clare siobhan

Last Friday I was lucky enough to get the chance to visit the ITV studios in Leeds thanks to my ‘Research and Writing’ lecturer Jason McCartney.

As a group we were given the chance to see the large office space in which all the journalists work from and upload and edit their own stories, as well as where the presenters and other members of the Calender team work and dicuss the next news show.

I was surprized that the team was still so large after the ITV job cutdowns, but we were informed that the team would be cut further in the new year as 2 other large regional teams were merged.

After viewing the offices, we were then led down a corridoor in which all the hair, make-up and dressing rooms were located, as well as a nicely furnished room for guests on the show to wait until they were called on (at the time a ‘by day police man’ but ‘by night a bodybuilder’ was waiting for the 6pm show!).

We were then all seated in a viewing booth behind the studio itself with a glass panel in which we would see a number of screens and computers. The audio and visual staff all worked here as well as the producer and staff to ‘count it’ the presenters to each individual news story. It was very exciting watching the whole news programme come together, as well as finding out that a lot of it isn’t live (even the studio bits!) and that the presenters have a really hard job of listening to 5 people in their ear all at once while reading from the auto-cue as well as having to fill in any additional time gaps with small talk with only 5 seconds warning! Presenting is much harder then it looks!