Visit to BBC Bristol, Points West

My fellow students and I had the pleasure of visiting BBC Bristol recently for a tour around the site and a chance to sit in the gallery for their regional news programme Points West.
Our first stop was the main office, which was so busy that hopefully no one noticed me walking straight into a waste bin. I assume that all the chaos was because it was nearly time for the news to be broadcast but wouldn’t be surprised if it was always like that. We quickly walked past the journalists’ desks that were preparing their stories for 12 o’clock. Our guide showed us their central server, the hub, which is more or less in the centre of the room. This is where all the stories, graphics and other files are uploaded to.

The next stop was to the desk of Points West’s weatherman Richard Abgwin who explained that the introductory graphic for the weather contains a ball which is graphically altered to show an overview of the weather for that day, so if there a lot of snow or icy weather the ball would be snowy or white. Theoretically you wouldn’t even need to watch the weather just have a look at the ball! The weatherman is surprisingly self-sufficient, as he handles the meteorology graphs that will appear behind him on the show and prepares his own scripts. He explained that another job he has to do is act as a kind of buffer for the shows running time, so if the programme is running over schedule he would have to cut down his segment to fit in the rest of the shows running time, I had no idea the news was that rigid with running times.

We met the man who’s job it is to post up the news stories on the BBC website for the Bristol and Gloucestershire pages and ceefax, he took us through how once he and his co-worker have decided on the text to be posted up then it’s his job to look over it once more, spell check it, edit it and then post it up using the system, typically one page can only post up to 11 news stories at a time so usually the ones that are the oldest will get replaced, generally these stories stay up for as long as 48hrs. He explained that the system is used at Birmingham as well and generally between Bristol and Birmingham there will be someone to cover stories 24hours a day.

We were ushered into the bristol radio room, which had a reception area and two studio’s. A presenter Steve Yablsey was finishing up his show, and got a glimpse of us saying something like “and now it we have what appears to be a bunch of tramps in the studio.” That did make me think that maybe we were a little underdressed for the occasion. He called us into the studio, and for a while none of us moved till Will decided to be there first one in, he asked us what our names were and even said I had a “rock star name.” He asked Will what we were studying and eventually he answered the question, Steve thanked us because he needed to fill in a few extra minutes of the show before going off air. It was looking pretty good we’d been live on the radio and called tramps by a radio presenter, I thought that we were now seriously interacting with the crème de la crème of the entertainment world. . We wenr into a studio which wasn’t in use, where someone explained the ease of which to use the studio kit which boiled down to a few faders and a stop and play button. They showed us what some of the lights meant, apart from the obvious red ‘on-air’ light; one of them was blue and only really goes off if Prince Charles, Prince William (but not Harry) or Tony Blair has died. I don’t know how serious they were about that though. I have to admit it looked great and until then I’d never been too fussed about radio work but I’ve become more interested with this visit, combined with the work I’ve done on the course.

We then met the Graphic Designer who showed us briefly what he had been working on which included a graphic for a sports promo which has about 3-4 different layers of imagery. We didn’t get much time to see the actual process involved in this as Point’s West was beginning to start filming.

The studio for Point’s West is surprisingly small compared to how it appears on television, I realised this was due to clever placement of the cameras. The studio had 3 cameras mounted onto large mobile stands, the floor manager demonstrated the ease of moving the camera which greatly pleased Reuben, who is interested in being a cameraman. Chris Vacher , Points Wests main presenter walked into the room and we were introduced to him, he wasn’t too chatty though and I think it’s probably because he was focusing on the task at hand. Before we left the floor manager said we could come back to play with the cameras, which never happened, Reuben was not pleased about that.

Being in the gallery was probably my favourite part of the visit. We sat behind the gallery team, which consisted of the producer, director, vision mixer and sound engineer. I fear that we may have been on this visit a bit too early because I was totally overwhelmed by watching the news being filmed right in front us, because it was live it felt like anything could go wrong at any minute, however this is obviously not the case as apart from being experienced professionals I realised that to them this was simply their day job. In front of the crew were about 5 widescreen plasma screen TV’s with all displaying smaller boxes which included things like images being used in stories, the auto cue, the 3 camera’s set up in the studio and a camera feed from a field reporter at a Bristol museum. The show ran smoothly with Vacher pre-recording the headlines, and a signer being pre-recorded. The only obvious concern from the director (apart from her game of solitaire) was that the field reporter was conducing an interview using a boom mic, which looked really stupid however the reporter explained it was the only mic available.

I really liked the visit to BBC although I do wish that there was enough time to give us a proper explanation of osme of the roles and I will look forward to gaining that knowledge and experience during work experience next year.