WiFi, iPhones and Wooden Spoons - Musings from the new world of presenting live sport from home
By Jill Douglas
“Is there any need to shout when you are talking about snooker?,” asks my thirteen year old son who sleepily wanders into my “home studio” at 11.15pm at the end of my eight hour shift, presenting live snooker. I say home studio, it is in fact the kids’ X-Box room, furnished with a large plasma, sofa, piano and boxes of industrial quantities of Lego.
Given the DIY nature of our home broadcasting set up, the Lego should not be dismissed lightly.
The ambition and enterprise shown by my colleagues at ITV Sport and our technical team this week have known no bounds.
Throw in my husband’s DIY skills and his imaginative solution to a set design issue and you can only marvel at our combined determination to bring back sport to terrestrial tv amid the lockdown.
In the general scheme of things, sport is of course, of little consequence when dealing with the challenges and consequences of COVID-19. With so many families facing hardship and uncertainty and with own health and wellbeing foremost in our minds, it serves simply as a distraction and hopefully a source of entertainment.
Fear, anxiety, and an unstable economy stalk our minds every day, but as we focus on slowly emerging from the lockdown, there is surely space for sport and all it brings.
To broadcast over eight hours of live snooker each day, for eleven days, remotely from our homes has taken us deep into unchartered territory. After a frustrating “test day” last week, I watched with amazement as SpaceX was launched and eventually made contact with the International Space Station.
We watched it live and gazed in amazement. Hours earlier I struggled to connect with my programme editor in West London. I live in Cheltenham.
I am hosting ITV4’s snooker coverage from our family home near Cheltenham racecourse. My guests have also established makeshift studios in their homes. Stephen Hendry is near Ascot and manages a swift eighteen holes on the golf course ahead of our broadcast.
Neal Foulds in down in Poole on the South Coast and Alan McManus joins us from Glasgow while the snooker action is in sterile bubble in the Marshall Arena in Milton Keynes.
My director is at home in East London, the programme editor is in Twickenham and we have producers working remotely to make our content appear as professional and comprehensive as we can hope in the circumstances.
And finally Jane, who keeps us on time and on air, is also online and operating from somewhere in Yorkshire!
We have never attempted anything like this before. The technical production resource is being delivered by an outside broadcast company who have improvised and engineered a workable network involving WiFi, 4G, iPhones, remote cameras and a whole lot of patience.
I have never met Adam, the engineer at their Ealing base, but I feel a though we have bonded in the way a bomb disposal officer might connect with a feckless civilian who is trying to diffuse a live device and being directed via telephone as to which wire to cut.
We watched Apollo 13 a couple of weeks ago and the inventive nature of the Houston team has clearly inspired some of the innovative solutions the engineers have found to keep us live and on air – and it is often as simple as gaffer tape.
My backdrop features an image of snooker balls – positioned carefully so as to avoid looking as though I have giant Mickey Mouse ears. On delivery, I found the frame was not nearly strong enough to support the banner. This is where my husband stepped in with tape, string and finally a wooden spoon to fashion a solution – don’t ask. He also installed black out blinds and managed the crisis when we lost all power in the village an hour before going on air on Thursday. We now have a generator on standby.
It is lonely sitting here without my pundits, regular studio crew and floor manager but I suppose the onsite catering is an improvement though I miss the late night curry with the boys when we come off air and the chance to unwind with a glass or two with the production team in the hotel bar – always important after a live broadcast!
Hair and make-up? Well the usually carefully coiffured Judd Trump is sporting a throwback style to Terry Griffiths and Ronnie O’Sullivan’s moustache has raised eyebrows…as for my vanity, another improvisation and frankly the least of my worries though my runners (two children) are doing a fine job.
The biggest challenge is how we all communicate with one another from remote locations - imagine you are having a conversation on the telephoneand midway through your sentence, you hear your own voice repeating what you have just said, but three seconds after you have said it…and this continues when the person you are talking to responds.
Now multiply that by six people and you can see the hurdles we are trying to overcome.
Barry Hearn and his team at Matchroom have worked incredibly hard to stage the Championship League, the players have turned up and entertained us. My colleagues and friends at ITV have pulled together to make it possible which is just as well as we’ve just learned we are doing it all again in a couple of weeks… but I mustn’t shout about it…