Celebrity Big Brother

I was very involved in the first three years of Big Brother (previous stories; Marcus, the voice of Big Brother, Avids dangerous for transmission, and my OB truck) - I designed and (with Tony D's help!) built the post-production environment, wrote the video ingest automation for the network review system and was one of the technical supervisor on most days. I felt that at the time they really saw it as a brave and new format where they were doing some truely innovative television. By the time I left it seemed that all the experienced TV folks who'd done other things before Big Brother had moved on and all the production crew and editors were youngsters that had only done reality shows. I think it's no coincidence that as a programme it's become degenerate and the only interest it holds is a purient one. It's all come to a head this week with small-minded bigotry - is she a racist? It probably doesn't matter - it's all bullying after all.

Resolution getting set up for Big Brother

This summer's television horror that is Big Brother is almost upon us. I've been up at Elstree Film & TV Studios doing a system for Wish Films and noticed that Resolution - the facility I used to run engineering at - were also on site in the George Lucas stage with the OB truck that I designed (and Tony wired) in 2001. I had a look inside and it is still tidy. They've expanded the size of the Unity SAN - up to twelve Terrabytes now (the last BB I was tech supervisor on we did it on a mere 3.5 Tbytes). It was also nice to hook up with Jonathan Braman who (as well as having a page on IMDb!) has cut off his dreds!

You gotta cover yourself!

Something that often makes other engineers chuckle is when I tell them about a trick (that I feel I pioneered!) used on such shows as Big Brother and Fame Academy - basically if you run the risk of having to play off the SAN to air via an Avid it is worth deleting all of the Avid error slates (which appear on the machines output if the error condition arises) and replacing them with colour bars with the ident of either the broadcaster or the company taking the signal for you - typically BT or SIS in the UK. That way if your Avid burps while playing it'll display colour bars that (to whoever is watching the feed) look like it's someone else's fault rather than yours!

Last Christmas when I was working on Celebrity Big Brother the company's accountant warned us not to spend any of the cash float on 'fancy' biscuits "like those Jaffacakes I see the engineers eating!" - talk about red rag to a bull. I set up a webcam and enouraged everyone to only eat Jaffacakes and pile the empty boxes in front of the cam - Marcus, the voice of Big Brother kindly recorded us this tribute!
hear it here!
(many thanks to my chum Ian Staite for re-finding this mp3 - I'd lost it).