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.
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.
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.