It went quite well. I couldn't produce a news package due to personal reasons getting in the way, but I was the fireman for news in case of anything breaking, and news presenter.
I admittedly didn't really expect to have anything to do as fireman - a naive idea. Tuesday came, it was noon and I was having a lie-in when Becky called me: I had to be down in Southampton for 2 PM to film Princess Anne entering a police station. After my initial disorder, Lee and I were down at Southampton Police Station - at 1:50 pm, I'll add, a good 15-30 minutes before the Meridian news team arrived. It wasn't the most exciting thing, but we managed to film Princess Anne getting out of her car, shaking hands with the police chief and walking into the police station.
As we didn't have access inside the police station, we had to use Meridian's footage, and first that meant getting the footage. BBC South was also using Meridian's footage so it was a matter of waiting for Andy Giddings to drop it off - at 8 PM, leaving me with little to do between getting back from Southampton and then. I was amused to find that the Meridian footage - at least that taken outside the station - wasn't much better than mine. In fact I had a bit of a mindscrew at one point watching the rushes, as they were so similar to mine I thought they were. I edited the OOV and thought that was done.
My footage:
Wednesday came and the stress was as high as ever. I wrote a script for the OOV, fiddling around with it a bit as I tried to improve it. When our editor decided the Anne OOV should be a package at noon, it all got a bit insane. The script writers wanted the new script in immediately, while I had to write and record a voice over and extend my 20 second OOV to 60 seconds - a feat I didn't manage, coming in at just under. On top of that, I would be needed from around 1pm on for bulletin rehearsals. I did manage to get the package together in the hour I had and give a script in, but it was incredibly hectic. I was having difficulty doing three things at once.
The final package:
Finally for that day, I was presenting sports. Here we had difficulties again, as my talkback wasn't working, and halfway through the actual bulletin Aimee's talkback broke down - we were effectively cut off. Though I think I presented well, we had to deal with only being able to guess when we were back on camera, never being quite sure. This wasn't anyone's fault, but it did lead to some awkward moments on my part - lengthy silences where I didn't realise I was back on, and one jarring moment where I thought I was on about 5 seconds before I actually was - I look away for a moment, realise my mistake and start over again. It's sloppy, but again it was no one's fault.
Overall it was a good week for me. I did more than I thought I would - which was good, better than not being productive at all - and although there came a moment where I felt myself crumbling under the stress, when my OOV was to become a package, I managed to keep my cool throughout.
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