I met Leona Lewis today

She did her job properly, singing at the launch of the Westfield shopping centre in Shepherd's Bush and providing a charming little interview afterwards. Sadly I failed to do mine. My lead package on the centre for ITN's London Tonight didn't make its slot. There were a number of mitigating factors (there always are), but in the end it was down to inexperience and bad time management. We knew what we need to shoot, we shot it, and we had a very good piece, but we just didn't leave ourselves enough time to ingest, cut and file it, and it messed a lot of people around. The plan was a live top into my piece followed by two other packages from other correspondents, rounded off with a live interview conducted by me back at the Westfield. It was a very sharp, creative package, with lots of nicely thought out elements, and just the right tone for what we were trying to achieve. Which counts for absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing, if you're still editing it when it's meant to be going to air. When mine didn't make, the other two packages were put out first, then I did the live interview. During this time my piece was finished, and filed from the satellite truck. It ended up going out at the end of the programme. Anyone with any professional pride knows how painful it is to cock up. Okay it's not like being a doctor or a pilot or something when a mistake can have serious consequences, but it's too flip sometimes to shrug and say "it's telly. nobody died". I've learned a lesson today. Or at least, I hope I have, because I won't be getting lead stories or any stories at all if it happens again. I'm off to present Stephen Nolan's programme for the next couple of nights on BBC 5 live. I intend to arrive in Manchester in good time.

Meeting Jessica Biel and learning how to drive a tube train

I have to say I was underwhelmed by both. I'm sure both Jessica and brand new victoria line driver cab simulators can be fascinating (and I'm sure Jessica was sooo thrilled to meet me too), but film junkets and disorganised shoots don't provide the opportunity for anyone to shine. Let's just say it was a learning experience, and not nearly as much fun as I had hoped. A nice lady called Shanna, who must have some Bourne Ultimatum Operation Blackbriar key word search going on, is a massive Colin Firth fan. She found my blog entry which referred to Colin Firth (within minutes, judging by the timing of her comments) and asked me to put a few pertinent questions to him. Sadly I'd just got the boring stuff about the movie out of the way and that was that. But I can tell you that Easy Virtue (and adaptation of the Noel Coward play) is actually a cracking film, brilliantly cast and beautifully shot. The central duel between Kristen Scott Thomas and Jessica Biel is just vicious, and the laughs start coming after a slightly stilted first act. It all takes off at the can-can scene and builds from there. If you have middle class parents, they will love it. The director also directed Priscilla Queen of the Desert and was great fun - we had nice chat in the lift of the Soho hotel. He told me Ben Barnes' brother Jonathan is actually much more handsome than his film star brother. I also did a radio interview today with Alex Gibney, the director of Gonzo, which is the new movie about Hunter S Thompson (see below), and he was a delight. We got 10 minutes rather than 4. I didn't realise it was Graydon Carter's idea to do the movie (the Vanity Fair guy) - someone I feel I know very well after reading Toby Young's "How to lose friends...". Alex also told me that the room next door to us at the hotel we were in was where the sinking of the Titanic was first announced. I didn't know whether to believe him, but as we were in the Trafalgar Hotel just off the Mall, near the admiralty rooms, it could be true. Tomorrow I'm going to see BoJo and Leona Lewis open the Westfield lifestyle megalomultiplexical retail experience that has further uglified and alread vile part of West London. Any questions for Leona Lewis?

Now we're talking

I was going to be doing a straight reporting shift tomorrow, but I've got to go and watch a film in the morning ahead of a Wednesday interview with Colin Firth, and then in the afternoon I'm going to learn how to drive a tube train. Wahey! They've got a simulator at the driver training place in Northumberland Park, which should be fun. And hopefully it means I'll have something to fall back on if this all goes wrong. Must practice my tube driver scowl.

Editing hell

I spent the day trying to edit my piece for this Thursday's /london. We went underground again last week to do a piece on escalators. They are very impressive beasts and quite interesting, especially from underneath, but not very interesting. Because we were filming repairs, we were up all night again, but this time I tried a couple of production ideas and a lot more of me in shot to link the various bits and bobs and to keep it interesting (there's only so many stylised angles you take of an escalator, or indeed, someone fixing it). Of course, because it's late at night, and because the strip lighting on the underground is especially flattering, I look like a bag of shit. Just the sort of piece that demands lots of reporter involvement, then. And we didn't finish the edit, so I stayed on for another 3 hours putting together a rough cut of second half to be tidied up tomorrow. Should look alright in the end, apart from the pale, puffy, zitty, inarticulate idiot staring vacantly out at you for most of the piece.

Harry Redknapp goes to Spurs

And so did I. For Five News. Doing a package based around a football match without the rights to use any of it is hardly a new challenge, but usually under the Sports News Access agreement, it's possible to use limited amounts of material, and if it's a Sky Sports game, we can often negotiate more (because Five News is a Sky News production). However, the Spurs/Bolton game wasn't going out live, so we had no rights to use any on-pitch material until it had been screened for the first time by the rights holders, which I think I'm right in saying was the BBC's MOTD2. Hmm. As Sky News were all over the story, it was our job to get some nice stuff in the Five style and put me in the shot, so that we had ownership of the report. When time is tight, this boils down to voxes, GVs and a piece to camera. We had 90 minutes. And we were stuck outside. Getting some nice external shots of the White Hart Lane stadium is a tricky job at the best of times. On a cold, grey, autumnal day it's almost impossible. The (even uglier) buildings around it block any wide shots and close by there's nothing really to latch onto other than some very prosaic signs. With apologies to Spurs fans who may love it like no other structure on earth, I think it has all the architechtural merit of a landfill pit. So we had to focus on the intiinsic natural beauty of the Spurs fans themselves. Our opening shot was a speeded up, locked off shot of hundreds of supporters walking up Paxton Road. We then got some lovely voxes from the various people milling around the merchandise stalls and burger vans before kick off, and I risked a piece to camera in the middle of the Spurs supporters in the same spot we did the locked off shot. To be honest, I wish they'd been more rowdy. Most were quietly happy about Harry's appointment, but no one was singing from the rafters and not many people were in the mood to play up to the camera. That kind of day. The rest of the package was Sky News and Sky Sports News material. They had someone covering Harry getting off the Spurs coach and arriving at the ground and they also had someone at Portsmouth. They also stuck around until after the match to get post-victory reaction, but all of it was a bit subdued. But we got Harry, we got the Pompey fans reacting to his departure and we got some nice pre-match colour from our voxes and the post-result update voxes to complete the piece. The PTC was a bit rushed because I had a feeling that at any moment I was going to get interrupted by a fan, but they let me get on with it. We left Tottenham before we got a ticket from the nice man in the Sainsbury's car park and sat listening to the match stuck in traffic on the North Circular.

Shredded

I'm sure we've all been there, still editing a package whilst the programme has started.

Still putting astons/supers in inews/enps as your piece is going out. Hells bloody bells I feel mentally scarred by today's experience.

Excuse me if this begins to read like therapy.

At 1pm I get given a story for TX at 6pm. To be fair, it was a story about Walthamstow and I was already in Walthamstow at the time.

I'd been filming material for LVJ's piece, but then LVJ had to be shifted onto another story after an element we thought we weren't going to get until a later date suddenly presented itself (an interview with BoJo, as it happens).

So muggins here gets to pick up the pieces on LVJ's package, most of which he had already filmed with him in shot, so other than a 3 minute interview with a local councillor we had to start from scratch.

To cut a long story short, we'd done all the filming (school canteen staff serving, kids eating lunch, voxes of kids, head teacher, external gvs, internal gvs, piece to camera, bong (headline in vision shot, not water-cooled inhalation device), fast food shop gvs, fast food shop manager, fast food shop PTC, kebab-eating childrens' voxes) by 3.30pm.

In the process we nearly started a mini-riot with screaming kids all desperate to get on TV. I thought the yout' was too cool to be bothered by that any more. They were all high on chips though.

We got in the car thinking we might be alright for time, but the traffic round Walthamstow was appalling. After half an hour we'd gone half a mile, although it did give me a chance to think about the structure of the piece and write a script.

By 4.07pm, things were looking bleak. I got out of the car with the tapes and called the newsdesk, telling them we were in trouble. I ran through Walthamstow to Walthamstow Central station and caught an overland train scheduled for 1620 - it was 10 minutes late and packed.

Discussing edit options on the phone to a carriage full of nonplussed Londoners was not exactly my idea of fun, but there wasn't much I could do about it. I felt like turning round and saying "This is telly, darling, it's important!", but I resisted. They didn't seem in the mood.

At Highbury and Islington I got off the train and headed onto the Victoria Line to go the one stop to Kings Cross. I nearly got run over trying to flag down a taxi to take me half a mile down Gray's Inn Road to the ITN building.

I ran in at 4.53pm and tried to load the main tape into the ingest point. It jammed and then got crinkled. It was taken out of my hands and someone spooled it off. At this stage getting a package out was looking a tad optimistic, but my spirits were raised when I was assigned Dave, one of the top ITN picture editors to cut the piece with.

As I lay down the voice track, it became apparent that someone had got the tape working again and on to the server. We went at it steadily whilst I picked out a basic shotlist from my tired, stressed and generally addled brain.

At 6.02pm with the programme already on air the package went to the gallery server. I was under the impression we were in the second half of the programme, but we were 3rd item.

It was only as I strolled into the gallery (feeling a little pleased with myself) with the final aston details in my hand I noticed my piece was already on air. The producer alternately hissed and glared at me.

Thankfully we got everything into the aston computer in time and it all went out correctly. For some reason LVJ's piece turned into a SOT/grab, which was due to an unspecified technical problem only alluded to obliquely in the debrief.

Reader, I was utterly shaken.

The nice newsgathering lady who put me all up to this had left by the end of the show, the prog ed had other things to deal with, the producer was standing with the other producers who were all seething about something and no one else gave a toss.

I chased after the picture editor who cut my piece as he was walking out the door. "Dave", I gushed, "thank you."

Dave raised his hat and strolled off into the night. "Aw." said Ted, an old school picture editor who witnessed this touching scene, "Go give him a hug."

Oh how we laughed.

I felt so jumpy the only way I managed to calm down was by telling myself how terrible I'd feel if the piece hadn't made, or was broadcast with some glaring error in it.

I was in no fit state to get on my scooter for at least 15 minutes so I shared some random bitching with Glen Goodman, a deeply sardonic and very brilliant reporter.

I told him I hadn't seen his piece, but was certain it was a work of genius. He agreed it probably was.

I got home in one piece and watched the programme properly, and my package was actually quite good. I feel ill. The joy of news.

.

News Show #5 is live

Longer, bleaker, but hopefully still (?) funny, The News Show #5 is alive. You can listen here: or click on the links on the right. As you may now be aware, I crave comments in a needy, neddy kind of way. Please leave them at the door on your way out. In other exciting news my night spent watching a track gang go about their business on t'Underground has become a 5m30s piece of television, to be TX'd to those in the London area on ITV1 this Thursday evening at 10.30pm on /london. I'm also presenting Stephen Nolan at the end of the month on 5 live. Hallowe'en.

News Show 5

Despite my best plans and the availability of a producer who could have got it sorted this week, NS5 has only just been written and will require voicing and knitting together tonight, which means it won't be out until Monday. I've re-read the script and it seems a bit dark, which isn't where I necessarily want to go. There isn't a female part in it for Helen this week. I wanted to do Sarah Palin's Brain, but didn't have the time and I don't know how good Helen's Alaskan accent is, because I haven't had a chance to speak to her. Perhaps I should stop blogging and get on with it. Also had some feedback from 5 live about it - they don't want it at the moment, but have passed it on to some people at the BBC who may be able to suggest ways of developing it. We'll see. In the meantime, if anyone knows a commissioning or development editor who might like it, please do let them know about it. I'll keep plugging away.

Going Underground

I spent Wednesday from 9pm through to 6am on Thursday filming gang workers fixing the Victoria Line on the London Underground for the ITV programme "/london". I actually managed to take my personal camera with me, so there will be some photographs going up shortly. It's a strange business alright. Because there's very little available time to do the work, everything is on a very tight schedule. But because everything has to be safe, there's a hell of a lot that has to be done, checked, signed and double-checked before certain jobs can be done. What struck me most about the whole experience, and I hope this comes across in the piece, is the relish with which these gang-workers attack their jobs. I was expecting professional, but moody, taciturn types getting on with it. Not so. Communication is a big part of the job, and as a result confident, verbose people are a requirement. They also have to be fit (some of the lads clearly work out, very few are overweight) and they have to trust each other, look out for each other and demonstrate they know exactly what they are doing at all times. There are no passengers (excuse the pun) on any track gang, and there is no time for anyone who doesn't have a specific, and clearly defined role. As a result - happy campers. It's well-ish paid (a track op starts at around £26K rising to £43 for a SPIC - site person in charge) and there's plenty of overtime. The work is intense, but the hours are short - clock on at 9.45pm - done by 4.30am (unless something goes wrong or overtime, in which case there is an inquest back at the depot). None of the team seem to mind working nights and they seem very engaged with the work - they sense they are doing something that is precise and useful, oiling the cogs in a very big machine. They also tolerated us, and when they had decided we weren't complete prats were actually quite friendly. Our chaperones for the evening - a PR guy who was ex-ITN and an engineer from London Underground couldn't have been more helpful. The night I was there all the jobs got done (some cutting and welding of replacement rails and cracking out of old wooden sleepers to be replaced by cement ones) on time or early and everyone was pleased with a good night's work. I think we got what we needed, but I'm writing this as the rushes are ingesting, and I'll only really know when I've logged them.

Gonzo: the new film about Hunter S Thompson

I knew Hunter S Thompson was a major counter-cultural figure, and I liked what he represented, but I'd never got very far with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and that was the extent of my knowledge of his work. I also held the mistaken view that he'd shot and killed his first wife in a William Tell-style game that went horribly wrong. No idea where that came from as there she was, bright as life, giving interviews for the film I saw on Tuesday. It's a 2 hour documentary, narrated (very well) by Johnny Depp, who played Thompson in the Terry Gilliam movie of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and who also payed for Thompson's spectacular funeral. The movie isn't out until December, and I'm probably not meant to be talking about it in any way that could be considered a review, but it certainly joined the dots for me in terms of linking up his association with Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey and the whole Haight Ashbury movement. And it is extraordinary to see the affection in which he is still held by the people he very publicly hated. The real shame is that Thompson didn't really produce anything of note for the last 25 years of his life, by the end his lifestyle had made him incapable of writing anything useful, and that he took his life before he had a chance to see the Obama/McCain tussle, which a lucid Thompson would have relished.

Being Stephen Nolan

It's been a well busy week, innit. It started with a 7 hour journey to Manchester on Sunday (thank you Virgin and your incredibly smelly Trains) to present Stephen Nolan's show on BBC Radio 5 live. I'd spent most of that time trying and failing to sleep. By the time I arrived (late) I was a semi-coherent wreck and was, of course, thrust straight into the studio to talk to Dominic Littlewood about Strictly Come Dancing and the Bishop of Lancaster about gay adoption. The interview with Dominic was not great, but I had warmed up a bit by the time it came to the Bish. It contrasted my style with Stephen's. He likes to go for the jugular, ripping specious arguments apart. I prefer to give people enough rope and let the audience make up their own minds. Doing what Stephen does takes some balls - you have to be very confident in your own rhetorical skills and certain that even if you are arguing the toss with someone on a subject they may have studied at length for weeks or months, you can go toe-to-toe with them, live on air. I am always acutely aware of my lack of knowledge on a subject, but even I can see some gaping holes (don't even think it) in the churches' problems with homosexuality. Curiously, I just didn't want to go on the attack. Whether its because I don't want to unnecessarily antagonise a large chunk of the audience, or whether I'm worried about exposing my own prejudices, or whether it is just having aired the argument, and explored it fully, people are perfectly capable of making up their own mind without me having too much to do with the shaping of their views, I don't know. But it made me realise that even if I was capable of doing what Stephen Nolan does, I wouldn't do it. So why do they hire me to do Stephen's job? I guess they don't. I guess they hire me to do a job on Stephen's show in my own style, and they like me enough and think Stephen's audience will tolerate me whilst remaining entertaining enough to stop the casual 5 live listener from switching off. As I have absolutely no idea how many people are listening when I cover Nolan or Bacon (it's frankly impossible to measure the impact of a stand-in presenter on the radio unless it's for an entire quarter (the period a rajar diary - the way radio listeners are measured)) it's very hard to know whether you are gaining or losing listeners during a show. I guess I shouldn't worry too much about it.

Danny Baker is a genius

Why is it left to him to say what all the pusillanimous pundits, hypocritical journalists and fantastically self-deluding, venal and contemptuous footballers failed in their duty to acknowledge? Ashley Cole is a twat and deserves all the booing he gets. It is the right of the paying fans to give voice to their dissatifaction over a mistake made by an unpopular player, just as it is their right to display their delight at a top class performance from a popular player. Do you think Ashley Cole likes football fans? Where do you think they come in the order of importance after his bank balance, his career, his fellow professionals and his celebrity? Fucking miles away. He treats fans with contempt, and doesn't care if he shows it, so why shouldn't the loathing be mutual? Still, you wouldn't expect anything less from a top footballer nowadays - insulated from the real world from an early age, surrounded by sycophants, treated as if they are gods among men. But the media?! Where was the pundit or journalist standing up for the fans? Why didn't anyone make the point that if you pour insane amounts of money and hype into the game, if you remove any possibility of shared identity between a fan and a player, and if that player doesn't make the slightest bit of effort to be anything other than a craven, mercenary, arrogant tosser, then the booing on Saturday afternoon was a refreshing inevitability. It is the only way the fans have left of making their point heard, and to hear them dismissed so many times by so many hacks on 5 live and in the newspapers was shameful. I can only assume that a) they have relationships with clubs, players and sponsors to protect and therefore don't want criticise for fear of losing access or b) they've been freeloading for so long they've lost touch with reality. As Danny Baker (cheekily) made the point on 5 live on Tuesday night - what happened when Ashley Cole got booed? England got better. They woke up. They raised their game. They got a big boot up the backside and responded. They went from 2-1 up and playing badly to 5-1 up and winning comfortably. So I am supporting Danny Baker's call for 30 seconds of sustained booing from the fans at the start of every match across the country this week, followed by random booing every 10 minutes thereafter. Fuck the feelings of the players, the sponsors, the journalists, the commentators, the pundits and the club directors. If you want fans to stop booing, start delivering. Start caring. Take a bit more notice of the people you consider suckers and graft yourself a bit of respect. Then you'll get the unquestioning adulation you seem to think is your divine right.

News Show #4 is live

Could I entreat you to listen? It's only 5m40s long and is our best yet. Strangely free of swearing this week, for some reason. Your comments, however rude, would make me very happy. If the above link doesn't work, get it here: http://audio.msdi.co.uk/news/ or here on iTunes: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=292647136

Producing a weekly no budget news satire programme

is fun, but it can be a complete pain in the arse. The biggest problem we have is keeping it current. The lag between me writing it and getting it up as podcast is currently 5 days. In an ideal world it would be 12 hours. If we were getting paid it would be 12 hours, but because everyone is doing it their spare time, it's 5 days, although I'm hoping that will soon be 3. I can't write after a day at work because I'm usually too knackered to do anything more than make a cheese sandwich and slump in front of the TV, so I tend to get up at 4 or 5am on a Wednesday, scout some audio, write the contributor parts and then email the scripts to the contributors. One has a home studio, the other doesn't and divides his time between Devon and Skegness, which makes him quite difficult to pin down, and makes it quite difficult for him to get into studios. Both usually get their audio back to me by Thursday night, by which time I should have recorded my script, and added some fresh audio. If I haven't it's another 5am start on Friday to assemble the final rough cut. Then I email a final script and all the tracks to the producer who cuts it all together, adds a few flourishes of his own and then sends it back to me as the finished article. I then upload it to a server and try and tell as many people about it as possible. At the moment, I've got everything for the next show scripted, recorded, lined up and ready to go, but my producer is away for the weekend, so nothing's going to happen until he gets in before work on Monday to turn it around for me. As news perishes, and the impact of a topical gag diminishes by the hour, it's a source of frustration to me, but there's very little I can do about it. Add this to the fact I need to be trying to get it to the ears of some BBC commissioning types or independent production companies, which is a whole other proposition, but one on which the whole project stands or falls, so I need to really work on that too. In the mean time, the one thing that does make it worth while is getting the comments of people who have been kind enough to bother listening to it. If you do read this, but so far haven't had a chance to listen to a News Show, please click here: http://audio.msdi.co.uk/news/ and let me know what you think. A new one should be up on Monday, but the current one I think is pretty good. Cheers

Murderous dogs, impenetrable politics and Liam Gallagher

Sadly I didn't get to meet the latter - I spent a torturous day reversioning the rushes Sky's Niall Patterson sent back from the first night of the Oasis tour in Liverpool. It was a very good interview - actually getting Liam to sit down and do something on camera is rare enough, which made it worth running. Five News wanted something for the 1230, 1700 and 1900 - all differing lengths with differing elements (gfx etc) and it made for a difficult day. I think we finally got it right with the 1900 version - a much longer package at 2'30" - it's hard to get much from a sit down interview across in 1'40" which was the length of the 1700, but there was a global meltdown going on, so the thoughts of Chairman Liam weren't going to make much headway. Monday was interesting - meeting a woman who was savaged by two pit bulls whilst pushing her 19 month old son home in his buggy. The dogs' owner pulled them off her and then just walked off. He threated the neighbours who followed him and as far as I'm aware still hasn't been caught. It was lead story on London Tonight after it appeared in the (London) Evening Standard newspaper's first edition. A couple of the national TV channels picked it up the next day. The woman's husband only contacted the Standard when it became patently apparent the police couldn't give a fuck. The woman had deep wounds, she could describe the dogs' owner, the neighbours could give descriptions of him and followed him some distance, but the Met said because no one witnessed the actual attack, they were reluctant to open an investigation. They didn't even inspect the crime scene. Of course as soon as it got in the paper the police were all over it, assigning the couple a new case officer and promising to get results, but, honestly. This woman was the victim of a very very serious attack and the dogs' owner knew that he could just walk calmly away because we all know that despite the amount of taxpayers money they are pissing away, on far too many occasions the police don't have the inclination to do their job properly. If they can't be bothered to look at a crime like this, what are they doing all day? I was quite pleased with the piece - we tried something different with the piece to camera which worked, I ordered a treated top, which the editor did before I got back, and that worked, and we had access to the hospital and the lady herself who was willing to be interviewed in the hope the bastard who allowed the attack to happen gets caught. And she is a concert pianist so we also got some good quality video of her performing, which helped. Tuesday was another stab at the Ark Academy being built at Wembley Park. Basically the council are getting millions from the government to build this privately-run state school and are being accused of running roughshod over the planning process to get it. There's a desperate need for school places in Brent, and this is effectively a free school, hence their determination to make sure it happens. They've been tackled every step of the way by a small group of agitators who have a problem with the private sector running state schools and who have successfully put lots of flies in the ointment for the council. The council and the school are slagging off the agitators as unrepresentative, and maybe they are, but because the proper procedures don't seem to have been followed (usual farcical "consultation" process etc), there are a lot of major issues that haven't been addressed, including the massive traffic congestion that is going to build up along an already busy road, the broken promises given to all the businesses on the site - including a children's nursery that was effectively forced out of business by the appalling way in which the council treated it. The council's dismissal of the agitators as irrelevant doesn't excuse their shoddy treatment of others. The local MP thinks its a wholly inappropriate site too.

News Show #3 is live

You can listen to it here: http://audio.msdi.co.uk/news/ (or download it or subscribe to it) or if you have iTunes, put this in your web browser's URL thing http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=292647136 you can subsscribe to it there too, if you like it. It's very funny this week, I think - a Tory Party Conference special, obviously. Any comments etc would be most welcome.

Do you know who Inspector Sands is?

I went on a London Underground health and safety training course yesterday as it looks like I might be doing a series of films dahn there for ITN. I didn't know that Inspector Sands is the person they ask for on the tannoy when one of the fire alarms has been set off. A station will only be evacuated once two alarms have gone off or there's been visual confirmation of a fire (or if the initial fire alarm isn't confirmed as false within 5 minutes). I told this to my wife and she rolled her eyes and said "everyone knows Inspector Sands is the emergency callout - I've heard it loads of times". Everyone except me, it seems. So next time you hear "Could Inspector Sands please report to the Operations Room Immediately" I would suggest noting the nearest exit and making your way towards it. Although our Health and Safety trainer suggested getting on the next available train, as if the station is evacuated, you're not going anywhere. I still think my advice is better as it takes into account the possibility of a real fire. What other things did I learn about Health and Safety on the London Underground? Everyone who goes down there is at risk from Leptospiral Jaundice, or Weil's disease, a particularly nasty virus which you can contract from rats' piss and other vermin. Given that 90% of the tube network is covered in rats' piss, this is a serious problem. Leptospiral Jaundice can kill you in about a week. If you cut yourself anywhere on the tube, seek urgent medical attention, it says here. Finally, used hypodermic neeedles are an occupational hazard for London Underground staff. Apparently junkies don't just throw them away, some like to tape them to the underside of bannisters and on the doors that adjoin the end of carriages to catch unwary fingers. To avoid a fate similar to that of Peter Duncan in Flash Gordon (you may actually have to ask your grandparents about this), the advice is never to put your hand where you can't see. The health and safety course came with a nice little surprise at the end of it in the form of a test - less than 8 out of 10 and you fail. Fail the test, no access permit, no access permit, no filming. I was not looking forward to having to explain that to the boss. Thankfully, I got 9 out of 10 (or 'a moral 10' according to the trainer*) and I went back to ITN brandishing my permit, which doesn't actually allow me to do anything without more checks etc, but it's a start. The rest of the day was spent editing a piece that's going out next week on a nice Philippino lady who has married a nice English man. An email went round alerting us to a law refresher that the ITN lawyer John Battle was running for an hour, so I went along to that. Usually it's impossible to find the time for this sort of thing, but as the piece I was cutting was for ftx (future transmission, TLA fans) it meant I could go and get my first law refresher for far too long. It was comforting to know that I was aware of most things he mentioned, but I will give anyone a banana if they can tell me what the Chancery Court and Queens Bench Court do without googling it. Last night I recorded the track to News Show #3, which is, I can exclusively reveal, funnier than the previous 2. I've had problems up to now with my delivery, but I think I'm slowly nailing it. It's hard to see the script sat under a picnic blanket in my dining room, but the accoustic is now a lot better. And I've just remembered I've got a head torch somewhere. I knew it would come in useful one day. It's not easy pulling it all together, although it's great fun when it happens. It takes about 3 - 4 hours to write, then I email the script to the performers Helen and Thom, they email me back their audio, I record my bits, do a rough assembly (another 2 hours) and then email it to our genius producer Ally to tidy up and add some pizzaz to it. Unfortunately as we all have lives, and not all of us have home studios, it can take some time to turn round. Thom has a particular hard time of it as he is based in Skegness and Devon, which makes popping into a studio quite tricky. He's actually coming to my house to record his bit this afternoon on his way down to Devon, but I've told him on his way through London to buy a decent .mp3 recording microphone so he can record his parts in the train toilets on his travels and mail them to me on the go. His speaking parts, that is... Now we've got a decent product, we're up on iTunes, and as a podcast, and we've got a home server (thanks again to matt deegan) I'm going to really try and plug the damn thing hard. If you are aware of it but haven't had a listen before, please do give it a go. Laters. Nick * To paraphrase the exact question: If you are confronted by a HAZARDOUS work environment who is the first person you must report it to? a) The station controller b) The site manager c) The nearest member of staff d) Your union representative The actual answer is b), but I thought the safest thing to do is to tell people who are near it first whilst you go off and find the site manager, so I put c). The trainer agreed that is what most people would do, but the key word in the question is "report" not "tell". By all means tell people near you, but report it first to the site manager. That's why he gave me a moral 10, though whether a moral mark would have counted if it was the difference between a pass and a fail was thankfully something we didn't need to discuss.