Stuart Pinfold

How Not To Name A Cat

So, I've just come back from the course that's mandatory for all BBC staff following the 'summer of scandals' throughout the media: How Not To Name A Cat - aka The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing But The Truth, How To Run A Premium Rate Phone-In Scandal, Raise £7.8m And Get Away With It, or the more humble (and the actual title!) Safeguarding Trust.

It consisted of watching a clip from Screenwipe (officially my favourite programme to watch during those long night shifts) and listening and watching the various 'scams' which occured during the summer.

We then had a discussion trying to distinguish what is artifice - i.e. practices which technically lie to the audience but are generally accepted by the production community and audiences (and have been for decades) - and what is an all-out scam - i.e. taking £1 from people you know have no chance of winning the competition they're entering.

The upshot of which means that most artifice is still OK - green-screen/chromakey (think of all the times you see Big Ben in the background and then ask yourself which possible building could have that view in central London!), walkies (the interviewee walking into shot by way of introduction, usually filmed after the interview), noddies (the interviewer nodding along to responses to help editing, almost always filmed afterwards after the intervewee has left) and talkies (the interviewer asking the same questions to camera on shoots where only one is available, again after the interview has finished).

What was interesting, however, was the distinct lack of discussion relating to these kind of issues when it comes to radio. Radio also has its own set of artifice - arguably even easier to pass off as real. Traffic and travel reports across most BBC local radio stations are sent down an ISDN line from various Trafficlink offices, along with a set of jingles and personalised sign-offs which imply that someone at the station in question is reading the travel news. Without pictures, it's easy to say you're somewhere when, in fact, you're somewhere completely different: sitting in your own living room, for example, or in 'a car park in central London' when you're just outside the doughnut at Television Centre.

None of these examples explicitly lie to the audience: there is an area used for car parking just outside stage door in TVC, when correspondents are live in their own home or reporting from London on a story that's happening where the BBC has no access, we don't say a location - just 'so and so joins me now' and use the sign-off "BBC News" (without a location) - and although the travel presenters make no mention of the fact that they're in a Trafficlink office and will be giving another local radio station's listeners travel updates in 5 minutes' time, they also never say that they're in the local area, or employed by the BBC.

In one of the most interesting outcomes of the session, we were discussing whether it's acceptable to re-record pieces from a different location after the event if the material is not quite right for any reason: Charlie Brooker has an episode like this in the video above. Imagine you've just come back from a week's recording in Russia, the example in the course went, and you realise that for an entire day's recording, the microphone has a loud buzz on it which wasn't noticed at the time. Obviously, for television, there's not much you can do without making it look like a badly-dubbed foreign film; but in radio, would it be acceptable to re-record the sections you really wanted to put into the final piece, even though they weren't recorded while you were actually in the country?

The answer: Saying "I'm in Red Square and I can see..." IS acceptable because the location has been visited - but saying "I'm in Red Square with Vladamir Putin" ISN'T acceptable when recorded over an ISDN line from London, because you weren't in Red Square during the interview.

Suitable confused? Good - because so am I. In fact, more confused than when I went in - although at least I now have the authority to name a cat without losing my job. Probably.

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