London fun

Well, what a weekend it has been! London certainly is a fun – and very busy - place to be at Christmas time and we spent Saturday morning enjoying the Christmas lights and window displays at the department stores on Oxford Street. Then we met Jennifer, Russell, Josh and Ben at the new BBC Television centre in Portland Place. We had a coffee together first in the Caffe Nero which is right next to it, and it was so lovely to see them all. Russell gave us a fantastic tour of the news room, which is huge and open plan with balconies going up eight storeys high. The basement floor has desks in a central hub, with rows of desks going out from the centre like a spider’s legs for each different section of the news. Also on the basement floor is the news studio and we could see the news reader broadcasting live. Eagle-eyed viewers could have seen us walking past in the background among the desks that can be seen during the broadcast. Russell showed us a huge touch screen where you can look at all the news stories together with the statistics of how many people are viewing the stories on the website. Russell’s desk on the 1st floor overlooks all of this and it’s amazing. Just along from his area is the BBC weather area, and he introduced us to weather man Darren Bett who explained to us how it all works. I got the chance to stand in front of the “green screen” and practised giving the weather forecast by pointing at the different areas while looking at the map on a screen.
We also noticed (from the big screen behind the news reader) that there was a “Breaking News” story, which was, sadly, the death that morning of restaurant critic A. A. Gill. We saw the journalists working to add more details from the first, very short reports that they got from The Times newspaper. It really was fascinating.
Finally Russell took us right up the 8th floor where we could see the stylishly decorated Radio 1 Studios and also beautiful twilight views down Regent Street, where this year the Christmas decorations are huge angels with sweeping wings.