 By Sara-Jayne Phillips
As Springwatch prepares for its 5th year I thought I would share with you an insider view of one of my favourite jobs – something I should have done in any one of the last 4 years, especially as I’ve urged other vm’s to write pieces to share with us on the website!
The only reason I’ve actually managed to get around to it now is that I’ve got to talk to a class of 5yr olds about it so I’ve just dug out all my photos. I was not a willing volunteer but being married to the class teacher meant I was under pressure to say yes!
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 I can’t tell you details about this year’s Springwatch as we are moving to Norfolk so there could well be some changes. However, I’m reliably informed that it will be very similar in set up: a very large OB based around a production village of portacabins, trailers, a marquee and a catering truck.
The programme was previously transmitted from a 400acre organic farm on the edge of Dartmoor. With more than 60 hidden cameras (many remote-controlled) and microphones it’s quite a technical headache for the teams who go in early in the season and install all the equipment, including miles of cables which need to be concealed in a manner which does not endanger the lives of humans or wildlife. This year, although in a different location, will be just as ambitious.
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 Separate multi-camera locations, such as Heligan in Cornwall and the Scottish Island of Islay last year, will feed into the main site, giving viewers an incredible insite into the habits and everyday antics of Britain’s wildlife.
Last year the live cameras followed the daily activities of tawny & barn owls, pied flycatchers, squirrels, swallows, hares, otters, pipistrelle bats, badgers, blue tits, great tits, golden eagles, buzzards, wrens, jackdaws, robins, foxes, kingfishers, housemartins, moorhens, pine martens, mice, blackbirds
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 The programme has, over the last 4 yrs, given channel 4’s BB a run for its money with around 4 million viewers. However last year when the shows switched to their late-night format it turned out that it was the wildlife reality TV which Britain preferred. E4 averaged 90,000 viewers while 300,000 switched to Springwatch Nightshift to watch the ASBO-worthy behaviour of Badgers.
Perhaps it’s the fact that Springwatch features sex, murder, cannibalism, attempted gang-rape, vandalism, mating rituals and adultery that pulls in the viewers or perhaps it is, as Bill Oddie says, that “Springwatch has given the green light to people who are not experts to incorporate wildlife into their lives”.
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 As a vm I’m lucky enough to work on many genre of programmes as diverse as Eastenders, Songs of Praise, Question of Sport & Big Brother and I love them all but as a viewer I recommend that from the last week of May to the 2nd week in June you watch the show where, as Executive Producer Tim Scoones said last year, “Big Brother eats Little Brother”!
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 300 Million Viewers and No Dress Run
By Ian Rowan - January 2007
Just as I arrived in Australia, ready for another jungle outing of “I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here”, the phone rang. It was Pierre Cheung from BBC Worldwide in Hong Kong.
He informed me that the BBC had sold a show format to a Chinese broadcaster for the first time and the company in question, Hunan TV, would like to know if I could go to Changsha in central China, as a consultant, to teach their vision mixer how we did it in the UK. The show, called “Just The Two Of Us”, involved celebrity duets performed and transmitted live. Well, the first thing they forgot to mention, until I got there, was that the vision mixer also directs the show – in Chinese of course.
How I laughed. On arrival at Hunan TV, after most people in the street had stared at me, I sat down in a meeting room with the producer, director/vision mixer and the camera crew, and with the aid of my interpreter, I explained what each camera should do for every part of the show. Strangely, everyone seemed to have a first name but no surname. I soon realised that this was because their names were in fact made up.
The Chinese adopt an English name when they deal with westerners, and the interpreter, hired to help me, was called Lucy. Her real name was Yi Hanlu and usually when I called out “Lucy” to get her to translate something, there was no response. This was simply because she had forgotten that her name was Lucy. This was going to be an interesting few days.
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 The studio floor looked similar to TC1 at the BBC, where we had done the UK show. That, however, was where the similarity ended. The gallery resembled a large hotel lobby with fluorescent lighting and no script lights. On questioning the producer about this, it was obvious they didn’t need script lights as they never use scripts ! Instead they attempt to memorise a 2-hour show.
Now this I had to see. The rehearsal was an uphill struggle, having to go through an interpreter for everything (except for camera numbers which I had learned in Chinese) and when I asked what time we had the camera crew until, the producer said “they are always here”.
Essentially, because the whole production process is so inefficient in China, they just keep rehearsing until they have memorised the show. I decided to finish for the day at 10pm and go for a beer, and when I returned in the morning I was told that they had copied everything I showed them and rehearsed until 3am – yes 3am.
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 Some senior people at the station took me to the biggest restaurant in the world, which happens to seat 20 thousand people, then for a drink at the intriguingly titled “Half Past 8 Friend Changing Club”, which is a very loud bar, where you can apparently change your friend for someone more interesting.
Only in China. The next day was spent asking lighting if they could actually get some light on peoples faces as opposed to having all the lights flashing all of the time. At the same time, the two jibs seemed to be doing a good job of demolishing the set, especially the 40-foot jib which was intent on crashing into the upper audience rows. It was going to be like Russian Roulette for anyone sitting up there on the live shows. On the second night, dinner was at The Mongolian Hotpot, where the meal for 3 people came to 25 Yuan, which is Ł1.80. Beer was 7 yuan - about 45p. Apparently, some other people from the TV station had gone to a 'donkey place'. That's not an exotic nightclub, but somewhere you can eat donkey. Of course it is. This is China.
Considering we had now reached the day before the first live show, the team of producers didn’t seem bothered that no-one knew exactly how long the show was supposed to be. I thought it a little odd that the presenter hadn’t rehearsed even once on set by the end of the day, but apparently that was OK because “he is number one presenter in China” and “ all the cameramen know him well”.
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 I'm not sure how that substitutes for actually knowing what you're supposed be doing, but they were breathtakingly unconcerned. The show was expected to get 300 million viewers. I had to leave on the morning of the first live show to return to the UK to do The X Factor Final. This is where an interesting trip turned into a nightmare. I couldn’t see anything out of the taxi windscreen all the way to the airport because of thick fog. I had a domestic flight to Beijing and then an onward connection to London, but suddenly all flights were cancelled because of the weather.
I eventually got to Beijing but it was too late to get an international flight anywhere that day. After spending a couple of hours at Beijing Airport trying to get any flight out of China without success, I faced having to wait until the next day to fly back to the UK, and I made the dreaded phonecall to The X Factor to give them the good news.
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 I’m a Vision Mixer…..Get Me Out Of Here
By Ian Rowan - September 2003
With 32 Cameras, 20 Avid Edit Suites, 10km of Cabling, 3 Helicopters, a crew of 380, and three live shows per day, “I’m a Celebrity….Get Me Out of Here” was a challenge with the added complication of being in the middle of the Australian rainforest.
Getting 380 people into the jungle at different times, and on time, from a multitude of hotels was no mean feat in itself ! The time difference of 9 hours didn’t help the sleeping patterns. The transmission time of 9pm in the UK meant arriving in the jungle at 3.30am and on-air at 6am Aussie time.
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 The induction briefing with the Safety Department was fairly off-putting, as you’re told that everything can potentially kill you – If you think snakes are dangerous, watch out for the funnel-web spiders !
Shortly afterwards a member of the crew caught a funnel-web in the gallery, and at one stage, the Director was standing on his chair during the show because a couple of blood-sucking leeches were making their way towards him. Of course, various toy spiders appeared on the vision mixer during the live shows, thanks to the pranksters in the camera department.
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 The Production Village was mainly made up of large Portacabins, with a marquee for catering. The Gallery compared favourably to any large studio gallery and had twin Sony Vision Mixers – a 7350 for the live shows, and a 7150 providing the 24-hour coverage of the camp. The latter was expertly handled by four Australian Director/Vision Mixers – known as the “Camp Directors” !
The transmission schedule was pretty busy with 1 hour live on ITV1, followed by a half-hour show on ITV2, then another half-hour show back on ITV1 again – with all of 20 seconds between each show ! As we came off air each day I tried to remember not to trip over the many cups of tea I hadn’t had time to drink.
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 Those of us on the Live Tx Crew finished after recording the Celebrity Challenge of the Day at around 10.30am. Luckily the hotel was on a very nice beach, about 45 minutes drive from the location, thanks to Granada TV building several miles of road, replacing a dirt track which would have been somewhat longer and bumpier.
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Life on Air, memoirs of a broadcaster.
Below is an exert from David Attenborough’s very entertaining book, “Life on Air, memoirs of a broadcaster.” The book is a super read and this section just made me laugh. “There were two only two studios in Alexandra Palace. Each had three or, if we were lucky, four cameras. They were the same kind as those that had broadcast the first television pictures back in 1936. Some people maintained that they were, in fact, the very same pieces of equipment.
They were large metal boxes mounted on bicycle wheels and filled with glowing glass valves. Each had only one lens. It is true that you could ask for that lens to be changed to one with a narrower angle – a kind of portrait attachment – but that took about 10 minutes to do and was not normally something that could be tackled during transmission. The picture the cameraman saw was not an electronic one from the camera’s lens but came from a separate optical view-finder attached to the camera’s side. The cameraman viewed this on a ground glass screen, where it appeared upside down and in colour. If the camera got too close to its subject, the electronic picture and the one in his viewfinder did not coincide. That could cause arguments between the cameraman and the producer who was viewing the camera’s electronic output on a monitor up in the control gallery.
Adjustments to a camera’s picture were made by a second operator who sat in a small room alongside the studio. Here the rest of each camera’s bulky electronic guts were fastened on to vertical racks so that any components that failed could be quickly located and replaced. If Racks, as he was known, passed the picture as technically adequate it was fed up to the control gallery and displayed on a monitor.
If you, as a producer, wanted that picture to be transmitted to the public, you had to nominate it out loud. The vision mixer then switched the picture to a preview screen, the senior engineer gave it his final technical approval and the vision mixer, usually a lady of iron nerve, impassive visage and total reliability, a breed of which the BBC seemed to have a limitless supply, would then press the right button and the viewing public would at last see it.
The process was cumbersome, to say the least. The days of the finger-snapping whiz-kid director with hair trigger reactions was still some time off… Hardly surprisingly, there were one or two occasions – to be talked about in the canteen for days – when a director finally lost his nerve and ran from the gallery saying that he could not take the strain any longer, while the programme contributors, unaware of the crisis, continued their performances and the unflappable vision mixer stayed at her post, restoring some kind of coherence to the pictures for the benefit of the public.” Not too much changes eh!
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Looking In On New Zealand by an English Director/VM - Oct 2004 Kia Ora!
By Richard Coventry - Oct 2004
New Zealand, for a bit of background, is found in the Pacific Ocean 1500km East of Australia and is separated from it by the Tasman Sea. It is divided into two landmasses, conveniently called North and South Island respectively. It was first populated around 1200 years ago by Polynesian Sailors (now the ‘indigenous’ Maoris) making Aotearoa, or ‘Land of the long White Cloud’, as they named it, the last major land mass to be settled by humans. New Zealand became part of the British crown in 1840, after the arrival of white European ‘Pakeha’, and the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand’s founding document. Recently there has been a resurgence of Maori pride and consequently a developing of a true national identity and self-confidence, in a move away from British colonialism. Because of its history of colonialism New Zealand, in the most part, can be thought of as a microcosm of British society.
Its land masses add up to greater than that of mainland Britain, yet it has a population about the same in number as Scotland (around four million). The television industry is no different in these terms, and has developed in fairly the same way as that in the UK.
It has seven national terrestrial channels – TV1 and TV2, run by Television New Zealand (TVNZ), TV3, C4 and Maori Television all largely run out of Auckland. Also free to air are Prime and Trackside. Lets take a moment to briefly look at these: TV1 & TV2 (TVNZ) TVNZ was set up in much the same vein as the BBC, it was formerly government owned and funded by a licence fee. Recent years have seen the abolition of the licence fee and a change to advert-based funding. Many of the higher-ranking staff have previously had stints overseas, particularly at the BBC. They also seem to be the source of training and experience of people who have been in the industry for over about 15 years. TV3 & C4 The Canwest media group, who also run many independent radio stations, owns these. TV3 is much the same as ITV, except has fewer locally produced programming and a higher proportion of US-imported shows. C4 is a music channel, much the same as MTV, from whom it also imports shows.
Maori Television The most recently established, only going to air in the last 10 months, is entirely government funded, and as the name states, broadcasts Maori interest shows 90% of them in Te Reo Maori (literally the Voice of Maori). Prime Run by Channel 9 Australia, with all programming coming either from there or on licence from the UK or USA. Despite being ‘first with the news’ at 5.30pm, most people are prepared to wait half an hour. Its one saving grace is that it shows Eastenders! Trackside This is run by the government agency the Totalisator Agency Board (TAB) and shows wall-to-wall horse and dog racing from NZ, Australia and Hong Kong. I’ll mention more on the working of these later.
There is also Sky Television, which works in a similar albeit downsized way to that in the UK. It has 3 Sport channels, Sky 1 (The Simpsons Channel), and the usual bundle of US and UK digital channels, such as Discovery and Sky News Australia. It not only broadcasts on a digital satellite format, but also on UHF, both of which are subscription services. Unlike Isleworth, however, Sky’s facility at Mount Wellington in Auckland is built inside an old factory unit that previously housed a local Auckland channel. It has two studios run from one control room, 5 presentation suites, and two ‘multi-pres’ suites that house the movie channels.
The equipment used in production at Sky is archaic, to say the least. Suite one, the studio control room, uses a GVG 250 composite vision mixer and an Abekas Dveous DVE unit. The monitors are of all shapes and sizes (and often colours!) The studio has five cameras, a mix of Hitachi multi-core and triax. At Sky they produce a daily sports news show ‘Sport 365’, which makes extensive use of the ‘Dalet’ server system, which is both powerful and unreliable (often at the same time).
The other main uses are to host Australian feeds of Rugby League games, and to record the Maori Television weekly sport show ‘Nga Hau Tipua’. Maori Television does have its own facility, with a small studio, which is well equipped for its size. The vision desk is a brand new Grass Valley Zodiac, with 3 ME banks, a still store, built in DVE and 4 DSKs. The studio is kitted out with five Ikegami triax cameras, one digital RF camera and two single-chip minicams. Here they make a nightly news programme, based heavily around the ‘News Cue’ server, which I have found to have a ‘lower-end’ feel to it. It operates on the windows platform, and is perhaps targeted at people with less training or experience. Oddly here the server is triggered by the vision mixer from the macro bus, rather than the PA (or TPA or DA, depending who you work for).
They also use the studio for a live weekly music show, with live acts and music promos. TVNZ are much like the BBC in that they rely mainly on their own pool of technical staff to crew their productions, and as such, I haven’t been employed by them, although I am aware that their main news studio suite has recently been refurbished and re-equipped with the very nice looking Sony 8000 series vision mixer. I have yet only had experience with the 2000, 6000, and 7000 series, but they seem very excited about it down there, and I have to say their set-up does look very nice! They are also particularly excited by the introduction of remotely operated cameras on pedestals, which can be fully controlled from the control room. Needless to say they are happy because it cuts down on the number of camera operators required – one person can control four at once- not because they can freak the viewers out by making them ‘dance’ on the close of the six o’clock news!
My main field of interest is in the Outside Broadcast industry, and this is where I can see tangible differences in the way things are done over here as compared to back in the UK. The first thing to notice is because the economy here is much smaller; the OB market is also reduced in terms of the number of service providers. There are 3 OB firms: Firstly ‘Moving Pictures’, the OB arm of TVNZ (essentially like BBC Resources). They provide facilities to TNVZ OBs but are generally too expensive for anyone else. Secondly On Site Broadcasting (OSB), which operates in New Zealand and Australia and covers in the region of 80% of all outside broadcasting that isn’t horseracing and has the contract for all of Sky’s OB work.
They have four trucks with three based in the North and one in the South Island. Their units are very new and relatively up to date. They predominantly use Sony 950 studio cameras and run both triax and fibres. The third OB supplier is a bit of an anomaly – The New Zealand Racing Board (NZRB) is a government owned agency that runs a series of offices around the country each with its own OB facility to cover horse and dog racing in their respective areas. This is then broadcast in state controlled betting shops (TAB offices) on their own channel ‘Trackside’.
They run smaller OB units with limited facilities and are currently in the process of selling their fleet to OSB and outsourcing them back from them post-renovation. As I stated, a government owned business! The NZRB’s unit are coming to the end of their useable life and again have a composite vision path, mostly with GVG100 type mixing desks, although the Auckland based truck has been upgraded to a Sony DVS2000. The main difference I have noticed in the OB arm is that no matter how small the OB or budget (with the exception of the NZRB) you do not find a Director who will mix his or her own shots. I find this rather odd. Back in the UK, I directed and mixed Premiership football amongst other things, and I often came across Director/Vision Mixers, not restricted to sports programming.
This state of affairs is sometimes a blessing in disguise. On the one hand, it means more vision mixing work is available in a relatively small market, but on the other hand there have been many occasions, where the production was relatively simple, that the director would have little else to think about other than call shots. This leads to a very restrictive day for the vision switcher, and often frustrated directing – the division of labour can go so far as to leave people with very little to do.
That said, it does mean that the relatively small pool of vision mixers on the Sky rotation, for example, have virtually cornered the market. This is especially the case in the OSB trucks that are installed with Grass Valley Kalypsos, something the most competent Director is easily daunted by. All in all, I have found the New Zealand television industry to be much smaller in size (in terms of number of productions), budget and scale than its UK equivalent. Things over here cost more than back home, mainly because of a lack of economies of scale, and because of a weak dollar. While clients can expect the same quality of production, they haven’t the cash to spend on the high-end jobs.
At the Super 12 Rugby (of similar profile here as the Premiership football in England) you won’t find a separate VT truck, and where there are 20 camera operators at Old Trafford, there’ll only be room for 12 at Eden Park. Sky employ one full time vision mixer and have a Technical Director who can cover occasional shifts. Add two freelancers and they can pretty much tie up the vast majority of the rest of the work both in studio and on location. This turns the industry into a very closed shop, you do see the same people wherever you go, and consequently it is harder to break in and make a living. On the plus side, despite not getting paid as much, you never have to wait more than a fortnight to get a cheque!
Despite the slim nature of the industry, everyone is kept smiling by the setting. Called ‘Godzone’ by the locals, once you get outside of Auckland, and down to the South Island, you are blessed by some of the most stunning scenery and wildlife anywhere on Earth, home to Lord of the Rings and The Last Samurai, to name just two. Even Wellington Airport has a sign reading “Welcome to Middle-earth”. It’s a tough balance, but it’s easy to understand why the Maoris, then Europeans decided to make it their home.
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