FUTURES
RESEARCH
9172 – Television and Radio
As I have described elsewhere, I have had a lengthy contact with television; first as the brand manager responsible for commercials being produced and latterly at the University as the Course Team Chair responsible for the documentaries being produced by the BBC. As the latter were produced as a joint effort, and my colleague in social sciences was much more experienced in interviewing, I was relegated to more of a back seat on those.
My main career on television, in front of the camera rather than behind it, came though when we launched the Futures Observatory. We managed to get remarkably good coverage for this launch and I appeared on a number of television and radio programmes. In terms of television, the most important at the time was appearing on the morning news programme from the BBC. It was quite an experience being filmed at the Greenwich Observatory, the BBC always seem to worry more about the background than the person or content. But, not least, it was enjoyable being at the focus of all the attention of the visitors to the Observatory watching the BBC crew filming. I also did a couple of other announcements, in the Sky News studio and another for a business programme. I also did an interview, at home, for Canadian television and a couple of programmes for an Australian business television programme.
The biggest coverage, though, came later; with an appearance on a late afternoon/early evening programme being run by Lowry Turner, who was trying to inject more serious material into these. This, hour-long, programme -- one of those she made then -- looked at the future. It was quite an experience, since it was in one of BBC's largest studios with a six camera set-up; and Ian Pearson and I were wearing radio mikes for our job of commenting on the main issues.
Most of my work, though, was in terms of roundtable discussions on radio. I enjoyed these, since the other participants were usually very interesting people and the interviewer was usually more than competent. Normally the half hour or so went by very quickly and some very interesting things were said. Typically, they were live.
I also did a reasonable number of one-to-one interviews, usually down the line. Occasionally these were on my own telephone, but most used the local radio station in Luton and where they were sent down an ISDN line. These, again, were good fun -- though they rarely lasted more than ten minutes. Among them I was maneuvered into one session with a 'shock jock'. This was when I was promoting the idea of the 'women's century' and, although I didn't know it at the time, the shock jock was trying to destroy me for this. Fortunately I spent most of the time agreeing with the things he said and turning them against him -- so that the disaster was his not mine.
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