Two years in the job

Just over a year ago I wrote "One year in the job", a review of my first year presenting the BBC Surrey breakfast show.

A year and a half ago, I wrote "A day in the life", a fairly extensive blow-by-blow account of my daily routine.

Here's an update.

There have been three significant changes to my routine in the past 18 months.

1) I no longer regularly make programme pieces for my show.
2) We have shifted the programme back an hour, so it is now broadcast between 6-9am.
3) I have taken on the Saturday breakfast show.

Stopping doing regular pieces for my show happened during the summer of last year. The time commitment was too much. I was leaving the office more or less straight after finishing the programme, going to a job, and then spending two hours at home putting the edit together.

After travel time, I often wouldn't file the piece until 2.30-3pm, making it a difficult working day. I was getting more and more tired, and whilst it was nice having three minutes of good quality audio on the show, it was affecting my performance during the other 177 quite considerably.

It also meant that I often wouldn't be around for the morning meeting, which is an essential debriefing and planning session. Here we get an early idea as to the likely stories in the next day's show. We also get to discuss those stories, and try to think creatively about how we could bring them to air.

These meetings can throw up some brilliant ideas, and can turn a weak story on paper into something very vivid when you hear it. It can also flush out the duff stories - ones which look good on paper, but are much harder to develop or execute on the show.

By the end of the planning meeting we will all have some idea of what should be happening the next day.

Then it's off home, or on to any other work commitment that might come my way. Recently I've been working with the BBC South Inside Out team again, which has been great. I have also had the enormous satisfaction of working with a Private Eye journalist to get a story about the Post Office into print, and I'm pleased to say there may be another broadcast piece to be made about the latest developments there.

More often than not, though, I will head home to have lunch, go for a run, sleep, do my share of childcare, or all of the above.

Since we have moved the show to 6-9am (it used to be 7-10am), I get up at 3.45am. I remember Nicky Campbell saying his alarm call was 3.45am when he used to start at 6am, and that's good enough for me.

It means I have less time to prep the show in the office. Some days, if a cue isn't quite right, or the producer, newsreader and myself think we need to make significant changes, it can be challenging.

The upside is: I'm not exhausted by the time we get to air, and I still get to listen to the excellent Morning Reports on 5live (and BBC Surrey!) on the drive-in, which gives you a full briefing on the day's news agenda.

The lack of prep time in the morning means it is more essential than ever to speak to the day producer at the end of their shift to discuss the next day's stories. I'll usually get a call between 6pm and 7pm, and we'll have a chat about everything. I think the producer finds it helpful too. They've spent all day with their heads inside the various stories, changing them, writing them, finding guests and working them up into something worth broadcasting; now they have to brief me verbally. Given that's what I'm doing for the audience the next day, it's a neat test of whether or not they've got the "tellability" of it right.

It doesn't matter how good the story or guest is, or how much work you've done on it, if I can't tell the listener what is going on in a simple, accurate and engaging way, everyone's hard work is wasted.

Whilst talking to the producer on the phone I can obviously ask questions that immediately occur to me. If any changes are needed (or have time to be made) the producer will make them, and I will use the basis of our conversation for some kind of approach on air the next day.

Once the scripts have been finalised, the producer sends them through to me on email, and I will read through them before I go to bed, making notes as to any further changes I think might need making, and absorbing the briefing notes which sit below the cues.

So the my current routine is:

3.45am Alarm goes off. Take phone off charge, stagger downstairs and make breakfast.
3.50am Watch last night's BBC1 Ten o'clock news on PVR whilst eating breakfast. Also check twitter feed on phone. If anything comes up on there, I'll forward it to my colleagues and to my work email to watch/read on a big computer screen.
4.20am Shower. Get dressed.
4.50am Get in car, listen to paper review on LBC.
5am Switch car radio to BBC Surrey to listen to 5live's Morning Reports.
5.20am Arrive BBC Surrey in Guildford. Discuss stories with producer and newsreader. Make any changes to cues as necessary. Get weather, write show introduction, choose 6-7am quiz question.
6am On air. The first hour has a relatively gentle start with a quiz and 4 songs before 7. But we have a top story, there is a full news, weather, travel and sport service, plus a rather enjoyable entertainment fix, and the papers.
7-9am All speech. Full on, full service breakfast show.
9am Decompression.
9.30am Morning planning meeting.
10.30am email and other admin. Occasional meetings with management.
11-11.30am Leave the BBC Surrey building.
11.30am Sleep or eat or work or carry out family-related duties.
6-7pm Producer phone call (10 - 25 mins)
8.30pm Read scripts
9pm Lights out.

Since taking on the Saturday breakfast show, I will also spend some of the post-show production time at the office thinking about what should go into Saturday. I'll talk to the news editor on a Friday and stay in regular contact with my weekend producer throughout the week. He comes in on Friday to set up the show and will studio produce on a Saturday morning.

We've only been doing this for four weeks, but I think already we've started to push the show in the direction we want to take it. It is a bit more relaxed than the weekday breakfast show - we have music running throughout the 3 hours we are on air, and it is a Saturday. So whilst we are geared up to take on breaking and important news, I think there should be a weekend feel to things.

So that's me. It's a reasonably punishing routine, but nowhere near as wearing as looking after three small children, which is what my wife does when I'm not around to assist. I also love doing it, which helps.

The main thing I have learned over the course of the last two years is that whilst good journalism is essential, the show is a performance. As a presenter, my responsibility is as much to the performance as it is to the journalism within it. Most of what I've been doing over the past year is working on my performance, and shaping my daily schedule to give me the best chance of doing it well.

To extend the point I made earlier in this post, the material I work with has to be simple, accurate and engaging, but unless I can do something extra with it, to put a smile on someone's face, or really connect with a story, everyone's hard work is completely wasted.

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The Post Office Horizon story grows legs

This is the new issue of Private Eye (no 1299). The last issue (no 1298, amazingly) carried an article about possible problems with the Post Office's Horizon IT system (see my blog post about it, which includes the text of the first Private Eye article and links to further information).

I am pleased to say the initial article provoked a response. The above issue contains three letters about it on p.15, and a follow up article In The Back (p.31) where it is leading the section entitled "IT cock ups".
If you would like to read them, please buy the magazine.

I also need your help. If you have high level experience of working on banking/high volume/legacy IT systems and you think you may have something interesting to say about Horizon, please get in touch. If you are prepared to go on camera about it, that would be nice too.

Post Office story in Private Eye

UPDATE: New blog post on the 2nd Sight interim report 14 Aug 2013.

OLD POST:

I have been working with a journalist at Private Eye magazine over the past few weeks, and a piece on the Post Office Horizon system leads the investigative section "In the Back" in this fortnight's issue (No 1298 30 Sep - 13 Oct p.28).

To read the original story in full and watch the TV piece I did about it in February, click here, but if you have a chance, please buy the magazine. It's an excellent read, and the Post Office story deserves wider public attention.

If the link above expires, here is the same article copied and pasted.

COMPUTER SAYS NO...

AS Britain’s multi-billion pound public IT programmes hit the next stage in the lifecycle of botched computer projects – malfunction – alarming repercussions are being felt in the nation’s post offices. In recent years the Horizon system that 11,500 sub-postmasters are forced to use has thrown up a rash of apparent financial “shortfalls”.

These have prompted dozens of prosecutions and financial ruin for businessmen and women with previously spotless records. Fifty-five of them last week launched a “class action” against the Post Office, arguing that their troubles owe more to computer error than dishonesty.In a standard week a sub-post office performs thousands of transactions – many such as pension payments and lottery and foreign currency purchases, in cash. When the computer says the till is short, the sub-postmaster (or mistress) has to cough up the difference; and the computer is always right apparently. If the sub-postmaster or mistress can’t pay up, the Post Office’s fraud investigators swiftly descend.

No sign of any missing cash

Typical is the case of Jo Hamilton from South Warnborough in Hampshire, who one week was £2,000 down. After the helpdesk told her to press a few buttons the total doubled, and the Post Office took £4,000 off her.

When the problem kept repeating, her mistake was to claim that everything was fine so she could at least keep trading in the hope that the errors would correct themselves and she’d get her £4,000 back. Then the total hit £36,000, the auditors swooped and she was convicted for false accounting (without ever being accused of taking any money) and forced to pay the £36,000 back with the help of supportive villagers.

Others have been jailed for theft simply on evidence from a computer system that seems to be misfiring, with no indication of what they are supposed to have done with the money. One, Seema Misra, was pregnant when she was found guilty of stealing £75,000 even though no trace of the cash could be found and the judge at Guildford crown court, according to supporters present, appeared to instruct the jury that the evidence was very limited. She was sentenced to 18 months.

Since her case, others have pleaded guilty simply for more lenient sentences. Many more have coughed up thousands of pounds from their own pockets in desperate attempts to retain their livelihoods. The Justice for Sub-postmasters Alliance reckons the total affected could run into the thousands.

A law unto itself

The Post Office remains the only body in the UK to run its own prosecutions and campaigners think that if it had to use the Crown Prosecution Service, many cases would not have made it to court. The last organisation with such powers, Customs & Excise, was stripped of them almost a decade ago when it was found to have over-stepped the mark in several high-profile cases.

Mrs Hamilton’s MP, James Arbuthnot, expresses a widely-held view when he says: “I find it very difficult to believe that all these sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses are suddenly found to be dishonest, if the alternative is that it may be a public sector computer system which has gone wrong. We’ve heard of that before.” But postal services minister Ed Davey is washing his hands of the problem, simply re-directing MPs’ questions to the Post Office itself.

Lost Horizon

There is no shortage of visible problems with Horizon. One sub-postmaster explained to the Eye how when selling stamps, for example, his terminal often either registered no stamp sale or not the class of stamp keyed in. And in July the entire Post Office banking system was shut down by a “Horizon online issue”. Even the 370 large “Crown” post offices managed centrally are not immune from glitches. Latest known figures show shortfalls there of £2.2m in a year, although mysteriously these haven’t produced any criminal sanctions.

These are just the latest episode in Horizon’s inglorious history. It originated in 1996 in a joint Department of Social Security-Post Office PFI deal for an automated benefits payment system with Pathway, part of ICL (now Fujitsu) on the back of a cheap but technically flawed bid. Four years and £1bn later it was ditched by the government, with the Post Office left to convert it into the Horizon automation project. Fujitsu still runs the technical side of things.
The lengthening list of “shortfall” cases, many in odd geographical clusters, has received little attention beyond diligent investigation by BBC South TV hack Nick Wallis and Computer Weekly magazine. This could be about to change, though, as solicitors Shoosmith begin action on behalf of the 55, with another 150 cases pending.

The Post Office, fearing immense further cost if its computer system is found wanting, has its head firmly in the sand. There are, a spokeswoman told the Eye, “no issues” with Horizon (which is nonsense given the ones already admitted). To say anything else would be to admit that the computer on which it depends is a pig in a poke that has not only wasted billions but might now be dispensing miscarriages of justice as well.

When politicians *really* don't want to answer the question

You might like this. The Conservative leader Dr Andrew Povey sacked his deputy (David Hodge) and then announced he was resigning. But wouldn't tell me why. Well, he wouldn't tell me really why.

 NICK POVEY by nickwallis

We just happened to have an interview with a different cabinet member (Peter Martin) booked for the same morning, so I asked him what was going on. He wouldn't tell me. He really wouldn't tell me.

 NICK MARTIN by nickwallis

How to deal with hate in radio and in life

Please take the time to read this article written by the documentary film-maker and polemicist Michael Moore. Funny, fascinating and deeply worrying.

And for some light relief, click on the fist, and listen.



It's taken from talkSPORT's late night show, hosted by @mattforde.

The odd thing is that the rage is at one level - the caller starts very angry and remains so. He doesn't get any more or less wound up - it's a steady, constant pitch of compellingly-enunciated bile, delivered without one swear word.

Thanks to @richardpbacon for tweeting them both.

Six days a week

Now I'm doing BBC Surrey Breakfast six days a week, Monday to Saturday, 6am to 9am.

I had better go to bed.

Would you like to taste the wine, sir/madam?

I hate this ritual. It's awkward and odd and has no place in all but the very best restaurants.

95% of wines are okay. In the restaurants I frequent, 99.5% of them are okay. Most are screw-top, and modern bottling procedures are such that even cork-stopped wines are usually always as they should be.

But still, we have to go through with the tasting. What is the point?

Traditionally, when one person is paying the bill, that person is asked by the sommelier/waiter to taste the wine. Not because of their inherently superior knowledge, but because it re-inforces the hierarchy of their position as bill-payer. You might be breaking bread as equals, but some are more equal than others.

We wait for the bill-payer to say the wine is good enough to drink, then it can be shared among us lesser mortals.

In terms of real, genuine practical effect, the only thing this obviates is the pouring of bad wine into more than one glass.

It's out of date. I don't like it.

Hmm I think, as I take a sip doesn't taste corked, but I'm hardly having an epiphany here... in fact... it tastes exactly like the second cheapest wine on the menu, which is, funnily enough, exactly what I ordered. 

The waiter knows it's bog-standard supermarket screw-top plonk with a 400% mark-up, and so do I. He's now been waiting exactly five seconds for me to say something, which is far too long to comment on what I already knew would be okay. Why are we doing this?

"Lovely" I say, failing to make eye contact with the waiter, or my dining companions.

Let's stop this now. In future, I'll order the wine. You bring it.

If there's a problem, I'll let you know.

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