Last week I was on a bit of a downer after The Children's
Media Conference. For a month and a half leading up to it I've had back to back
work lined up but nothing set in my diary for afterwards so it got to Thursday
and after sending masses and masses of emails all week to people chasing up
potential work with no results I was feeling slightly sorry for myself. I watched the lunchtime showing of Neighbours and jumped into the shower before sitting down in front of the laptop once more to pour over all the jobs websites again
when two exciting things happened...my phone rang and I got offered a two day
job at the end of this week working on Heston Blumenthal's upcoming series then
an hour later my phone rang for a second time, this time from a lady at BBC
Learning practically begging me to work on Blue Peter's Big Olympic Tour at the
weekend which would involve me hopping on a coach with the rest of the BBC
Learning crew the very next morning to make our way down to Bournemouth for the
big event on Saturday.
I was meant to be going down to see my dad at the weekend in
Gloucestershire but obviously you don't turn down such offers (even if they're
not paying you for your services) so after doing a bit
of grovelling to my dear papa and conveniently forgetting to mention
that I was doing this as a labour of love I was officially added to the call
sheet which consequently has the Blue Peter ship on the bottom of every page
which I got a slightly excited about. Just to put my excitement into context,
Blue Peter and Newsround are the two programmes that made me decide that I
wanted a career in television in the first place. I was a classic CBBC child
growing up and my ultimate goal has always been to one day work on either of
those two flagship programmes so it's kind of a big deal for me.
On Friday morning I
shoved a few things in a bag and made my way to Manchester Piccadilly Station
which is where the coach was departing from, I introduced myself briefly to the few people I had spoken to on the phone the night before and we all set off on a six hour
coach trip down to the south coast. As luck would have it, the girl who I met
first and sat next to on the coach was put into the same hotel room as me so when we
arrived we dumped our stuff and instantly headed towards the beach.
After seeing some rather exciting looking beach huts, paying a grand total of 60 pence for the privilege of walking along the
pier (a season ticket cost a whole pound) and watching Twist and Pulse prancing
around a stage as the warm up act before the Olympic Torch got there, we
decided to get back to our hotel room before heading out to meet the rest of
the BBC Learning gang for a lovely meal at Ask where we got to meet the rest of
the team properly. Much food and a complimentary glass of wine later, one of
the team announced that it was 11.30 already and that maybe we should all go to
bed soon seeing as we had a taxi coming to pick us up at 6:50 the next morning
to take us to location.
For those of you who don't watch Blue Peter and have never
heard of the Big Olympic Tour (shame on you) I shall fill you in on what
goes on during the day...The Blue Peter team go to a different location every
week following the Olympic Torch around the country, there's a live outside
broadcast that happens at 9am which gets shown on the CBBC Channel and BBC2.
Then for the rest of the day there are various events dotted around a field
that tie in with the Olympics which is where I came in. I was located in a tent
called the My Sports Report tent, which was set up as a little mock studio and
aimed to teach the general public about chroma key technology (more commonly
known as green screen). The kiddies could try their hand
at operating one of the cameras or the vision mixer or they could get
on stage and dress up as an Olympian or be a co-presenter. We had some rather
interesting kids on stage during the course of the day, one of the
co-presenters was the most adorable three year old who as soon as she sat down
grabbed the mic and started rambling on about being a ballerina. The biggest
challenge was getting the children to form a nice orderly queue and trying
to persuade them that being behind the camera or on the vision mixer
was just as fun and important in the television making process as being the
guest star.
Half way through the day, I accidentally exposed my Blue
Peter ship tramp stamp tattoo to the rest of my little team and they were
trying to persuade me that it would be a good idea to march over to
Barney Harwood (he's one of the presenters) and expose my back to him. I was
highly reluctant despite everybody reassuring me that he wouldn't think I'm a
crazy mad woman but fortunately for him, the opportunity didn't arise. Besides
which I was too excited about wearing my totally beautiful high viz jacket and
didn't want to have to pull it up for no good reason.
All too soon it was time to hop back on the bus and make our
way back up to Salford. It was a great honour to work on a Blue Peter event and
with the BBC Learning team and I had a lot of fun doing it but my story doesn't
end just yet which is where we skip forward to the following Monday.
My friend
has come up for the week and my flatmate has taken some time off work as well. They
are both highly nerdy boys and on the bus back to Salford on Saturday I caught
wind of the Batmobile making an appearance on the Piazza at
MediaCity. With all three of us free to do whatever we like for a week, I
dragged them both over there yesterday morning to marvel at it but I wasn't
counting on Blue Peter recording a little piece for this week's show. Barney
was standing around in the rain right next to this wondrous piece of machinery
and I thought I would take the opportunity to do the thing that I was too chicken
to do at the weekend. I walked up to him, apologised for interrupting
and launched into an abbreviated version of the
story you've just read...then I turned around quickly and flashed my
back at him. I'm guessing he was slightly in awe because he asked to take a
picture of it which later appeared on twitter. What a result!
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| Barney's reaction after taking a photo of the best tattoo he's ever likely to see. |
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