Pop Shield

It’s 1915 on a Wednesday evening and I close the faders on the Nations Favourite and scamper over to The Mothership. “You’re in the wrong building!” jests Colin as I present my pass at reception. “So are you!” comes my reply. I head to 70A where I have a seemingly innocuous booking on ABC1 which involves indenting speech miss for a round table discussion programmed Conundrum.

It is ages since I’ve done this one and it feels comfy yet formal. I chat with Philip about his trip to China and about the auto recorder. We test miss and feeds to the headphones and set up the repeat recording and plug in Mark’s ancient TV earpiece thing. In the control room, I notice the studio talkback button looks faulty and phone the maintenance engineers to ask two of them to come and fix it later. Journalist, newsreader and presenter Mark Albike comes in and brandishes crisps at me, this is his normal Wednesday evening routine. Off mic/camera, come to think of it, I have never once seen this man without a bag of crisps in his hands.

It is only once Mark is settled in his seat with one minute to go to the live trail that he comments that he can hear everything happening in the cubicle in his headpiece. Not good. We hush the gathered troops for the trail. Once that’s past, we have fifteen minutes until on air to set about fixing the talkback. We reset the desk with no effect – beyond having to dial in a shed load of mic settings again. I call the maintenance engineers back and Andy and his colleague appears. He stabs at the talkback key with a screwdriver to no avail. I unplug the talkback mic and Phillip wiggles the loudspeaker DIM knob. The talkback resets itself. Phew. As soon as the programme is safely on air, I trot off into the winter darkness.