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Today in Norwich
by Mark Coles
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I was at the doctors last week. "Take it easy for a while" she said "keep your hours down and try not to do anything too stressful".
Four days later, I was sat in the council chamber at Norwich City Council presenting Saturday's Today programme in front of a live audience and several million listeners at home. I'm sure its not what my doctor had in mind for the start of the Bank holiday weekend. It was a bit like walking into the lion's den really.
We're in the middle of the silly season. We normally fill airtime in August by chasing UFOs, corn circles, squirrels that mate with rats or count songbirds in the back garden. This year, we've ridiculed Norwich City Council over a series of what, on the surface, seem like daft policy decisions. They banned bouncy castles and window boxes on health and safety grounds, painted double yellow lines that were just 11 inches long on their roads and planned to cut down horse chestnut trees to stop children collecting conkers.
In the silly season, it doesn't come much sillier. When some bright spark came up with the idea of bringing Saturday's programme from Norwich City Council it seemed like the right thing to do. Of course we didn't really expect them to say yes - or agree to it so quickly. All of a sudden producers Richard and Ed, and researchers Lisa and Mark were landed with a logistical and technical nightmare - as well as a programme to sort out. I was an after-thought. With John Humphrys unable to present as planned, this being the silly season, I was drafted in as a last minute replacement.
On Friday - the hottest day of the year so far - we all met up at Liverpool St Station and lugging computers, a printer, fax, recording equipment, stationery and a change of clothing caught the train to "nutty Norwich" as its known in the tabloid press.
Once there, I ran round the city putting a package together while the rest of the team and technicians, John and Michael, set about transforming City Hall into a makeshift Today studio. ISDN lines had to be installed, there were cables everywhere running from Outside Broadcast vans outside up into the council chamber on the first floor. The council's press office became the programme production office and by night time it was finally complete - we were confident we could broadcast from there in the morning.
After just four hours sleep we were back in again. That's when things began to go wrong. With just one computer between us - with scripts,briefs and running orders still to be written, time was of the essence. It didn't help when someone accidentally disconnected a cable and severed our ENPS (electronic news production system) link. Nice one. To make matters worse, our antiquated printer chose Saturday morning to throw a wobbly and print everything in numbers and symbols rather than anything readable. When, with 45 minutes to go, the technical crew reported a power failure in one of the Outside Broadcast vans we feared the worst. But by now the audience had arrived and were taking their seats. The show had to go on.
Sports presenter and admirable warm-up man Gary Richardson began entertaining the audience with his sporting anecdotes. Thanks to Jim at Radio Norfolk the morning's papers arrived on time and with the power failure repaired - but with scripts only for the first half hour of the programme - we went on air. It was only while Jim Naughtie back in London was doing the first item that I realised quite what I'd let myself in for. Here I was, on my own in the council chamber of a council we'd ridiculed all summer, surrounded by Norwich residents - some of whom weren't entirely happy that we'd picked on their fair city. My studio producer, on whom you depend and normally have eye contact with through a glass partition was actually sat in a van out in the road, one floor down hundreds of yards away. When the talk back to him failed completely for twenty minutes, I felt marooned.
As for the programme, Norwich council took a bit of a bashing and they sportingly bashed us back when we made a mistake. Norfolk's deputy chief constable popped in to defend policing of rural areas, and everything else went smoothly thanks largely to the hard work and dedication of all those involved - including Norwich City Council without whom none of this would have been possible. Next silly season, we've promised to pick on someone else.
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Mark Coles |
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The offending conkers |
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Very short lines |
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Norwich Market |
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Sound check at the broadcast |
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