A Day at the BBC
In the Christmas holidays I was fortunate enough to go to the BBC Broadcasting house in London. I had been wanting and wishing to go there for a while. My best friend’s Mum works for the World Service at the broadcasting house and she was able to give us a guided tour. When we arrived at the building it looked far smaller than how it looks like on the television.
Before we went into the building we went for a coffee at Cafe Nero, which you can see in the background from the 'One Show'. We then went into the building, where we first went to the reception desk to get our visitors pass. There are two sets of doors, one from the outside and another set of security doors on the other side. We went through the second pair of doors where you arrive in a room with some chairs. Behind the chairs was a big sheet of glass, and behind this you can see the desks of the BBC news room. You can also see the cameras that film the BBC News theme tune, little did we know that we were stood directly on top of the news desk. We were standing; looking at the news desks, however we found out that the news desk was directly underneath us. (We had to bounce up and down).
We then went to the lifts and went right up to the top floor where Radio One is. We could not actually go inside the Radio 1 Studio because of the security but we could faintly see through the glass. We then slowly walked back down the stairs. Each floor had lots of small funky areas where you can have meetings. We met a man from the World Service who is very famous in Somalia. Radio One only get about 3 million viewers but he had 20 million viewers. He was going to commentate on a premiership football match. In Somalia, the paparazzi follow him around everywhere. He was a very polite and friendly man.
Afterwards we went to the basement and you would be surprised that the BBC News is actually filmed in the basement, but you wouldn't think it was. Then we quietly walked into the BBC news room which is surprisingly large, in fact it is the largest news room in the world. The shots of the newsroom which you see on the BBC news theme tune are all filmed live. Also there is a no camera crew as everything is done by robots.
My friends mum was also able to explain how the news room works and how the news is filtered to the correct team to make the news that we all see.
After sneaking out of the BBC newsroom we went to the ground floor and continued a fantastic day in London.
By Lewis Walduck (7RGO)