Working from home
Mar. 28th, 2020 01:04 pmI mentioned in previous post that I was enjoying the behind the scenes glimpses of the voices in my radio who are working from home. and ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
helenraven asked: Could you do a post about the radio people working from home? I would be fascinated by that.
My initial reaction was to say 'no', that's all I've got, I don't know what I'd add to the fact that I'm noticing it hapening. But I realised I was explaining this at such length that perhaps I could unpack it a bit further. Too much for a 'reply to your comment', too little for a post. Sorry.
I suppose my starting point is that oh, no, things are being cancelled! Filming was due to start on the next series of Shetland, and hasn't. Now we learn that they will run out of episodes of The Archers, and these are being rationed. The big difference between these two things is that one is television and one is radio. On Thursday's television news it was obvious that Our Health Correspondent was speaking via a webcam from just outside the cupboard under the stairs (though he was in the studio yesterday); on radio, unless it's mentioned specifically it needn't be obvious. If I were more observant I might notice more shift in quality, but I'm not listening for quality, I'm listening for content (and I know the story about the glowing endorsement for recorded sound and how you'd think the musicians were in the room with you, which turns out to be describing scratchy old 78 rpm discs).
Eight days ago, to judge from the performers' comments, The Now Show was broadcast from a theatre with no audience: last night it came from the homes of the various performers, and despite the (rather laboriously) humorous opening sequence there was no indication of any problems. Which isn't to say that there were no problems, of course, maybe all the things they joked about going wrong really had gone wrong, and the technical team found that sequence hilarious. But it wasn't obvious to the listener.
When the Today programme goes split site, sending one of its presenters abroad (or out of London, which is much the same thing) it's treated as a special event: not business as usual, but not a problem, either. This morning Martha Kearney co-presented "for family reasons" from rural (actually I don't remember where), and it worked well enough to make me wonder whether the BBC really needed to be sending out limousines at dawn every day. There must be some loss of interaction, and, as you know Bob, some people take better than others to working in isolation. But in the brave new greener world, perhaps we'll retain a degree of working from home previously thought impractical.
By then we will probably have lost the unfamiliarity, the sense of improvisation, that gives the current practice its informality: there's an intimacy about it which has its charm. When this is just how we work, interviews won't begin, as Eliza Carthy's recent appearance on Front Row did, with enquiries about where you are, and what are the children doing? She was, for the record, at home in Robin Hood's Bay - and I hadn't realised that she had moved back in with her parents, to help care for her mother: I half wondered how much of that she had meant to broadcast, before concluding that well, she's an old folkie, not really a problem...
Being old-fashioned and not really up with the technology, I don't listen to podcasts. (Yes, I probably should do something about that.) It's possible that this is all terribly obvious, that this is what podcasts sound - and more to the point, feel - like, and that the success of podcasting has made the BBC more open to the 'coming to you live from my kitchen table' aesthetic. Well, good. Now let's see whether an actor phoning in a performance to a radio drama has to be such a bad thing.
helenraven asked: Could you do a post about the radio people working from home? I would be fascinated by that.My initial reaction was to say 'no', that's all I've got, I don't know what I'd add to the fact that I'm noticing it hapening. But I realised I was explaining this at such length that perhaps I could unpack it a bit further. Too much for a 'reply to your comment', too little for a post. Sorry.
I suppose my starting point is that oh, no, things are being cancelled! Filming was due to start on the next series of Shetland, and hasn't. Now we learn that they will run out of episodes of The Archers, and these are being rationed. The big difference between these two things is that one is television and one is radio. On Thursday's television news it was obvious that Our Health Correspondent was speaking via a webcam from just outside the cupboard under the stairs (though he was in the studio yesterday); on radio, unless it's mentioned specifically it needn't be obvious. If I were more observant I might notice more shift in quality, but I'm not listening for quality, I'm listening for content (and I know the story about the glowing endorsement for recorded sound and how you'd think the musicians were in the room with you, which turns out to be describing scratchy old 78 rpm discs).
Eight days ago, to judge from the performers' comments, The Now Show was broadcast from a theatre with no audience: last night it came from the homes of the various performers, and despite the (rather laboriously) humorous opening sequence there was no indication of any problems. Which isn't to say that there were no problems, of course, maybe all the things they joked about going wrong really had gone wrong, and the technical team found that sequence hilarious. But it wasn't obvious to the listener.
When the Today programme goes split site, sending one of its presenters abroad (or out of London, which is much the same thing) it's treated as a special event: not business as usual, but not a problem, either. This morning Martha Kearney co-presented "for family reasons" from rural (actually I don't remember where), and it worked well enough to make me wonder whether the BBC really needed to be sending out limousines at dawn every day. There must be some loss of interaction, and, as you know Bob, some people take better than others to working in isolation. But in the brave new greener world, perhaps we'll retain a degree of working from home previously thought impractical.
By then we will probably have lost the unfamiliarity, the sense of improvisation, that gives the current practice its informality: there's an intimacy about it which has its charm. When this is just how we work, interviews won't begin, as Eliza Carthy's recent appearance on Front Row did, with enquiries about where you are, and what are the children doing? She was, for the record, at home in Robin Hood's Bay - and I hadn't realised that she had moved back in with her parents, to help care for her mother: I half wondered how much of that she had meant to broadcast, before concluding that well, she's an old folkie, not really a problem...
Being old-fashioned and not really up with the technology, I don't listen to podcasts. (Yes, I probably should do something about that.) It's possible that this is all terribly obvious, that this is what podcasts sound - and more to the point, feel - like, and that the success of podcasting has made the BBC more open to the 'coming to you live from my kitchen table' aesthetic. Well, good. Now let's see whether an actor phoning in a performance to a radio drama has to be such a bad thing.
