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| Guided
tour - Breakfast television |
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| Will
Glennon - one of the regular breakfast presenters |
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Will
Glennon fronting one of the regional inserts into BBC Breakfast
News
He looks cool, calm and collected.
But what really goes on behind the scenes? |
BBC Bristol
Radio Bristol
BBC Wiltshire
Radio Swindon
Radio Wiltshire
BBC Gloucestershire
Radio Gloucestershire
BBC Somerset
Somerset Sound
Have
you ever wondered
what goes on behind the cameras?
Find out in our tour of the newsroom and studios.
Eenjoy
one of our live views across the West in
our webcams section
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It
may be 6.30am but presenter Will Glennon has been in since 5am.
He uses this time to prepare the six bulletins you see on the
hour and half hour between 6.30 and 9am.
As well as checking his scripts, and his make-up, Will rings
around the emergency services' information banks to check if
anything newsworthy has happened overnight.
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| Director
Antony Ward in the breakfast control room |
You quite often hear the presenter referring to the 'Breakfast
team'. Not a cast of thousands - there are just three of them.
The director looks after everything you see and hear on your
television.
He or she is responsible for making sure all the right pictures
are played-out from our transmission server.
They also ensure the bulletin is timed to the second - we cannot
be under or over time - and call up the appropriate name captions,
weather forecasts and travel reports.
Most importantly, it's their job to get the teas in at 7.30!
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| Will's
view of the studio. |
In the studio, Will has three cameras for company. He can hear
the director's count via his earpiece - you can just see the
white cable running up the back of his jacket.
He also has a small microphone pinned to his jacket so we can
hear him. He's truly wired for sound.
Built into the desk is a computer where the running order (the
order of the stories) is displayed - and changed if necessary
- and a small monitor to show what is going out.
If you wonder how the newscasters remember all their words -
it's simple - they have a prompter on each camera.
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| No
need to remember your lines! |
The prompter works by taking the script information from the
newsroom computer system and turns it in to words on a small
TV screen underneath the lens.
There is a piece of glass at 45 degrees across the front of
the lens so the camera can see out without seeing the scrolling
text, and the presenter sees a reflection of the words on the
glass.
The speed the words move at are either controlled by a foot-pedal
operated by the presenter or by a broadcast assistant.
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| The bulletins are timed to
the second |
The director operates a small vision and sound mixer which feeds
the transmitters directly. This mixer is much smaller and less
complicated than its bigger brother in the main TV control room.
The bulletins have to be timed to the second because we have
a fixed time slot to fill.
By using a stopwatch and other electronic timers we know how
much time is left and can provide a count into the presenter's
ear.
That's how we get the bulletins to always finish on time. |
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