3October1997

3 October 1997
My dear folks,

A pleasant little day is drawing itself to an end, soothed by the harmonies of J.S. Bach’s flute sonatas. One ear is tuned to these, the other is scanning the drive-time radio news round up – currently delving into the persistent failure of British youth to comprehend maths. And what’s left is concentrating on this letter. I suspect that sounds like a recipe for confusion; for better or for worse, it’s also a reflection of how we habitually work. (Don’t say it!) Go into any BBC newsroom & you’ll find its occupants wearing headphones over one ear & typing away at a keyboard or at least peering at a screen. That way you keep one ear on the station output, one ear on the newsroom & one ear – so to speak – on your work.

If God had created humans with the electronic age in mind, he’d have given them several more ears & eyes in order to monitor the simultaneous output of rival stations dancing on monitors all over the newsroom & to stay up with the buzz of conversation. But in his wisdom, he didn’t. There may have been method in his madness. It’s such a demanding business trying to keep abreast of events that 12 ½ hour shifts pass very quickly.

I breathed a deep sigh as I walked down past the studios & towards the bike shed this a.m. at the end of my 7th & final night shift of the sequence. The arrivals rat-race was in full flow, a stream of people with anxious faces scurrying in the opposite direction. I’m not designed for rat races & was grateful, as always, not to be part of it.

It was a good night, as they go. After putting out a couple of bulletins, I spent several hours getting in & then putting pictures to a track from our New York correspondent on the latest Mid East saga – the use of forged Canadian passports by a couple of Israeli agents who were captured in Jordan after bungling an assassination attempt on a Hamas official. The Canadian foreign minister was venting his spleen in NY where he was attending the UN General Assembly. It proved a difficult track to paint & we got it into the transmission suite a bare 3 mins before it was due for broadcast at 0500 – the lead story! Earlier in the evening, we went live to space where the Atlantis shuttle astronauts & Mir cosmonauts were giving a news conference at the end of the Atlantis mission. Routine stuff these days. Just think what our grandparents would have made of a news conference from space!

In-between times I’ve been working on suggestions for the new news templates, output schedule pages with masses of technical information on them to guide the production teams. Each half hour of every day needs to have its own template prepared (though there is some duplication). It’s on these templates that we subsequently write the bulletin scripts. The complicated bit is getting the templates to talk to the graphics & videotape transmission suites, as everything is computer generated. If it sounds complicated, it is.

As usual, Mave demanded breakfast the moment I entered the flat & then flopped down on my feet for a back scratch. He makes out that he’s come for a lie-down & it’s a coincidence that it just happens to be on your shoes. He purred away as I gave him the required 2 min grooming & affirmation session before the pair of us went to bed.

This p.m. saw the usual round of bank, health food shop & greengrocer. I sat down at my favourite pavement café to pore over a computer magazine but the sun went away & it wasn’t inviting. Jones faxed me her news – the electricity had tripped last night during one of her rare supper outings, leaving the guests in the dark. They’d gone to fetch Maria who’d untripped it after they failed to do so themselves. It was minor but all things are relative & it had been sufficient to take the gloss off Barbara’s day when she heard about it. The equivalent complication in my life was a late afternoon call from a tenant with a blocked loo. My fixer had turned his mobile phone off & it took me an hour to find a fall-back plumber & then to arrange for him to fetch the keys from neighbours the following day while I slept.

Am off Saturday before I begin a fortnight of Sunday to Thursday shifts on Asia followed by a trip to Portugal on the 17th. Roll on! Can’t wait

Blessings
T