The other things we did were things like the football – mainly, I think, because they knew I wasn’t particularly interested. They always seemed to choose me to do the football, because I never got involved in, ‘Who’s shooting what?’ and ‘Isn’t that a good goal? There was a football programme on Sunday night with highlights from the main matches, and we’d have to edit them down to packages. The researcher would come in and say, ‘Right, we’re doing the City-Liverpool game. I want four minutes, thirty-two seconds.’ Luckily, the researchers would have sat there looking at the match, had marked where all the goals were and their idea of where the interesting play was, and we’d have to assemble it into a four-minute, thirty-two second package, because the programme had already been planned by then. Again, sometimes you’d have to drop it down a generation because you were running five minutes, thirty-two seconds and you had to do some snips. You’d run right up to the wire on that one. That was an adrenalin junkie’s job as well.
I remember pressing the button in edit five to eject the tape. We did all the voiceovers; we had a voiceover booth and we’d do all the sound. I remember pressing eject, grabbing the tape and running down the corridor into VTO telecine and half-throwing it across the room. This was the transmission. He rammed it in a machine, I remember, and within seconds it was on the air. That’s how close it was.
That happened several times, with the producer coming in and saying, ‘We really have to speed up,’ as if you weren’t speeding up! You couldn’t go any faster, but the producer would always come in and say it. I’m not naming any names, because you’re recording! There was one of the producers who particularly got under my skin one day. We were working as hard as we could. They had three edit suites running and he came and said, ‘We really have to go faster’. He was the only person I’ve ever asked to leave the edit suite. I just couldn’t work with him anymore, because he was making me so nervous that I was starting to make mistakes and, of course, if you make a mistake you’ve got to correct it. So he left, and left me to his researcher, which was alright.
