Birth, Death and Important Stuff In-Between: The Effect of Major News Events on the Delivery of Subtitles

And in-between there is all kinds of other important stuff that goes on. Here in Red Bee Media’s Access Services team one of our roles is to make sure news about all these things is made accessible to deaf and hard-of-hearing TV viewers via subtitles.

I am a Duty Manager in the Access Services Planning and Delivery team. A major part of our role is looking ahead at our clients’ TV schedules to make sure that we know about the programmes and live events that our clients, such as the BBC, Sky and Channel 4, are planning to broadcast. This forecasting begins weeks and months ahead of transmission so that we can make sure we have the correct number of subtitlers available at the right time. And as the transmission month/day/week approaches, schedules change and shifts/work hours are altered in order to cover these changes.

Schedule changes in the run-up to broadcast affect what we do in myriad ways, but most are relatively minor and the working day ticks on acknowledging these changes. A programme might be re-edited, a scheduled programme might be replaced by a different programme. However, nothing affects the schedules and the Planning and Delivery team’s day more than a major news event.

Planning (subtitles) & Delivery (of future monarchs)
Most people would agree that the birth of Prince George of Cambridge was a major news event. And since the birth of our future monarch couldn’t be neatly scheduled in advance in the TV listings, it presented some unique challenges for the team. For hours, we subtitled rolling news coverage on Sky News and the BBC News Channel as the world’s press camped outside St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington waiting for the first glimpse of the royal baby but with the static front door of the Lindo Wing featuring extensively for much of the day. As word got out that we were perhaps minutes away from the unveiling of the newborn royal progeny, the Duty Manager had to prepare live subtitling contingency plans in case BBC One chose to cut away from its scheduled programming in order to cover the baby reveal. When the Palace announced that the world would see the baby before 7pm, this meant liaising with BBC scheduling on what that would mean for the eighteen regional news opts (this is when the news cuts away from the national news to regional editions, as happens at 1830 every week day on BBC One), and making sure we always had enough subtitlers available for the majority of the day in case live coverage of the event replaced pre-recorded programmes in the schedules. In the end, the first footage of Prince George was shown after the opts had finished and BBC One then took the BBC News Channel’s subtitling feed. (Of course, at that stage he wasn’t actually Prince George as he hadn’t been named, but our subtitlers had been keeping track of all the likely names and were well prepared to subtitle George, Alexander and Louis once the names were announced).

The death of Baroness Thatcher
I was on my way to a late shift (2pm-midnight if you’re wondering) a few months ago when I got a text from a friend informing me of the death of Margaret Thatcher. I immediately knew that her demise guaranteed that there were going to be some big and immediate schedule changes, which yours truly was going to have to deal with.

Red Bee Media’s UK subtitling team is based in various locations. The majority of the subtitlers are located in our Ealing and Glasgow offices, but we also have subtitling teams located in Belfast, Cardiff and Newcastle, as well as dozens of subtitlers who work online from home.

On any given day the live allocations rota is a big amorphous jigsaw. When an urgent schedule change big or small comes through from the broadcasters, the Duty Manager is required to re-arrange the jigsaw pieces (which subtitler on which shift is covering which programme) in order to fit the new arrangement, contacting the subtitling team in order to keep everyone up to date on their altered list of work allocations. Something like the death of Margaret Thatcher radically changes the picture the jigsaw is trying to make, and although the patience and skill of a multitude of staff from subtitlers to transmission assistants make sure the subtitles appear on screen, at the nerve centre of the change is the Duty Manager, re-organizing staff effort like a Vegas black jack dealer shuffling a card deck, albeit at a slower pace and in a more temperate climate.

On the day Thatcher’s death was announced I arrived in our Ealing office to find my colleague working past the end of her shift to deal with the first wave of schedule changes. These mainly involved the replacement of existing programmes with obituaries and the extension/addition of news slots but there were also some more unpredictable changes, such as the addition of a five-minute news bulletin into the Channel 4 programme What’s Cooking? and delays to the start time to the BBC regional football series Late Kick Off.

Wanting Andy Murray to lose
There are three types of people who ever want Andy Murray to lose at tennis:
1) Non-Brits
2) Miserablists
3) Duty Managers who are concerned that any successful attempt to pull back from being a set down in Wimbledon will almost certainly lead to prolonged coverage, schedule changes and the mass re-organization of the live scheduling rota.

It’s not that a Duty Manager wants Murray to lose from the outset. It’s just that they want whoever does win to do it in straight sets to minimise schedule disruption. This was the case with Murray’s victory over the fictional sounding racquet enthusiast Fernando Verdasco in the Wimbledon Men’s Quarter Finals. I won’t mention the name of the Duty Manager who was on shift that day by name, but her heart sank as it became apparent that Murray was going to come back from his losing position to an impressive victory, ultimately altering BBC One’s schedules for the rest of the day.

So in conclusion…
This is what goes on behind the scenes to make sure unpredictable major news stories and live events are shown with subtitles. Personally, I probably won’t ever win Wimbledon, but I was born, and one day I’m definitely going to die, hopefully a long way off, like at least 2070. If my death doesn’t warrant at least one schedule change and re-allocation of live subtitling effort, I’ll be pretty disappointed. Not because I want to be famous, but because I’m big on schadenfreude and the idea that it might make the day more complicated for one of my ex-colleagues amuses me. Major news events are both the bane of Duty Managers and also the very thing that keep us on our toes. We’d all like an easy day at work, but unfortunately for us that would mean living in a world without birth, death and all the exciting things that happen in-between. And what kind of world would that be?

Aidan McCaffery, Duty Manager, Access Services.