BBC OB Training
Teaching the BBC's regional teams to plan and run their own outside broadcasts
The BBC Academy brought us in to turn regional appetite into capability across its bases. Six courses in, it rebuilt the programme with us and asked to write the result up as one of its own success stories.
Snapshot
Client: BBC Academy
Sector: Broadcast, internal team training
Delivered: Six one-day courses across three regional bases
Bases: BBC Bristol, BBC Southampton, BBC Leeds
The BBC's regions wanted to get out on the road
The BBC wanted its regional teams running their own outside broadcasts wherever a story needed one. What the regions did not have was the experience of planning an OB, the knowledge of what to look for and what to plan for that only comes from having set up a good few of them. The BBC Academy needed people who could teach that to teams doing it for the first time.
Delegates left the day able to plan and run an OB themselves, and intending to argue for more of them back in their regions, some of them knowing their line managers would take convincing at first. In the months after, more outside broadcasts began appearing across the regions. The BBC's own verdict came in writing: the Operations Executive for BBC Local credited the programme with "giving our teams the confidence to plan and deliver high-quality outside broadcasts," and the Academy asked to write the programme up as one of its own team success stories. The relationship has not closed with the sixth course. The BBC has raised taking the training further across its Local teams.
Results: What the teams left with
Why a national broadcaster handed this to an outside team
The Academy extended a working relationship that was already more than a decade old. Sparkly Light has run the BBC Academy's multi-camera directing course for over ten years, and had already cut that five-day course down into a one-day version for news directors. Behind that sits 30 years of outside broadcasts of every size, both produced and directed, so the teaching could draw on more than one seat in the truck.
The call that made the course work: getting out of the classroom
The brief asked for classroom teaching and a practical exercise. We pushed back on the classroom part. There is only so much a team can take in behind a desk, so we made the case to the BBC for an afternoon out of the room. Delegates would go out to a real local site. There they would meet the site contact and put the questions an OB depends on, shaped by the morning's teaching, then build their own OB plan for that site and present it to the room at the end of the day. Persuading a national broadcaster to change the shape of its own brief takes the standing to say what will work and why. From decades of planning these broadcasts, we knew the questions a first-timer forgets to ask, and knew they land far harder with a real location in front of you than on a slide.
The first round was pitched broadly. Feedback from the Academy's line managers said it needed to sit closer to the regional news environment, so we rebuilt it. The sharpest change was bringing in the director of the BBC's Six and Ten news to weave his experience through the teaching, so the examples matched the delegates' day job. The BBC saw enough in that to commission a second round.
Rebuilding it between rounds
If your own teams should be running your broadcasts
If your organisation has an in-house comms or media team that could be running its own live broadcasts, but you bring in an outside crew every time, the gap is usually the same one the BBC's regions had: the know-how of how a broadcast is planned and pulled off, which only comes from having done it. We can build a course around your teams and the broadcasts they need to make, and have your people planning a real broadcast on site before they leave the room. Send us the brief and we will shape the day around it.
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Send us the brief and we'll shape the day around it
Got teams who could be running your own live broadcasts, but you hire a crew every time?
Send us the brief and we'll shape a course around your people.