Communication Let Me Down

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Before the World Cup kicked off there was a fair amount of nervous talk about the implications at staging such an event in an African country (albeit one of the most developed ones of all). Would safety be an issue? Would the stadiums be up to scratch? Would the transport infrastructure cope?

I can happily confirm to you that all of these were totally the wrong questions to be asking. What really should have been foremost amongst peoples concerns was the issue of “will we be able to get a connection to the games themselves?”.

For the outside broadcaster, ISDN technology has for years been nothing short of a bloody miracle. The concept of a little black box that can convert your voice to a string of numbers, squirt them at high speed down a telecoms connection and then have them reassembled intact at the other end with barely a second or so of delay is quite simply genius – when it works. Part of the dark arts of sports producing is knowing the exact amount of love to give a terminal adapter and codec unit, how many times to retry the connection, what standards and indeed often what brands of kit will talk to others and most importantly of all how not to panic when things just don’t seem to be working and the minutes before airtime are steadily ticking away.

Call it instinct, but 60 minutes before we were due to be live in the magnificent Soccer City football stadium in Johannesburg on that Friday lunchtime, I knew exactly the reason my attempts to connect to the commentary positions were were failing. The connection was taking longer than usual to establish and the boxes at our end were simply assuming no answer and timing out. I delved into the little used configuration menu on the Nicral unit and found a setting for “Long Dial” which I enabled. Ten seconds later the little red light winked into life and crowd atmosphere flooded over the studio speakers. The first worry was out of the way.

For purely selfish reasons I’m very fond of talking up the work of the sports producer and how pivotal we are to the entire operation. Truth be told there are some aspects of the job that aren’t really all that hard work. I mean how much effort is it really to say to two commentators: “right, I want you to describe what is happening on the pitch for 45 minutes… and GO”? When all is well, we have nothing to do. Our job is to be there when things don’t go to plan, when the timings of the game are disrupted, when entire running orders need to be reworked at the last minute or worst of all when we lose the link altogether.

The initial connection to Soccer City may well have been established, and indeed seemed perfectly happy whilst we were chatting off air and rehearsing the big opening. Come 1pm however and it was a a different matter.

BOOM! CRASH! THUNDER! Went the grandiose station production, announcing that this was indeed the 2010 FIFA World Cup and was absolutely Big Game Radio. Then the lights began to flash:

“…ood afer… I…. ark… Sag… ….come to the mag… …ity…. asberg…”

Cometh the hour, cometh the technical issues. The sheer volume of noise coming from the stadium, added to the enthusiastic bellowing of our commentary team, proved to be too much for the apparently fragile connection to handle and it steadily became more and more intermittent. I shouted at the tech op to cut to a trail, yanked the presenters off air and advised the staff back at our main base that they were going to have to run with things for a few minutes whilst we got it sorted.

Never have I been more glad to have the back up of the rest of the office as the control room was flooded with senior producers who fussed over replacement material and briefed the remaining presenters whilst I made some frantic telephoning to the stadium and asked them to reset everything and possibly maybe turn the volume down a little.

So it was that our live coverage got off to a rather inauspicious start, fifteen minutes later than planned as the line finally became stable and the big build up got underway. Naturally relaxing even for a moment was a danger, and sure enough about 30 minutes into the second half another crisis presented itself as the commentary fell off air altogether. Not just the commentary it seems as absolutely every link we had to South Africa chose that particular moment to hiccup and reset, leaving the little black box that controls everything looking like Santa’s grotto as every red light it had available winked in alarm. Suddenly I was left with nothing, no stadium, no presenters and nothing to fall back on. Apparently at that very moment something deep within the telecoms network in Johannesburg decided it had had enough and was going to go offline for a few moments, blacking us out totally.

Fortunately the interruption was brief, a minute or so later we had re-established the connection and the commentators were faded back to air as if nothing had happened at their end. At my end however I had caused the office a brief moment of hilarity by filling the silence with the first thing that came to hand – a trail proudly boasting of our LIVE UNINTERRUPTED COMMENTARY which for one very brief moment was the emptiest of empty boasts.

The aftermath of the game prompted a few worried conversations afterwards as everyone wondered whether the flaky communications was going to be an ongoing issue throughout the whole tournament. We were at that point just 24 hours away from the first England game of the World Cup and were facing the prospect of having that too fall off the air dramatically. I did my best to assure everyone that I did not think it was going to happen. In my experience the first day of a major event such as the World Cup is always plagued with teething troubles as the final kinks in the system are ironed out. If we were suffering problems then you can bet that hundreds of other broadcasters around the world were going through the same thing, all of whom would be banging on the doors of the organisers and advising them to get things sorted at their earliest convenience – and preferably sooner.

Sure enough the problems were not confined to the radio, and on the Saturday afternoon whilst preparing for the England match that evening I turned up the sound of the BBC1 commentary on the earlier game and heard the voice of Jonathan Pearce cutting in and out as his own feed from the stadium broke up and at times vanished altogether.

One final amusing postscript to these first day challenges came that evening at the stadium in Rustenburg for the first England game. Still reeling from the challenges of the previous day, the team onsite informed me down the line that they had run into ITV anchor Jim Rosenthal in the press room who had chuckled at their plight and dryly commiserated with them about the technical problems we had suffered. He who laughs last and all that… five minutes into the match came the now infamous ITV technical failure which saw their HD channel cut accidentally to a commercial just as England’s first goal against the USA was scored. After informing the team down the line of this disaster and the shitstorm that was inevitably brewing amongst those watching back home, I am told that a whole band of British radio producers instantly began counting the moments until they ran into Big Jim again, if only to commiserate with him sincerely about the terrible technical problems he and his employers were experiencing.