"Due to technical problems..." - Stuart Pinfold's Blog

So, I started my new job on Tuesday, as a Studio Manager at World Service Africa and Middle-East.

I’ve spent Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in Bush House, shadowing existing SMs doing their job, with me looking over their shoulder and asking questions. I’ve also edited a 15-minute package on Kate Bush to brush-up my audio editing skills.

Today, I’m in the new Egton Wing in Broadcasting House, the home of the Arabic service (so excuse any typos in this post – this keyboard had both Arabic and English character sets). It’s also the first time I’ve driven a programme as an SM (with someone watching over my shoulder!), firstly for a bit of the Arabic Breakfast radio programme, and second for the lunchtime BBC Xtra programme. Three minutes into the programme, after the 5-minute news bulletin and the opening menu, I played the first item in the playlist on Radioman.

It was about one minute into this piece that a message popped up on screen: Network connection lost.

Radioman is clever enough to cache all audio when the playlist is loaded onto the local computer, so the audio could continue playing as normal. The person watching me told me not to worry, so I carried on. Three minutes or so later, I looked at the remaining time on the 8-minute piece: 7 minutes, 34 seconds.

Eh?

Turns out the network connection being lost made Radioman stop counting down the audio, so we had no idea when it was going to finish. Suspecting we shouldn’t just ignore the error message, we called the support team, and put into place the backup plan – playing audio via a simple player.

Fearing the curse of the newbie, I sat back and left my colleague to take over.

Turns out though, it wasn’t me. On the day I made my first programme as an SM, the entire BBC London Radioman network has gone down.

It’s going to be an interesting day of learning…