A very early Sunday AM
On Sunday I was up at 4.45 and standing outside waiting for my BBC car (oh yes!) as several drunken undergraduates were stumbling back from the Undercroft Bar.
Work starts at 6am on a Sunday and everyone arrives promptly dressed in their Sunday best clutching a goblet of coffee and all the papers. We go straight into a meeting- What stories have broken overnight? Have any angles not been covered? Are the cars ordered for guests... and are the drivers awake? Have we remembered to get soya milk for the foreign secretary?
The three hours before the programme fly past- everything is timed like clockwork and it is truly amazing how the simple things (like forgetting to order soya milk) can be fatal.
I began by meeting the paper reviewers- Kevin Maguire and Sarah Sands. We went through the papers and make sure they had a good balance of stories between them and a light hearted tale to finish with. I then had the incredibly important task of drawing around each story in the trade mark red pen.
I then met David Davies found him some coffee "with as much sugar as will dissolve" and went to check that Lesley Phillips (a lovely man, very warm and funny) had found his way into make-up. I then prepared the dressing room for the arrival of Margaret Beckett and her extensive entourage. There were a lot of bodyguards lurking around in unexpected places carrying very large retro-style mobile phones.
The foreign Secretary arrived once the programme was on air, escorted by her husband Leo. Sunday AM had spent a day last week shadowing Beckett and made a short 'day in the life film' which was aired before her live interview.
At the end of the programme we all went for a big BBC breakfast (which apparently was actually slightly smaller than last week following the license fee settlement). Still, sitting at the breakfast table with the foreign secretary, shadow cabinet member, world famous actor and highly admired journalists as I tucked into a poached egg was quite memorable Sunday morning.
2 comments:
I chose this post randomly just to tell you how engaging this blog of yours is.
I'm hooked.
I didn't see all the item. I caught the tail end of the VT, but it was a fascinating disco ( you'll know what that term means now) between Yasmin and Iain.
Well done and I have no doubt that the praise the editor will get from opening up an "obscure" area for appraisal will have some of its shine rub on you.
Only question I want to know is whether you filmed something behind the scene - for your self as well.
Political campaigners/bloggers in the US where it's all rather dynamic would want to know who was behind this.. and before long you could find yourself involved in something over there.
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