Pop Shield

Confusion reigned in the theatre this evening when Jill asked me to head out to the auditorium and check the level of the PA during an audience recording of Cleverclogs.

I enter the auditorium, and at that EXACT moment the theatre working lights spontaneously come up and the PA falls silent.

I rush back to the cubicle to report to Jill what is happening and to find out what might be going on. She doesn’t know, and stabs at various lighting state buttons to no avail. I make a series of swift phone calls to the maintenance engineers, the theatre manager, the Broadcast Manager and the facilities manager. The production team begin to panic, asking what’s going on and when it is going to be fixed. The Cleverclogs panel are left stranded on the stage shouting ad libs at the audience for what I am later stunned to find out is nearly half an hour.

Finally, the producer heads out to the audience to brief them on the situation. Bang on cue, the lights go out and the PA comes back on. We can now get on with the rest of the show, which the audience appear to enjoy about five hundred times more than normal. I end up staying extra late filling out reports and sending emails to talk about what happened. There had been problems in the Fire Control Room in isolating the theatre from some fire PA testing. This caused the theatre to enter a fire alert state. Not a barrel of laughs you might say!