World in Action was a regular visitor, once a week. They would come in on Sunday morning.
Once it had left film?
Once it had left film. It would be on various tapes. They had their own offline editors. We’d get a box of tapes and a little edit decision list for the computer. The first part was always the easiest, which was just assembling the programme. But then, of course, the producer-director would come in and we’d go through the entire programme, and he’d make the changes then. He’d say, ‘I want this effect’.
We had to make the graphics up. Some of the things they wanted us to do used to make my hair curl – and it was curly then! I remember the most nervous part of the job was going in on Sunday morning and thinking, please let it be a nice simple one! Please don’t want the Earth.’
Sometimes you’d have to do effects that you had to build up over layers and layers. It would take you an hour to do just one kind of shot. Sometimes we had to work into the early hours of the morning, because at nine o’clock the following morning it was in audio dubbing having the sound tweaked. But it was things like that you used to live on, because of the adrenalin. That’s the thing I miss the most.
