Beeb'in Amazing! (Thank you S2R)

The final day of the Supporter 2 Reporter consisted of a rough overview of the last two day's work and a timescale for the day's events. The group surrounded around the sofas in a horseshoe around Suzi, where every one of them demonstrating their talents during a 'What have you learnt?' type of conversation. Moments later, and for what seemed like the umpteenth time in a mere 14 or so hours, they returned to their blogs for yet another insight into their minds. Almost completely as predicted, this consisted of all but one story on the previous night's Champions League football matches, where unfortunately Arsenal hadn't been knocked out just yet.

Around the corner came a lunch break, where I found I had packed far littler than I thought. (This was later solved by my discovery of a co-worker's lollipop stash, helping myself to the cheeky drumstick or two as well as an extremely nutritious cheesestring).

Zip forward an hour or two and our train pulled up in White City (thankfully, the train was direct on one line, saving the dreaded scenario of a lost child in between transfers). A short walk, two revolving doors, badge dispersal and a security check later later saw us enter into a whole new world. Like my blog about my activity day at Bournemouth University, I was once again to be immersed in a world full of switchboards, microphones and cameras, eagerly taking in a thousand and one sights as fast as my brain would let me.

The first room we entered was a Radio 5 Live broadcasting room, complete with a gallery/control room for the directors/producers - both of which can be seen in the photos. The thing that shocked me the most was the contrast between the two rooms in terms of equipment. In the broadcasting room - the room where the journalists, reporters and guests would record live transmission - there was a round table upon which lay a few monitors, microphones and more water bottles than Evian produce in an hour. In complete opposition, the control room contained an extremely long switchboard with hundreds of different controls, a very generous handful of monitors (in perspective, 5 were used just to air outside channels), and dozens of computers, cameras, and headsets to relay information to the presenters.

After heading out of the radio studio, we travelled across the room towards "the Doughnut", a section of the BBC offices shaped, as you may have guessed, like a doughnut - which I can safely say is extremely annoying to get lost in, managed, shamefully, by us. However, on the way we did have time to see two rather well known faces - Sophie Raworth (BBC 1pm News presenter) and Jake Humphrey (BBC Sport presenter, pictured), the latter of which I managed to exchange small talk and grab a typical 'fan photo' with.

Sections of the walls inside the Doughnut contained coves where props from television shows were displayed, including a commentary sheet used by John Motson (pictured), a few Doctor Who masks, and one of Tracy Beaker's costumes - again another photo op. This was soon followed up by a gallery view of two different broadcasting studios - one set up for ITV's hit show Goldenballs, the other completely bare to show the difference in sets. Although no photo was managed here due to a live shoot, the way in which the studio had been laid out to form the Goldenballs set will stick in my mind forever. The thing that I realised mostly from this section of our unofficial tour was how heavily programmes rely on the wide-angle lens when shooting to make the sets look far bigger than they actually are.

To conclude the tour in true multimedia style, we entered tour guide Ian Morris' "home" offices, in the BBC Sport section of the building. Ian informed us of his job as well as the importance of working under pressure and as a team as well as including the fundamental and extremely over-used yet effective quote "It's not what you know, it's who you know" as advice for us budding journalists.

The only dampener on the day was upon arrival back at Leyton Orient during a final goodbye with everyone, where Suzi's "Did you enjoy today?" question provoked several iffy answers, including a rather depressing "Not really, but I met that guy from CBBC" (Jake Humphreys I assume). Even though the trip was intended for the students training to become reporters, I found it extremely useful for myself, for my career, for my life.