best class vote?

[Irma2]

im a riter.

[Medea Fleecestealer]

I'd forgotten that Defiler could keep track for you, but then I've only recently actually LOOKED at the individual character possibilities of the program. Takes me a while, but I'll get there eventually!

[Medea Fleecestealer]

What do you rite? Sorry, write, Irma2?

[Irma2]

Television scripts, print media articles, annual reports, corporate communications, marketing bumph mostly.

[Medea Fleecestealer]

I didn't write them, but I've pounded out (manual typewriters at the beginning) many radio scripts in my younger days at BBC Radio. Greatest boon from the introduction of computers for the harried typist - cut and paste! Really makes a difference when you're working to a deadline and (hoorah!) don't have to retype a whole page just because a couple of sentences need to be put somewhere else on the page or, heaven forbid, moved to another one necessitating two pages of retyping. Those were the days.

[Irma2]

Cool. I remember the days of IBM golf-ball typewriters. The client wants one word changed on the page - retype the whole page. Urgh. My first WP was WordStar. What a boon to be able to correct, hit "Print" and give them a new draft.

[Medea Fleecestealer]

Never used one of those, though I have seen them over the years, but ours were the good old standard ones. Then eventually electric, electronic and only then did we get computers; Compaq was our first. With two live shows being scripted on the same day (one for Friday evening and one for Saturday morning) things could be a bit hectic at times on the old machines, especially as we used to use very thin paper with carbon sheets inbetween so we could do multiple copies at once (no quick and easy access to a photocopier then either). They were all attached together with a tear off strip at the top so you could separate the pages and you got 5 copies in all. And, of course, very difficult to correct if you made a typing mistake. I always had the bottom copy for my timing part of the job because it was the fuzziest one to read.

[Irma2]

Heh, broadcasting was a blast back then. In the 80s, we used to broadcast film directly to air via telecine. And a lot of it was 'live'. One of my colleagues took his half-hour sports programme to telecine for live broadcast and, as they were putting it onto the projector, the bobbin in the middle of the film reel fell out. It was quite a palaver to get it back in and there wasn't time. So my mate put his wrist through the middle of the reel as a makeshift 'bobbin' and stood next to the projector, feeding the film off the reel by hand for the entirety of the broadcast.

Video wasn't any better. At the time, they worked with gigantic 2-inch video spools that weighed about twenty pounds each. They ran under tension and, when loading the reel onto a player, the last step was to hit the prep button where the machine would take up the slack and set the correct tension with an unnerving CLUCK sound. Everybody would hold thumbs that the jolt wouldn't rip the tape - which often happened just as you were ready to go on air.

Nowadays many broadcast off DVD and it won't be long before they're all broadcasting off solid state memory chip. Already there are cameras with no moving parts and writing directly to chip. Originally, a 400 foot roll of 16mm film would give you around ten minutes of recording time and was a fairly bulky item. Now you're getting something like 270 hours from a small chip, heh.

[Medea Fleecestealer]

Yes, times have changed a lot. Not sure how much radio has changed since I left which was early 90's, they're probably using rewriteable discs for recordings these days instead of tape. Reporters only occasionally took out cassette recorders to record their material on; mostly they used Uhers so we didn't have the hassle of converting cassettes to tape format.

Could be wearing though, especially if we had a live OB for a programme. I remember we did one for "Breakaway" down at a holiday camp in Devon. Everyone else went down on the Thursday to start gathering material on the Friday, but I had to stay in London to do the script for our other programme "Going Places" for Friday evening's broadcast. Then I got the train down to Devon to the camp, to fall pretty much straight into bed as it was about 11pm by that time. Up at 5am next morning to find somewhere/somehow to type up the script, did the OB live and then packed up and got the train back to London.

Most panic though was when we did "Going Places" from one of the new HMS navy vessels. Played the sig tune, then I was handed the tape to keep safe. "Don't need that again," I thought and went and placed it in my bag to make sure it didn't get lost. Programme went well and then coming up on 5 minutes to the end of the programme I suddenly realised I needed the sig tune tape again. Just a minor problem; it was at the other end of the ship in my bag! Mad dash from one end to other and back again to get it, but I was in time and didn't cause a problem. Phew! Didn't make that mistake again I can tell you. No idea why my brain suddenly decided we only played the sig tune once, but there we are, it did and nearly caused a mix-up.

[Irma2]

Heh, my most famous brain lapse was while I was editing the local police show. I did the segment where they reconstructed a crime and appealed to the public for help/eyewitnesses. Every Tuesday morning, I'd edit the programme, have it final mixed and then drop it off at telecine in preparation for the evening's broadcast. In those days, I lived in an apartment about 4km away from the broadcaster. I usually caught the bus to and from work but occasionally walked if I was in the mood and the weather was good.

On one Tuesday evening, I get home and start preparing dinner. Then suddenly it struck me - for some inexplicable reason, I'd left the film in my editing room instead of handing it in for broadcast. I RAN all the way to the broadcaster (no buses at that time of night) and got the film to telecine with about five minutes to spare before broadcast. They didn't even have time to clean it. Luckily I was quite meticulous about wiping china marker marks off the film before taking it to mix so it was in a reasonably broadcastable state.

The producer was more than a bit cheesed off because they'd already found replacement material and had the studio presenter script and present it during rehearsals, when they realised that the weekly film segment wasn't going to materialise. Now they had to shuffle everything around again and revert to the original script. Anyhow, it all went off OK. Catastrophe averted although I still don't know why I had such a brain fart.