Rotary Visit to BBC Bristol: 15 December

Visit to BBC Bristol  15 December 2012

A group of Rotarians, wives and family, seventeen in all, visited the radio and television studios of BBC Bristol on Saturday 15 December. Having gone through the usual security and been issued with identity tags our two lady guides took us through an excellent and very well presented tour of the complex.

They explained that at Bristol the BBC did not have extensive studios for drama and other indoor productions, rather they are a center of excellence for the production of many outdoor natural history programmes such as Autumn Watch, the recent series on the Arctic and many others. They do have news studios for both television and radio so Points West, the local TV news programme and BBC Radio Bristol are produced and transmitted direct from their studios. 

Our tour started in the news room where all the reporters for both TV and radio are based and news clips are editied. This was followed by the BBC Bristol radio studio, where we were shown all the equipment the newsreaders and other presenters had to cope with at the same time as transmitting live news. It suddenly made us appreciate there is more to being a newsreader than reading the news. 

Then it was on to the Points West TV studio with all the cameras, cables and seemingly hundreds of lights and an explanation of how it all works "on the night". The mysteries of the green curtain for the weather presenters was revealed, including the fact that whilst the news is all on the autocue the weather presenter has to make it up live, and their 'slot' time can vary considerably, depending on the length of the preceding news. 

If we had thought that the radio studio had been complicated all the controls and screen of the TV production room soon changed that. Our guides soon had us sitting at the desk and gave us descriptions of what each one of the eight people in the production team do, from the autocue person through to the director. The picture shows the full team.

Our final visit was to a training studio where we produced our own news programme, sports report and weather forecast. Our newsreaders, Jenny Newson and Gerry Hooper started with a report of a purple lobster taking up residence before handing over to our sports reporters Jeremy Zabell and Martin Luxford. Paul Cowan our weather man then made an excellent attempt to present the weather. Nesta Waine and Alison Zabell completed the team by operating the autocue and inserting newsclips.  This real life production was a great end to an entertaining and informative visit. Thanks to Peter Newson for all the organisation.

More photgraphs of the event below, including our senior vice president 'on the telly'