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It all started in the summer of 2007. I was a second year student studying Journalism at the University of Chester. My main aim in life was to become a Newsround presenter (this has since changed when I came to the realisation that my mind turns to mush as soon as there's a camera pointing in my direction). As part of my university course it was required for me to undergo a work experience placement. Whilst most of my fellow course mates let the university find mind numbingly dull places for them to waste six weeks of their life contemplating why they had ever been born, I went straight to the top and applied to do work experience for CBBC.
When I got the call saying that they would love to have me for a month down at Television Centre to work on a programme called Do Something Different (DSD for short) it was possibly the greatest feeling in the world. I was off on the most exciting adventure ever and going to be sharing corridors with the likes of Konnie Huq, Chris Jarvis and Lizo Mzimba in the East Tower (the former home of BBC Children's). The first thing that popped into my head when I emerged from the White City tube station was "it looks exactly like it did on Live and Kicking". This was my dream and I was well and truly living it! I spent the happiest month of my life there. It really was the most fantastic working environment I've ever experienced, everyone was so wonderful, friendly, and enthusiastic about their job, which after temping for many years you quickly come to realise that this is not the norm with most work places. On my last day, the team brought me chocolates and a card, something that I wasn't expecting and something that they assured me they didn't do for everyone.
During this month I came to the definite conclusion that I had made the right decision about aiming for a career in broadcast media. At the time my future career path to happiness went exactly along the lines of: go back to Chester, finish my degree, get a job with the BBC soon afterwards where I would live happily ever after for the rest of my working life. That was the plan and I completed the first part of it at least, I graduated in 2008 with a shiny 2:2. However during the time it took for me to finish uni, the BBC had announced that they were going to be moving out of Television Centre and relocating a large selection of their departments to Salford. This was fantastic news I thought, not only will I get a job with the BBC but I don't even have to move down to London for it.
So I waited and waited and waited some more and in the meantime I was applying for jobs all over the country. Eventually I received an email from the BBC inviting me to an interview up in Glasgow for their Runner Talent Pool so I caught the train up two days early and made a long weekend out of it. I visited friends and family that I don't often get the chance to see and then trundled along to Pacific Quay to await my doom. The interview was set up in two sections, there was a group exercise with two other candidates (both of whom, I discovered whilst chatting to them in the reception, had far more experience than I had) where we had to create a schedule for two hypothetical runners during the course of a day from a hypothetical brief that covered a whole three sides of A4. We had to sit in silence for half an hour making notes and then have a group discussion afterwards to bounce ideas off each other so we could come up with an effective schedule between the three of us. We also had an adjudicator sitting in the corner of the room to watch over us writing her own notes about our performances. For all intents and purposes, it was the most stomach churning exam situation ever. I am a very practical person, I love keeping myself busy and being at the hub of a problem in the real working world. In a normal working environment I would be able to come up with a load of useful and practical suggestions, however sitting there in silence with the ticking of my watch boring into my brain, it was impossible to focus. This meant that when it came to the group discussion I had little to offer and tried to compensate by encouraging and praising the other two (they give you brownie points for that). When I got feedback from this interview about a month later they told me that I should pay more attention to briefs and that I needed to contribute more to the group discussion. However (they were obviously really struggling to find something positive to say about my performance) I was the only person who remembered to factor in a lunch break for the runners.
The interview wasn't much better, if was full of "give examples of when" questions and it seemed to go on forever. The only question I felt I gave a reasonable answer to was “You’re driving Edith Bowman to the studio along the motorway. You’re already running behind schedule but then you get a flat tyre. Edith wants to get out of the car and hitchhike to the studio. What do you do?”
That evening I went back to my uncle's house and drank lots of whiskey. A few days later I stopped beating myself up about what an incompetent fool I was and put it down to experience. The main thing I learned from the ordeal was that BBC interviews were just as long winded and ridiculous as the application forms.
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