….and RELAX. The uncharacteristic radio silence emanating from Masterton towers over the past few weeks is naturally down to a certain football tournament taking place in South Africa at the present time. Working for a sports radio station and also being one of the main live sport producers on said sports radio station means that the arrival of the World Cup brings with it a working schedule which at times feels like it will take almost four years to recover from.

Hence this rather fragmented series of writeups, the product of two and a half weeks of random jottings that somehow I’ve not had the opportunity to collate together into a coherent posting until today – the first day for 19 weeks that I haven’t had a live football match to magic into existence on the radio.

Magic? Well it certainly feels like that at times.

The Phoney War

We had been talking about it for months, the plans for the World Cup, speculating on who amongst the programming and production staff would actually be travelling out to South Africa, what the schedules would be, which superstar signing would be next to pull on on the grounds that he was playing in the tournament (thanks Jamie!) and just how big a party we were all going to deserve at the end of it. The fact that the World Cup was about to start for real was actually only hammered home by a brief online tweet from the man responsible for making sure everything at the South Africa end happened the way it should.

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Without seeing it all in place it is hard to convey just what a huge logistical operation a major event like this is for one small radio station. Aside from the huge crate of broadcast equipment which had to be logged, inventoried, tagged and painstakingly declared for customs at both ends of the journey, the movement of people and where they will all be from one day to the next is a whole new level of stress on top of that. Commentary teams have to be driven, bussed and flown from one stadium to the next in the early stages, with hotel rooms booked, accreditation sorted, communications links prepared and all naturally with a contingency plan in place just in case the worst happens.

On top of this, everyone back at base has to be fully briefed and up to speed on the way management want everything to sound. A week before it all kicked off, this briefing took the form of the distribution of the carefully compiled document which quickly became known as The Bible:

TheBible

This is my now well-worn copy, containing details of the staff out in South Africa and their contact numbers, ISDN numbers for our main broadcast base, our positions inside each stadium, the emergency contact for the host broadcasters, details of all sponsored features around the games, the full programme schedules for the next four weeks and most crucially off all the staffing rotas back at base, a day by day run down of who was working on which game and what duties they would undertake. Anyone expressing confusion as to what they should be doing and when was generally beaten up with a copy of The Bible which contained the definitive picture of who was where, regardless of what people claimed they had been told.

It was at this point at the start of the first full week in June that we entered what came to be known as the Phoney War. Most of the broadcast staff had flown out to South Africa at the weekend, ready to start our World Cup programming on the Monday and to properly build up the excitement and anticipation for the forthcoming festival of football. These four days were in actual fact the most challenging of all for everyone involved because naturally they involved four days of pretty much nothing happening. The team’s solution was to throw themselves headlong into as much South African culture as they could, resulting each day in several packages being sent down the line of our presenters and commentators visiting townships, historical monuments, safari parks and on one memorable occasions standing awestruck as a celebratory parade passed through the centre of Johannesburg. It was this parade in particular that exposed us for the first time to the devastating effect of a cheap plastic trumpet, something which was to become a recurring theme and indeed a headache for just about every broadcaster involved. More on that later however.

For my part I was dizzy with both anticipation and frustration, because essentially I had nothing to do. My role was master of the live matches, games which did not start until the Friday and for which all the preparation was pretty much complete. I was simply counting the hours until 1pm at the end of the week when the output was mine to control, our presenters could welcome everyone to Soccer City and the opening ceremony could get underway. Little did I guess that the problems were only just beginning.