91Èȱ¬

'Just where should the axe fall and what will the effect be?' is the hot topic for Spending Review: The Look North Debate which airs Thursday September 9 at 2235 on 91Èȱ¬1.

The programme includes a league table of how resilient different places in England would be to cuts in public spending. Our region doesn't come out terribly well. You can read the results here and Richard Moss has a blog about reaction in Middlesbrough, the town that came bottom out of the whole country.

You'll get the see the debate tonight, but as you know I like to give you a peek behind the scenes of what I get up to. So for the techy and not so, here's what went into getting the 50 minute show on air.

We recorded the programme on Tuesday at .

It's a brand spanking new building. Appropriately enough it was one of the last to be completed before the new government axed the Building Schools for the Future programme.

The airy main hall made a fantastic venue for our special set. To make sure we could get all the angles we needed on our 50 strong audience we needed five cameras. This is actually more than we use for Look North each night.

If I put a foot wrong I'll literally be getting an earful off the director. While conducting the debate I'll have a constant stream of instructions being fed into my right ear. Alan, the director, calls the shots as he selects which camera to use.

It all needs to be choreographed so that I don't stand in front of a contributor and block the camera.

Only by rehearsing using some pupils as stand-ins can we be sure it will all run smoothly when we're doing it for real.

On top of that Michael, the producer, will be telling me in my earpiece to keep on a particular subject or move on. All the while I'm trying to concentrate with my other ear on what the member of the audience is saying. You need two brains!

Actually the biggest challenge before the rehearsal is mind-mapping the audience. I'll have to be able to go to any of 25 main speakers and know their name, what they do and where they are from in the region.

As long as they take up their pre-allocated seat I'll be able to go to them even though I've never met most of them before.

Everyone needs full concentration. The boom operators, who hold the long arm microphones, have to be quick off the mark to find the next speaker. It's a fine art to be able to pick up the right sound when there's a barney sparking off across the room.

Perhaps the strangest sight was seeing our floor manager get to grips with the only chore of the evening.

The carpet needed a good old clean. Celina's husband who also works on the crew remarked how unusual it was to see her doing the housework. Now I've spilled the beans I fear there could be some domestic trouble ahead!

Before we know it the real audience has arrived and are ushered in to place. As when I helped out my colleagues on Radio 4's Any Questions we get someone on to warm up the audience. In our case it's to get them comfortable in front of the moving cameras and microphones.

One of my 91Èȱ¬ bosses does the honours and reveals how in his early days he was a . You learn something new every day.

As for the debate itself I was so busy during the recording I really can't tell you how it all went on screen as I don't get to see the finished result until it airs tonight. My mind is still a bit of a blur. Those two brains I talked about aren't back in synch yet.

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