The Media

My challenge  (24 hours without computers) was covered by 3 parts of the BBC yesterday. The contrast between them was a surprise. 

I spent a total of half an hour with BBC Radio Manchester (including a couple of minutes live on air), very little preparation, just spontaneous replies to questions I hadn’t been briefed about. It was fun, electric and swift. The only downside was getting up early (it was the breakfast show). (I was too on edge to chat with the other guests – must do so next time, interesting group of folks).(you can ‘listen again’ for a week here – skip forward to 2:25:00).

On my way in I handed my notebook with notes of the day to BBC online, with a warning that my longhand is now almost unreadable. Later in the day they went up on the website – slightly tidied up and almost perfectly transcribed. Painless and rewarding, but no flash of adrenaline.

I spent the whole of the rest of the morning with people from the BBC regional TV news show Northwest Tonight. They filmed me in various illustrative situations where the challenge had been difficult. It was a surprisingly slow and painstaking process, with lots of steps I’d never considered, like getting permission to film on private property (Rail station in this case) and the difficulty of changing the time on clocks (It seems you can’t on a DAB clock radio, the time is part of the signal). The bulk of the time was taken up with different angles and shots. I found the repetitiveness of the process difficult. The end result from 3 hours of work was a beautiful ‘package‘ (I’m learning the jargon!) which they played 3 times yesterday. The shock however was the way my bit fitted into the program and how much they managed to convey in such a short time. I’m deeply impressed with the results and the skill required but I’ll think twice before doing it again as it is a bit tedious to do.

I’m going to try and get a sense of the response I get to the coverage, but first impressions are that the TV had the most impact. I guess that the web will be a bit more of a slow burn. We shall see.