episode I watched being made is already online, as is a blog post about the episode, which was being discussed before I was even on the train.

Behind the Scenes at the One Show

Posted by Roo - 29/10/08 at 11:10:07 pm

I was invited to go behind the scenes at The One Show tonight.

Having seen me venture on to the Watchdog set (twice), Ciarán Ryan (content producer at The One Show) recently emailed me to suggest I might want to take a look behind the scenes and watch Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley in action. Like Watchdog, The One Show is broadcast live, but rather than weekly this goes out every week-day evening, 7:00 to 7:30 pm. Because of this daily schedule the show has its own studio on the first floor of White City.

Tonight guests were Ricky Gervais, Hardeep Singh Kohli and Hector the Dalmation.

Live television really is a very special thing. The tension and excitement are palpable because, at least for the studio portions of the show, there are no second chances. My heart rate jumped the moment I stepped into the room and heard “Phones off, everyone!”.

The atmosphere in the studio is helped by having a small crowd of people off-camera, enjoying the show; there’s a healthy collection of crew and staff gathered at the back of the set watching the action. A dozen or so people stand around behind the cameras, staying out of the way and cheerfully enjoying the on-screen proceedings. Aside from weird interlopers like myself, this crowd is made up of the researchers, writers and web team who between them all make the programme happen. For most of them, this daily half-hour is the slot in which the things they’ve been planning and working on crystalise into reality, are captured and broadcast live to the nation. Obviously the VT (video tape) segments of the show are prepared earlier, and (as with Watchdog) while those are being played the atmosphere transforms. It doesn’t relax, it just takes a deep breath and gets ready for the next live chunk. “Ten seconds, everyone!” and we’re back on air.

I had no trouble staying out of the way at the back while enjoying a great view of Ricky and Hardeep chatting with Adrian and Christine on the sofa. It might not surprise to you, but I was struck by how relaxed the hosts and guests seemed about everything. This is live television; aren’t you nervous? Perhaps it’s a gene, some quirk of personality which allows someone not to seize up as soon as a camera points at them, that sets ‘on-screen talent’ apart from the rest of us.

Even Hector the dog looked relaxed. He was supposed to sing along to the One Show theme tune at the end (this being his adorable trait, which reminds me of ‘That’s Life’ and the dog that could say(?) ’sausages’). Sadly, Hector merely looked confused and issued only a short ‘woof’. Never mind. It’s hard for a Dalmatian to look anything but adorable, and apart from climbing on the sofa (I was mentally telling him off. Down. Bad boy) he was a star.

Meanwhile, Ciarán was very busy back-stage, grabbing pictures of the action his lovely Canon 5D and regularly dashing back to his desk to upload them. Most were candid behind-the-scenes photos for the One Show backstage blog.

He was kind enough to snap one of me backstage as a memory of my visit to share with you.

Roo and Ricky
Photo by Ciarán Ryan. Thanks, Ciarán!

I really enjoyed the evening. What a privilege it is to be invited behind the scenes to see television being made. It gives me a totally different appreciation of the effort and attention to detail involved in making 30 minutes of televised output. Many thanks to Ciarán for inviting me, and to everyone else for putting up with me.

You can watch the episode I saw being made (if you’re in the UK, for the next seven days) here.

On the way out of the studio, I had a quick look at the remarkable edit suite, which boasts 20+ monitors showing each of the cameras, the taped segments, still images, and a live view of what else is being broadcast to the networks, wonderfully labeled ‘Rivals’. I’ve (somehow, wonderfully, excitingly) been invited back in a couple of weeks to watch another episode being made, but this time watching the edit rather than the studio. Geek heaven.

I think I’m hooked. I’m falling in love with television.

BeeBCamp - what happened?

Posted by Roo - 28/10/08 at 10:10:37 am

BeeBCampMy hasty notes from today’s event

10:00am - Philip Trippenbach: introductions

Philip introduces the format of the day. The default is for sessions to be on the record (i.e. externally bloggable) though participants are free to go off the record when and if they want to (in practice, this happened very infrequently during the day). Philip shows people the whiteboard and invites people to add their names and topics they wish to talk about to the board. Having arrived with a slight paranoia that everybody would want to listen but nobody would want to speak, I was relieved to see plenty of slots fill up quickly. We weren’t mad to think that people would have stuff to share. Phew.

BeeBCamp sessions (morning) BeeBCamp sessions (afternoon)

From now on, the notes I make are predictably dependent on the slot I decided to join. There were generally 2 - 4 other sessions I could have gone to, so I’ll be relying on other people to share their notes to fill in the gaps.

10:30am - Max Gadney: Choice & Voice

Max was previously Head of Design for BBC News and is now the multiplatform editor for BBC 2 and BBC 4.

  • Choice: often the technical focus. TIVO
  • Voice: editorial selection and (sometimes) marketing. Brand. a point of view.
  • Serendipity vs customisation.
  • Personalisation (choice) via metadata, recommendation systems, personal suggestions.
  • Book: Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier
  • A brand is a promise, re-iterated. On brand affinity, radio does this more often than TV. Fine grained reinforcement. Radio is a bag of sand, TV is a bag of marbles. 2 hours of snooker vs 3 minute song on the radio.
  • Brands with the clearest voice will be meaningful.
  • Choice and voice are extreme ends of a scale. Interesting things will happen somewhere in the middle.
  • “What am I going to watch?” is answered by a TV channel if the voice of that channel means something to you.
  • “I’ll watch BBC 2″ if there’s a voice there, so that I know what to expect.
  • It is the role of tech teams not to say “Telly’s dead. Knob off”.
  • BBC as a gateway. What will there be less of? Reasonable prediction that repeats will be less important in a world which has video on demand everywhere.

11:00am - Steve Bowbrick: Common Platform

Steve presented a speech on the Common Platform, but it was punctuated by so many additions and asides (and interruptions and questions) that it didn’t feel like an overly formal approach.

  • Steve = Blogger in residence
  • Set up by Jem Stone and Tony Ageh. Now reports to Nick Reynolds who edits BBC Internet Blog
  • Blogging externally at commonplatform.co.uk
  • “Blogger in residence” could have been “the Inquisitor”
  • Commmon Platform project is an effort to imagine what comes after the broadcast era for the BBC
  • Dream: BBC might become a platform for creation, enterprise, participation, communication and learning
  • What comes after the 80 year golden age of broadcasting might be very different to what we know now
  • It might not include the trust and acceptance of the audience. The YouTube generation might already be forgetting what the BBC is
  • Steve was bought up (not literally) by Radio 4
  • BBC needs to manage the transition to the thing with some grace, and change at a pace that doesn’t tear it apart
  • This is not an apocalyptic view of the future. It’s not “Telly’s dead. Knob off”
  • Observation from listener: platform is a difficult word. Steve: at least it’s more neutral than channel. Television was probably a difficult word. So was radio
  • commonplatform.co.uk - get involved. Tag (delicious bookmarks, Flickr photos, …) write stuff.
  • Openness as an attitude needs to become utterly endemic and soak through the organisation
  • Pragmatic: sharing to defend against criticism. Openness to reveal a positive truth
  • How do we share code, content, insight, talent and resources?
  • How do we plan in openness from the outset
  • via Tom Coates via Max: “everyone wants to build cones” (building blocks - the pretty cones on top of the castle roof) when we should be building block-like things upon which others can later build
  • Q: there’s already a common platform, it’s called the internet. A: the BBC has the potential to create a valuable layer in and on the web. We should not duplicate existing services, but we might have to create new ones. The role of the BBC should not only be to slot content into existing models. Providing guidance and value might involve more.
  • Q: is it a specific thing, a destination? A: Not necessarily. More a way of thinking about the world and our place in it. Not being so cowed by the technology that we don’t get involved in improving it.
  • Closing observation from the floor: even the basic infrastructure needs to work

11:40am - Jo Twist: Social Viewing

Jo is BBC 3 multiplatform editor and, like me, has been thinking about social TV viewing for a while.

  • BBC audience: 18 - 34ish
  • What are they doing? Facebook, mobile, IM. i.e. connecting with friends.
  • Time rich, but very busy socialising
  • Twitter is not massively popular in the BBC 3 demographic (but MSN is)
  • Simulcast + watching and chatting with friends. To some extent this is happening already
  • Idea: private screenings online. Viewing rooms with friends. Private chat between friends reduces risks (e.g. if the chat isn’t visible to public/strangers)
  • Idea: live text/audio commentary. Celeb commentators. Talent led. Sarcasm (e.g. examples of Charlie Brooker, Anna Pickard). Insider knowledge.
  • Idea: annotations. Text and graphics. Freeze frame and draw on the screen. Dragging and dropping graphical features.
  • Two models: live chat around simulcast and asynchronous conversations around catchup
  • Two propositions: enhancing content with commentary and enabling chat with friends

12:20pm - Andy Smith: some things I like

Andy has a list of invaluable tools which he can’t live without. Here are some of them:

  • Firebug for Firefox - for debugging. (Portable Firefox also came up)
  • Greasemonkey for Firefox - used for regression testing and update testing
  • Eggplant - automated testing. Re-creates clicks, takes screenshots for comparison
  • FFmpeg - used to generate different versions of video for testing different platforms (e.g. what can the Wii play back reliably?)
  • Charles - debugging proxy
  • Prince XML - write HTML and generate PDFs

Andy also covered what’s going on with the EMP (Embedded Media Player)

12:40pm - Lunch

Lovely food and drink sponsored by Simon Nelson. Thanks Simon.

1:30pm - Roo Reynolds: Blogging Externally (Can I? Should I?)

I took bad notes about this because I was doing too much of the talking. Rain was taking better notes?

  • Internal vs external. Internal blogs are unloved. Most can be just as effective externally
  • Rights and responsibilities. We should all be able to blog. Guidelines say talk to your manager
  • Blogs as a way of staying in touch externally with colleagues
  • Three models: 1: internal, 2: externally on bbc.co.uk, 3: personally
  • personal hosting and personal liability. Good thing or bad thing?
  • IBM’s blogging guidelines and culture
  • “I don’t have time” - priorities
  • could my response to this email usefully be seen by more people?
  • reading and commenting on other blogs as a way to get started
  • Tom: was recently challenged on why he wasn’t making time to blog more. Can we afford not to?

2:00pm - Daniel Bennett: Blogs and News

Daniel is at the College of Journalism. He hosted a conversation on the role of journalism in blogging, and blogging in journalism.

  • Three models for blogs in news. 1: blogs as news (baghdad blogger), 2: blogs about news (reporter blogs), 3: programme blogs (news as conversation)
  • Watchdog is two things: a conversation around programme content and a call to action to submit story ideas (privately, separate from blog comments)
  • Liveblogging. Sport does this (but doesn’t call it live blogging. It’s ‘live text commentary’). News doesn’t.
  • Roo: blogging as a personal invitation to a conversation
  • Tom: blogging and reputation
  • Idea: why aren’t foreign correspondents on Twitter? (From Our Own Correspondent model). Daniel Morris: Ambient journalism.
  • Blogs like Amazon (and Last Chance To See) as production diaries. Scope for doing something like this in news?

3:30pm - Tom Van Aardt: What Next?

Tom asked, where do we go from here?

  • ‘Institutionalised reform’. Meeting like minded (and different) people is a good thing
  • “if only my commissioner/controller could ‘get it’”
  • relationship building. We’ve developed our networks. Find out which of the attendees knows the person you need to get to know
  • Next steps: revisit attendee wiki. Follow external links to internal people (external blog, Twitter, etc.). Subscribe to others. Keep in touch
  • Ask Ian Forrester if you want to get added to internal Backstage mailing list
  • Taking the seed of openness back to our teams
  • Should we run more of these?

BeeBCamp

People who are talking about BeeBCamp:

And even more…

BeeBCamp - what is it?

Posted by Roo - 27/10/08 at 12:10:44 am

BBC White CityWhat is it?

BeeBCamp is an internal, barcamp style ‘unconference‘ happening on Tuesday, 28th October from 9:30am in White City. It has been organised to bring 60 - 80 BBC employees from various locations around the UK together. Every one has an interest, a passion, a hobby or a particular area of expertise. Here, everyone gets the opportunity to share so that we can all learn from, and get to know, each other.

Why do we need one?

We don’t need one, but a few of us thought it would be a good idea. Face-to-face meetings in London W12 (White City, Media Centre, Broadcast Centre and TV Centre) account for so much of our time and attention that it can often feel like a bit of a hive. Those of us who work there can sometimes forget that the outlying ‘nations and regions’, including even other bits of London, can feel a bit more distant than they should. Whether it’s via internal blogs or external tools (blogs, Twitter, Yammer, Flickr), we may build relationships online but it’s hard to start them that way. We hoped that having a physical get-together, in which we put names to faces (and Twitter, etc, screen names) would be useful for everyone.

The idea is that bringing together people from Manchester, Cardiff, Glasgow, and other far flung and exotic places helps build relationships that continue long after the event. Meeting and learning from interesting and interested people is more fun than sitting down to hear from a small set of speakers. In short, an unconference sounded like a fun and useful thing to put together. Who knows what it will lead to?

Who organised it?

Well, the nature of an unconference is that all the participants play an important role in making it happen. But if you’re asking who facilitated and booked it, Philip Trippenbach, Mark Simpkins, David Hayward (College of Journalism) and I have all played our parts in making it happen. It was Philip’s brainchild, with David playing a huge role in organising the logistics of the food (which Simon Nelson sponsored) and the venue.

Why is it being held in White City?

It had to be somewhere, and White City has a lot of conference space. It’s reasonably central and since we happen to work near there it was the easiest place to organise it. Perhaps the next one will be somewhere else.

How does it work?

There’s no fixed agenda. The day will begin with an empty grid on a whiteboard, representing a few rooms and a series of 20 minute time slots which need to be filled by whoever wants to host a conversation about something. The first item of business at 10am is to fill the grid.

Leading up to the event, an internal wiki has outlined the structure of the day (starting time, slots and breaks) and listed the confirmed attendees. In the style of the Interesting 2008 attendees wiki, people have been sharing things they know about the other attendees, rather than just themselves. The wiki mainly consists of names and roles, with links to personal blogs, Twitter names, and other public presences where we might get to know each other better.

See you tomorrow

I’ll take notes about the externally bloggable stuff (of which there will hopefully be plenty) and feed back how it goes and what I learn.

Back on the box

Posted by Roo - 20/10/08 at 11:10:19 pm

Thanks again to Nick for grabbing a ‘where’s wally’ shot of my second Watchdog appearance. (Last week’s TV debut, with detailed comments, is here.)

This week, I was invited to sit-there-and-look-busy to fill a space in the Watchdog desks. I’ve done a lot of work with them this week, so it felt quite natural to join them in their office. The computer in front of me was initially switched off, and with not much time to spare before the live broadcast began I made frantic notes and tried to ignore the camera. I turned the desktop PC on during the first pre-taped segment and proceeded to spend a very productive half-hour checking my email, blissfully unaware of the goings-on in the studio. Quite a nice place to hot-desk on a Monday night, really.

Tardis

Posted by Roo - 17/10/08 at 11:10:49 pm

I was fortunate enough to be given a tour of the BBC Cardiff set today. Dr Who, Torchwood, Sarah Jane… brilliant!

Tardis

Generally my camera was firmly switched off (there’s a big agreement on the way in about not taking photos or video, to avoid revealing spoilers) but I was told it was OK to take some shots inside the console room of the Tardis.

Tardis Tardis console Tardis

It really is bigger on the inside.

I’m on Watchdog

Posted by Roo - 13/10/08 at 11:10:20 pm

I’m feeling ridiculously pleased at having made it onto the set of tonight’s episode of Watchdog. As far as I know, my first ever TV appearance.

(Back left. Looking tall.)

Thanks to Nick for grabbing a screenshot while I was on train home.

Going Live

Posted by Roo - 22/08/08 at 10:08:45 pm

Today marks the end of my first full week in my new job at the BBC. As you may know, my role is Portfolio Executive, Social Media - BBC Vision. I’m not going to explain it fully yet (I’ll talk more about what that means and what I’m doing soon, for now I just wanted to let you know I’ve started) but I will say that I report to the lovely Dan Taylor, with the even more impressive job title of Senior Portfolio Executive, Internet - BBC Vision and his recently explanation of his title should get you most of the way there.

Television Centre

Although my first day at Television Centre was predictably filled with first-day at school feelings, walking around the building fills me with something close to awe. Television gets made here, and in addition to things I watch now on iPlayer, triggers for childhood memories abound. If I strain my ear I can almost hear the echoes of Philip Schofield, Sarah Green, Trevor and Simon and Gordon the Gopher. There are Daleks in the Foyer cafe, and a near constant stream of tours of the building.

I was very pleased to arrive at my new desk in Television Centre on day 1 and discover that I already had

  • A badge (temporary pass. I get my RFID badge next week)
  • A telephone, configured with my office number
  • A desktop computer
  • A BBC username with which to access the intranet
  • A laptop (with which I am particularly happy)
  • 3G USB dongle for being productive (or at least as productive as possible) on the train
  • An RSA dongle (for internal webmail access via the internet. Handy)

I must say I’m impressed. Of course, I was slightly less impressed to open my brand new inbox and find 115 emails waiting for me, but that’s what mail filtering rules are for.

Television Centre

The commute to Wood Lane isn’t as bad as it probably sounds. In the morning, I take the first direct train from Southampton Airport Parkway to Clapham (8:08am), the overground to Kensington Olympia and from there the BBC shuttle bus to White City. (I have many people who left comments on this blog and messages on Twitter to thank for that excellent tip.) It’s just over 2 hours door-to-door, and I’m learning about timing my departure time for the return journey correctly in order to avoid making it an unnecessary and painful 3 hours. I am looking forward to the overground line to Shepherd’s Bush opening up later this year too.

For my first week I got a one-week season ticket, which turns out to be impressively good value. It costs less to travel for a whole week (£109) than it would for even two individual daily tickets (at £55 a pop). I also picked up a form for an annual season ticket too, which is an even bigger saving.

Going home

I quite like commuting. The 3G card gets me online so I can clear my inbox and get my brain in gear before I arrive at the office, and even offline the uninterrupted time gives me a chance to read, think and write while listening to podcasts.

In fact, I think I’m going to need to subscribe to a lot more podcasts. A lot more.

My current list is pretty short:

Various people have recently suggested This Week in Tech, This Week in Media, This American Life and Audible for books.

What else should I be listening to?

Powered by WordPress with GimpStyle Theme design by Horacio Bella.
The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent my employer's positions, strategies or opinions.