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Yearly Archives: 2012

My job, and why I love it

I received an email from Jeremy Romeo, a student at Australia’s James Cook University, asking me questions about my work for his course. As usual, if it makes a good blog post, I’m happy to respond.

What do you do in a typical day?

My job is to mix the sound for live and pre-recorded television at the BBC World Service, mainly for the Farsi-language channel called BBC Persian, but increasingly for the other languages of the World Service.

BBC Persian broadcasts live via satellite for 8 hours a day (and a further 8 hours of repeat programming) to Farsi-speaking audiences in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, as well as online streaming. The TV service only started three-and-a-half years ago, but a BBC Persian radio service has been broadcasting since 1941. Its funding currently comes direct from the British Government’s Foreign Office budget. While the BBC has complete editorial control over the content of its programmes, the Foreign Office decides which languages it should broadcast in, usually places which do not have a strong (or any) impartial media of its own. In the future, funding for the World Service (which also includes a radio and TV channel entirely in English) will come from the UK’s Television Licence Fee, so we will be competing for ‘sharing’ budgets and resources with the rest of the organisation.

Iranian law stipulates that no news organisation, including people like Reuters, cannot share their news material to be broadcast on BBC Persian or our American counterpart, VOA Persian. Even the BBC correspondent in Tehran, Mohsen Asgari, is only permitted to report in English for the BBC’s domestic services. The authorities in Tehran have the right to immediately suspend accreditation for any person or organisation whose material appears on BBC Persian. This makes gathering news in the country extremely difficult, so we make much use of eyewitnesses rather than reporters, as well as ex-pat experts who now live in various European and American cities with a large Persian community such as London, Washington, Toronto, Bonn, Stockholm and Istanbul.

The news element therefore only makes up approximately half of the BBC Persian TV’s programming, with a mix of current affairs discussions and popular BBC entertainment and documentary programmes dubbed into Farsi making up the rest, such as Top Gear, A Year At Kew, Doctor Who, Louis Theroux, BBC Proms, Lonely Planet and Sherlock. One of the most popular non-news programmes is Word On The Street, which aims to teach the audience the English language and about British culture.

My day starts at either 09:30 or 11:30 depending on which shift I’m on, and kicks off with a series of studio preparation and checks, ensuring all microphones, speakers and other equipment is working as it should be. Sometimes there are issues to chase up with the in-house support team, perhaps if something which broke the day before was fixed overnight. The rest of the morning is then used to pre-record current affairs programmes which will be shown between the news bulletins that day or later in the week. These are often discussion programmes which involve a combination of in-studio guests, contributions via satellite or Skype from elsewhere in the world, or sometimes someone on the telephone.

At 13:30 (17:00 Tehran time), the first news bulletin goes on-air, a half-hour digest of the latest world and Persian-region news, with pre-recorded packages, live contributions via telephone, Skype or satellite from eyewitnesses, correspondents or experts, and a presenter in the studio. During this, I will be balancing the sound level for all of the sources to make it sound as good as possible (not always easy when someone is in rural Afghanistan on a mobile phone!) and – most importantly – a constant volume so that viewers don’t have to keep turning up and down their television set.

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There are four such half-hour bulletins throughout the broadcast day, at 13:30, 14:30, 16:30 and 20:00. At 15:30, there is a Sports summary (roughly 10 minutes) which updates viewers on the scores and news from international and regional sports, followed by Nowbat-e-Shoma (“Now it’s your turn”), a 50-minute phone-in programme where viewers can give their thoughts on the topic of the day. The programme also discusses the content of blogs on the subject, and encourages input via Facebook, Twitter and email. There is an hour-long news programme called 60 Minutes at 18:30 (22:00 Tehran time) which goes in-depth on the day’s news, often discussing the top story for 20 or 25 minutes.

Throughout the day, I might be asked to help editorial colleagues with technical issues, give advice about how to make something sound better, setup live translations for press conferences or contributions, or arrange for other parts of the BBC to interview one of our reporters or correspondents in our studio about Persian-region news in order to give the UK audience an expert perspective.

Increasingly, we are also producing programmes for other parts of the BBC. That’s because recently the whole of the World Service moved out of the iconic Bush House, a central London landmark which has been home to the BBC’s international transmissions for over 70 years, and moved into the newly-built Broadcasting House. This means the World Service (which has traditionally been focussed almost entirely on radio) and the rest of the corporation’s news output are in the same building for the first time in their history. This is obviously great news for collaboration between the two entities, and means stories and resources can be pooled, shared and used more efficiently. With the new facilities, including a new multipurpose TV studio for the exclusive use of the language services, more teams are working on creating new TV programmes. Already, we are making the Turkish Business Report, a Russian news bulletin (above right) and a new Swahili-language news bulletin is due to launch the week after next. Upcoming programmes include Turkish, Hindi and Urdu news bulletins.

What sort of equipment and software do you use on a daily basis?

Most of the studio – as other news broadcast studios – is fixed; everything we could possibly need to broadcast the news is either already set up or lying around waiting to be simply plugged in. The mixing desk is a digital DHD desk, my favourite digital desk I have used (although I still prefer the clunk-click of the 40-year-old desks in Bush House!) and lapel microphones (a combination of wireless and wired). The sound mixing desk obviously complements other desks in the broadcast gallery, such as a lighting mixer, robotic camera controls, the vision mixing desk, and controls for software.

The Persian TV gallery (left) is semi-automated (the new galleries in the new Broadcasting House building have gone much further with their automation), which means we’re more reliant on the technology working properly in order to broadcast properly. A lot of the automation depends on human input into ENPS (Electronic News Production System), a software package produced by Associated Press which stores all of the BBC’s running orders and scripts. As well as controlling things like the Autoscript (any changes to a script in ENPS should update automatically on Autoscript in front of the presenter), producers can also insert commands which control various parts of the picture – for example, automatically showing and hiding captions and graphics such as contributor’s names and the location to go next to the “Live” bug. It also times the programme for us so we know if we have to add or remove a story at the end of the bulletin in order to finish on time.

BNCS (Broadcast Network Control System) is another piece of software heavily relied on across the News department, but is configured differently in different studios depending on requirements. In Persian TV, we generally use this only to connect Outside Sources (whether a satellite feed, ISDN line, Skype contributor, etc) into the gallery, and a few functions in the studio such as changing the brightness and colour of the plasma screens. However, it can be used to transfer network control between studios, dial and connect telephone and ISDN lines, control recordings, and in some cases even control functions on the sound and vision mixer desks.

The standard audio software – such as Adobe Audition – is obviously used to create music for new programmes, and SpotOn is used to play it out on-air.

What are some of your inspirations that got you into what you do?

I’d always been passionate about radio, and decided aged 17 to go to college instead of staying on at sixth-form to study Media Production, which covered both radio and video, but not necessarily specialising in broadcast of video. At the time, I had setup and was running an internet radio station at the local youth club, which gave under-privileged young people the chance to get some training in radio production and have their own weekly show, funded by the Prince’s Trust.

After college, I was awarded a place at the University of Bedfordshire (then the University of Luton) on a three-year Master of Arts degree course in TV and Radio Production. At the university, I experienced a TV studio and gallery for the first time, but was still more interested in radio. In my third year for my final project, I was one of the managers of the University’s own radio station, broadcast on FM for four weeks to the town of Luton.

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My first job out of university was in the BBC’s Traffic department, which is a kind-of co-ordination point for dispatches and live contributions for BBC News. Correspondents from around the world would dial into Traffic and we would then record their story or patch them through to the correct studio at the correct time, saving the correspondent the hassle of having Yellow Pages-size phonebooks full of telephone numbers for all of the BBC’s studios and a schedule of when they were on-air.

I stayed in Traffic for about two years, always on short-term contracts of four months or so, until I got an attachment as a Studio Manager at World Service Radio. The BBC’s attachment scheme is one of the best things about the organisation, allowing staff to go and do a different job for a fixed amount of time and guaranteeing their original job back afterwards. It allows staff to move around, pickup new skills and meet new people, bringing back best practice to their original department. Unfortunately, as I was only on short-term contracts in Traffic, the guarantee of my job back didn’t exist, so when I was told that my attachment wasn’t being renewed, I became freelance, picking up work at the BBC on a daily basis as staff fell sick. This included working at BBC Arabic TV, similar to Persian TV but which broadcasts news 24/7 to the Arab world, which was my first job in TV.

Nearly three years after leaving my attachment, another short-term contract came up in Persian TV, which I applied for and got. This was then ‘made substantive’ (the words all BBC contractors want to hear – in other words, “made full time”) towards the end of the six months, and I have been there ever since.

I do still hanker after radio occasionally, as I think Studio Managers (radio sound mixers) can be more creative in their work than they can in TV which has a set format, but the freelance audio work I sometimes get asked to do makes up for it!

What has been the best part about your job so far?

Probably working on the London Olympics for Persian TV (right). It was a surreal experience – as the World Service did not have the rights to show any video from inside the stadium, or even the Olympics rings logo, we had to use still images to illustrate what had happened that day. We had built a special set for our nightly Olympics Update programme, “London Calling”, which involved green astroturf and red lino painted to look like a running track, with a fake flame in the foreground and some circular set (which most definitely did NOT attempt to represet the Olympics rings!) in the background.

Iran winning four golds – and a silver in Discus, the country’s first track-and-field medal ever – at the Games and watching my editorial colleagues whooping in delight and the big grins on their faces for the rest of the day will be a sight I will never forget!

Can you name a few celebrities that you have worked with in your time at BBC?

‘Celebrity’ is a weird concept. Have I ever worked with Madonna, Stevie Wonder, David Beckham? No.

How about well-known BBC personalities? Jonathan Ross? Kate Adie? Terry Wogan? Chris Moyles? No.

Ever heard of Seva Novgorodtsev, Ros Atkins or Sadeq Saba? Millions of people listen to or watch them every single day across the world – and yes, these are people I have worked with.

Leave a reply - Posted: 16th August 2012, 2:28pm - Category: World Service TV

Do not order from Shire Garden Buildings – review

Editor’s Note – 15th September 2014
The contents of this post are now more than two years old, relating to a purchase made by myself in June 2012. While the comments made since then have been of both positive and negative reviews of Shire and/or Elbec, I cannot personally vouch for the accuracy or otherwise of these comments. I have therefore decided to close the comments section to new posts, and have deleted and/or edited existing comments where I thought it was necessary.
Regarding the back-and-forth discussion between Steven Horner and Elbec Customer Care Team, this was not the appropriate place for this dialogue so I have simple kept Steven’s original post and Elbec’s only response, with minor edits where the conversation referred to now-deleted posts.
For any concerns or queries please contact me.

We recently* ordered a shed for our new house – a nice 8×6 apex design – from Elbec, an extremely helpful and pleasant company operating online selling – well – sheds and garden buildings.

We decided to also order the optional shed base, so that we did not have to lay concrete for the shed to sit on, and paid an extra £119 for on-site installation, having never built a shed ourselves before. At that point, we did not know the horror awaiting us as the order was passed from lovely Elbec to the chaos that is Shire, who were to deliver and install the shed.

A few days passed, and I received an SMS message inviting me to book a date for delivery and installation. I called the number provided in the text message, and booked – with Shire – a date almost exactly a month later. Ideally we wanted the shed earlier, but this was the only date that worked out for both of us, given someone had to be in on the day. That delivery date was yesterday – June 24th.

On the Thursday, I received another SMS informing me that – and I quote – “your order through Elbec will be delivered on 25th June 2012 between 8am and 12pm”. Great!

12:00 came and went. No delivery.
12:30 came and went. No delivery.

At just before 1:00, I called Shire to enquire about the location of our delivery, and the fact it was now an hour past its timeslot. I was told that they had been stuck in traffic, that the shed was definitely out for delivery today (which contradicted their website, which had a tick next to “booked” for that day, but a cross against “dispatched” let alone “out for delivery”), and they would be with us soon. I explained that as we lived on a new estate, our postcode would almost certainly not appear on their SatNav, and asked them to call me directly if they got lost so I could give directions.

2:00 came and went. No delivery; no phone call.
3:00 came and went. No delivery; no phone call.

At 3:00 I called Shire again to ask for an update. Only then they informed me that deliveries could happen any time up to 7pm, and that the text message was just a “guide”.

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At 3:30, I had a call from the Shire office to say that the delivery van was just departing their previous job, but that our postcode was indeed not showing, and asked for an alternative street to head towards. I gave them the postcode of a road around the corner, and said to call me when they were there for further directions – which had worked with our previous contractors for our wood flooring, sofas and phone line.

4:00 came and went. No delivery; no phone call; no information.
4:30 came and went. No delivery; no phone call; no information.
5:00 came and went. No delivery; no phone call; no information.

At 5:15 I tried calling Shire again. Surely the delivery team’s previous job wasn’t nearly two hours away – even taking into account the rush hour? No answer. The Shire office had closed at 5pm. At this point, in desperation, I called Elbec for the first time that day. They confirmed that Shire closes at 5pm, and that they didn’t have any contact information for our driver.

5:30 came and went. No delivery; no phone call; no information; no hope.
6:00 came and went. No delivery; no phone call; no information; no hope.

At this point I had to leave, but my wife was home from work so – knowing they still had an hour to show – we assumed they were just running very late.

At 7:30 I called Sarah. No delivery; no phone call to her; no phone call to me; no information; no hope.

So we gave up, vowing to give Shire a piece of our mind tomorrow morning. Grr.

Suddenly Sarah called back: they had made contact! They were on a road on the opposite side of town, completely lost, and could someone come to meet her to show her the way to our house? At least we think that’s what they said: they only had a few words of English between them, which didn’t fare well for Sarah’s initial hope that she could talk them through road-by-road using Google Maps.

Against her better judgement (going to meet two strangers in the evening when she should have been progressing with her dissertation essay) she eventually found them at the road they said they were, bought them back to the house… then watched them unload the flat-pack panels onto the wet soil in the garden, before asking her to sign.

No installation? What?
Are you going to assemble this? Huh?
We paid for installation. No understand.
[Sarah pointing to word "Assembly" on delivery note] As-sem-bly? No today.
When? [Nervous looks and shrugs of shoulders]
Tomorrow? Maybe.

After scrawling a massive note about the fact she was signing for delivery only and making it clear that we had paid for installation but it had not happened, they were on their merry way, presumably to drive around for another few hours trying to find their own homes.

So, now we have a pile of flat-pack furniture on our soggy soil, covered only by a thin sheet of plastic which formed the packaging, but no actual shed.

But it’s OK! Shire’s slogan is “Built around our reputation” – surely a strongly-worded letter will make them realise what a horrible cock-up this has been, and a team of people will swoop into action to get us a shed erected by the end of the day, and/or to make some kind of compensation offer, in order to avoid the bad publicity.

Err… no.

A call to Shire at 10am the day after resulted in them sounding about 30 steps below the least interested you could possibly be about our problems, and resulted in the promise that they would call me back by midday once they had spoken to the delivery manager and delivery driver.

12:00 came and we… you get the idea. Nada.

But in the interim I started Googling for reviews of the company – and found these:

Spotting any kind of pattern here?

At 12:30 I called them and reminded them of their now-broken promise. This time they sounded maybe only 25 steps below interested, but said they were still trying to work out if we could have a delivery today (really? Two-and-a-half hours later?).

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Just after 2pm, my mobile rang: it was Shire! They had bad news: no-one would be able to come to install the shed today. Like I didn’t see that coming. They did let slip, though, that they had received my complaint email by referring to the fact that the pieces were on soil.

They were obviously concerned that when the installer came – the earliest date on Thursday, i.e. ten days after delivery – the wood would have been destroyed. Not an unreasonable assumption, I agreed – and suggested that maybe they might like to bring a new shed with them, install that, and take the old one away to do whatever they liked with it. You can guess how that went down with them… Well, the response that we should stack them up against our fence in the meantime was the best they could come up with, until I pointed out that it would still be exposed to the weather, would probably come out worse than if it was just lying down in a pile, would require more plastic “protection” due to the larger exposed area, and would probably bring down our fence due to the weight of it all.

Still unsatisfied (duh), I spoke again to Elbec, who said they would call Shire to see what could be done. At this point I was (and still am) asking for a refund on the installation fee, and trying to find a local handyman who can erect it for us.

Shire Garden Buildings in Wisbech: don’t touch them with a fence pole.

UPDATE – 17:00 on Tuesday 26th June
Shire have called me back to say that they definitely can’t deliver any time before next Thursday, despite “racking their brains all afternoon trying to solve this issue”. We are, though, to be the first calling point of the day. Let’s see how that works out…

UPDATE – 10:00 on Thursday 5th July
Well, we have a team of three blokes in our garden now putting up our shed.
The fact that the first thing they did after showing them where it should go was take out fags and light them doesn’t bother me as much as it should given all we’ve been through to get to this stage!

Editor’s Note – 15th September 2014
The contents of this post are now more than two years old, relating to a purchase made by myself in June 2012. While the comments made since then have been of both positive and negative reviews of Shire and/or Elbec, I cannot personally vouch for the accuracy or otherwise of these comments. I have therefore decided to close the comments section to new posts, and have deleted and/or edited existing comments where I thought it was necessary.
Regarding the back-and-forth discussion between Steven Horner and Elbec Customer Care Team, this was not the appropriate place for this dialogue so I have simple kept Steven’s original post and Elbec’s only response, with minor edits where the conversation referred to now-deleted posts.
For any concerns or queries please contact me.

- Posted: 26th June 2012, 3:41pm - Category: New House

First Capital Connect and APCOA: How to piss off and confuse your users in one fell swoop

First Capital Connect (FCC) have really played a blinder in the last 24 hours. I’m always quick – sometimes too quick – to criticise the  company which runs trains between Bedford, Brighton, Luton and south London… but this stuff could almost be lifted straight from Page 1 of the book of how-not-to-upset-your-paying-customers.

It started last night – Thursday 31st May – when I received an SMS message timed at 20:02 (that’s just after 8 in the evening) from RingGo. The company arranges pay-by-phone parking at over 3,000 car parks in the UK, making it easy to pay for parking if you have no cash, as well as providing parking attendants to check tickets and issue fines as necessary. The company – until yesterday – offered this service at all FCC car parks. The text message read:

“We are sorry from 1st June RingGo is no longer provided at FCC stations. For info please call FCC on email ”

My first thought was “Why are RingGo telling me this and not FCC?” Then the date in the message suddenly registered: that’s tomorrow! RingGo/FCC had given users under 6 hours notice (daily parking sessions expire at 2am the day after) of the change, and the only communication offered did not mention how – or even if – a pay-by-phone service would continue to exist. One member of the Facebook group “I Hate First Capital Connect” reportedly spent 45 minutes on the telephone in a queue, only to be cut off shortly after reaching a human without getting any answers. The section on the FCC website regarding parking (screenshot, right – click to enlarge) confirms that a new operator – APCOA – will take over from RingGo and provide a similar service.

Some questions which genuinely require answering – but still haven’t been as of 10am on the 1st June – are to do with season ticket holders and multi-day ticket holders, for which RingGo will have already processed the payment. Presumably APCOA will have their own separate payment system, separate staff to check tickets and issue fines who will be carrying equipment which links to APCOA’s – not RingGo’s – database, and possibly different parking rates and fees. So if someone purchased a three-day ticket via RingGo yesterday, their car registration and payment details won’t show up on APCOA’s computer and they could be liable for a fine. What happens with annual ticket holders who are seven months through their RingGo session – will they have to purchase a new season ticket starting today, and will they get a refund on the unused portion from RingGo? The answer is probably not – their parking contract will probably have been passed on to APCOA (which raises Data Protection issues, but let’s not go there…) but the point remains that no information or clarification about this was available.

So who’s to blame for this change of heart – First Group or RingGo? A message on the RingGo website from March 2011 seems to suggest that this was forced on them by First Great Western (FGW) – another First Group train operating company – possibly in breach of contract. A forum thread on the FGW website from the same time period suggests that this change was made by First Group with less than a week’s notice to its users. First Group apparently have form in this area.

OK, so we didn’t get any communication from First about this change, and if it wasn’t for RingGo telling its customers – presumably at its own cost, and while in dispute with its business partner – no-one would be any the wiser come this morning. But if we’re just swapping one supplier for another – which happens constantly in every other business – there’s no problem, right? Well, assuming quality of service improves or the price decreases accordingly, that statement would probably be true. Unfortunately cutting service quality is another area in which First Group have previous experience, from ticket office opening hours to charging for cash machine withdrawals which were previously free.

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So how does APCOA compare to RingGo? This only uses what I have seen this morning before I have even used the service to park (first time today, I will need to purchase a daily off-peak ticket later this morning).

First thing I did was go onto the APCOA Connect website. The registration button was easily found and clicked on. But useability obviously isn’t an important priority for APCOA. The first step of registration – email address validation – doesn’t allow you to use the + character in an email address, despite it being valid. The activation link then went straight into my Gmail spam.

Once your email address is confirmed, you are invited to set a password and enter your credit card details. However there is no information anywhere on the site showing which cards are accepted and which are not. I entered my American Express card details  in and it didn’t complain about it – the real test will be when I come to process a payment! If APCOA do accept AmEx, it will be an improvement over RingGo, which only accepted Visa and Mastercard. (Update: APCOA do not accept American Express, yet the site doesn’t complain if you enter an AmEx card number. It only tells you when you try to process a payment while on the phone)

The same page enables you to fill out your vehicle information. Having entered my full registration number in the first step, I expected this to be filled out automatically using DVLA’s data – this would have also determined whether the vehicle was eligible for FCC’s “green car” parking discount.

We are then asked for our “preferred parking location” (screenshot, left – click to enlarge) which unfortunately is a list in a scrollable frame, rather than a text box which filters out locations based on what you type, which would have made this much more user-friendly.

Hooray! I was then completely registered and ready to use APCOA. As I normally do, I went into my user settings to check everything was in order and found that there was still some “optional” information I could fill out to complete my profile – one of which was my address, presumably required for APCOA to process my payment (when was the last time someone was able to process your payment without confirming your home postcode and house number with the bank?). Surely this should have been required at point of registration to make the payment process later on much easier?

There is also a page titled “Parking reminders”. RingGo used to have these – a text message service which messaged you confirmation of your parking session, and a reminder before it expired (in FCC’s case, sent at around 22:30 the night before at – it stressed in the message – a “sociable time” rather than shortly before 2am). However APCOA’s reminders configuration screen (screenshot, right – click to enlarge) makes little sense. What on earth is “ivr”, and what is the difference between “sms” and “smartphone”, how does it know what phone you have? Why are they all ticked by default when it states it costs 10p per message, but you only discover you can save 60p on your parking session if you happen to be nosing through your settings, rather than asking you at registration?

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Talking about smartphones, RingGo had a fantastic downloadable app which allowed you to simply enter your parking location code and the length of time you wanted to park for, and submit your payment in about 30 seconds without having to phone a service. APCOA (on Android at least) which – given the rising popularity of smart handheld devices – is a definite disadvantage.

[UPDATE: OK, after reading through this "Reminder Options" page again, I think you can configure reminders based on HOW you pay for the parking session - IVR (telephoning the number), SMS (sending a text) or smartphone (via some non-existant app). In other words, you can have a confirmation if you phone or text, but not if you pay by smartphone, for example. But it's not very well explained at all]

Other things I have seen mentioned this morning but cannot confirm:

  • APCOA uses an 0845 number. RingGo used to use a local (in the case of Flitwick station, 01525) number. This will cost mobile users more to call. (Correction – Actually, they do use a local-rate number – 01895, which is the area code for Uxbridge.)
  • APCOA apparently considers the end of the day to be midnight (Correction – APCOA sessions still expire at 2am). RingGo sessions [also] used to expire at 02:00. This was always an anomoly as train tickets are valid until 04:30 the next day – in other words, if you bought a train ticket on Wednesday evening at 21:00 and returned at 03:00, you would only need a “daily” train ticket, but would need two daily parking tickets (one valid 21:00-02:00, one valid 02:01 for a further 24 hours when you only need it to be valid for another hour).
  • Some FCC customers are reporting that parking is free today due to the car parks not being ready for the new provider (Update – in fact, it wasn’t free but @FirstCC on Twitter promised that no-one would be penalised as a result of being unable to purchase a parking session – this carried on for more than a week!). If customers were only given six hours’ notice, can you imaging trying to replace all the signage and ‘traditional’ machines (RingGo was offered alongside cash/card payment machines which printed a physical ticket to display on the dashboard) in all the FCC car parks in that time? How much revenue did First Group lose that week in reduced car park income – and don’t they know that the day after they made the change was the start of a four-day weekend for most people, being the late May bank holiday and Diamond Jubilee celebrations? Would it not have been better to have spent those four days installing the new system ready for the following Wednesday?! Why the rush and – as a result – lack of notice to customers?
  • NEW: Reports by “TimeWaster” on FirstCrapitalConnect.co.uk that APCOA do not offer weekly tickets as RingGo used to – weekly ticket users now have to choose between the more expensive daily tickets, or a monthly ticket. (Small correction – you can still buy a weekly pass, but this costs the same amount as buying daily tickets for the same period, i.e. there is no longer a discount for buying weekly)

So, there you have it. A modern-thinking company (RingGo) has been forced to apologise to silent FCC’s customers for the train company’s actions (possibly in breach of its contract) to replace them with a lesser offering which possibly costs more. To one of FCC’s customers like myself, just another day.

UPDATE – 2nd July 2012
More than a month in, you would think things have had time to settle down? Think again. The “convenience charge” that both RingGo and APCOA added on to the cost of the parking (presumably this is their fee and profit for providing a telephone line) was supposed to reduce to 20p as a result of the change – FCC even boasted about it in the little publicity they did (putting flyers on windscreens of parked cars). However it still seems to be 40p, i.e. when parking at Flitwick station on a Monday afternoon you could pay £3.00 at the ticket machine, or £3.40 if you use the telephone service. I bought this up with @FirstCC on Twitter, who said it could be a “glitch”. They are hopefully due to call me some time this week for more information.

21 Replies - Posted: 1st June 2012, 10:28am - Category: General

Farewell, BBC Bush House

BBC Bush House in the February snowI only spent six months full time there, followed by the odd freelance shift, but BBC Bush House off the Strand in central London really did leave a lasting impression on me.

Next week the first services will start moving out of the iconic building, first built in 1923 and partially-occupied by the BBC World Service for over 70 years, and move to the newly-built Broadcasting House in the West End; the first non-English broadcast from the new studios will be the BBC Burmese bulletin. By the summer, Bush House will be empty but its legacy and history to the BBC’s worldwide audiences will never be lost.

I’ve overheard producers and presenters from various language services talking about their childhood memories: recalling their parents listening to the World Service in secrecy – tucked up under the bed covers or where whole communities gathered round a single radio – because being caught listening to the infamous words “This Is London” and the news that followed it was illegal. Even when my colleagues were kids, Bush House was a magical place where truth and impartiality was spoken to all corners of the world via technology which was difficult – if not impossible – for their governments to stop.

I’m not entirely convinced the image of Bush House in their mind matched the reality when they first walked through the doors of the building – as the first speaker in this video proves!

Sure, Bush House had its faults. Its endless hospital-like corridors meant many a struggle to find your destination; a glance out of any window facing the internal courtyard would show you how dirty the external walls had become, at least partly as a result of the huge, noisy electricity generators plonked on the car-park.

Studio C34 in BBC Bush HouseBut the studios… ahh, the studios. The nicest ones I’ve had the pleasure to work in; old-fashioned switches, buttons that actually clunk, workhorse sound mixers that have been in operation for decades, and would almost certainly last decades more. They just don’t compare to what is essentially a big computer in the new studios: five buttons presses to do anything more advanced than adjusting the volume on a channel, its reliance on another computer in the technical room to operate in the first place, the constant threat of a crash and sudden loss of sound on output.

Broadcasting House is open-plan throughout: great for workflows and collaboration, bad for escaping what will be the largest newsroom in Europe when you just need to get away from it all. Bush House was perfect for this: lots of rooms with actual closeable doors; corridors with a personal touch, containing large poster-photos of inspiring images from whichever language service you happened to have wandered into; and – an often-used, but never misused, comparison – United Nations-type community of people from all over the world with no (visible) tension between them. They simply share a common goal – broadcasting to their various audience for the sole purpose of improving their knowledge of world affairs. Journalists from India and Pakistan, Iraq and Iran, Bosnia and Serbia, south America, east Europe, and anywhere else you can imagine in the world, wander the corridors and eat together as one.

I don’t know if that community feel will be kept once the move to W1 is complete. I certainly hope it will be, but when the sanctuary and isolation (from the rest of the corporation) of Bush House is no longer there, and the World Service is competing for budget, space, studios and facilities with the rest of the BBC, I fear it will be much more difficult to consider Broadcasting House ‘home’ in the same way Bush has been for 70 years.

Leave a reply - Posted: 2nd March 2012, 6:51pm - Category: World Service Radio, World Service TV

Video killed the radio… star?

Whoa. I’ve done it again. Nearly 5 months since my last posting. I have a good track record in blog abandonment. Apologies.

La Radura villa, near Lucignana, Tuscany, ItalyIn my defence, lots of things have happened in the last six months or so.

In July I got married, then went off for the most fantastic ten days in Italy; the mountainside villa combined with visits to Florence, Pisa, Siena and elsewhere; amazing food and wine; and, of course, perfect company was the best antidote to the hectic Saturday just before.

On our return, it was straight back into life with a bump: we both started new jobs, and my six-month contract with BBC Persian TV, the World Service’s Farsi-language television station.

A whirlwind trip (about 20 hours in total including Eurostar travel) to Paris in October was to cover 2011’s G(irls)20 Conference for the Nike Foundation, who sponsored a debate about the personal development of young women in poorer areas of the world, with a particular emphasis on east Africa.

G(irls)20 Summit at Academie Diplomatique Internationale, ParisComing back absolutely shattered to an early Persian TV shift the day after, my boss came over during some down-time, and asked for a quiet word with me. Uh-oh, I thought, having a flashback to three years earlier when ‘a quiet word’ confirmed that my contract wasn’t going to be renewed. Or maybe I’d screwed up on something that morning and not realised it because I’d needed a couple of matchsticks just to keep my eyes open?

“Just wondering if you’d have any objections to us making you permanent staff?” he asked, in his usual quiet, not-going-to-give-away-anything manner.

“OF COURSE I BLOODY DON’T!” I wanted to scream in the corridors of Egton. It’s only what I’d been working towards for the last five years or so. Permanent contracts in content-making areas of the BBC are like gold-dust, and someone was standing in front of me asking if I had any objections?!

So, six months later with my shiny new contract just around the corner due to start on February 1st, and with two extra-special work requests fulfilled already, I’m looking forward to being a permanent member of staff at the BBC. I’ll be able to pay into a pension and go through regular pension reform processes, see staff numbers reduced through regular redundancy rounds or department mergers, while being criticised daily for my work by certain elements of the press. Yay!

I’m still working on websites in my days off, too, and have recently put together sites for a comedian, a fashion blogger, a musical trio and a shop for homemade skincare products.

As for one of those extra-special work requests? This video (below) shows BBC Persian’s business reporter Amir Paivar standing beside the computer program I coded in order to display live market data, including stock markets, individual companies and currencies depending on what the daily news agenda demands:

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This has been used on-air a number of times since it was coded, in order to graphically demonstrate the ongoing Eurozone crisis, and more recently to show how quickly the US Dollar:Iranian Rial conversion rates raised as sanctions against Iran’s oil exports were considered and, eventually, implemented.

As for the second special request? Far too complicated to go into here – but if you ever need to work out how to have two guests appear in a TV programme, who both need to be translated for the audience, need to hear both each other and the translator’s live translated questions, and the presenter to hear the translator in the studio – I’m your man!

Leave a reply - Posted: 23rd January 2012, 6:25pm - Category: World Service TV