On the 6th May, the team at WINOL hosted their very own Election Coverage show which went live from 10pm until 6 am the following day. The show, in a word, was a success.
The team put in a tremendous amount of work making packages for the show in the weeks prior to the election date in order to give the show more substance. All the packages centred around politics and many were interviews with electorate hopefuls although a few were more economical pieces on topics such as fair trade, recycling, the carbon foot print etc.
Josh, Joey and I headed to Romsey to create a package about the constituency and managed to get a few vox pops from the public about the upcoming election as well as an interview with the Liberal Democrat electorate hopeful, Sandra Gidley.
Unfortunately for us, the day started poorly, because when we got to Romsey, we discovered the ever tremendous loan counter had failed to put the camera we had hired out on charge, and the battery was flat. So being the opportunists us students are, we headed straight to the pub..... but with a legitimate reason of using the pubs electricity socket to charge the camera in exchange for a nice cold pint of coke.
Once the camera was charged, we headed out into the town getting as many general views, and vox pops as we could but the people of Romsey weren't too keen on appearing in front of the camera so we had to work had to get our footage. We then struck lucky, when we went to the town hall and we were told that the Liberal Democrat candidate for Romsey was just arriving in town, so we rushed down to the address we were given and Sandra Gidley herself kindly gave an interview for us. We were initially worried about the sound, as it was a particularly windy day and the sound levels were through the roof as the wind attacked the gun mic!
Fortunately for us, when editing, we managed to drop the sound level completely and the interview was saved. We cut the package to a minute and a half and submitted it to the editors. Next stop, Election Night!
Having been preparing all day, by increasing our knowledge on the political parties we would be covering, in my case, The Liberals, we headed into the studio dressed smartly at approximately 8pm. We prepared up to date scripts for the top of each hour giving our audience a round up of how each political party was fairing, paying particular attention to the regions close to us in Winchester. The newsroom was hectic and people were rushing about in order to get everything to run smoothly, but overall everyone enjoyed it, and the highlight of the night was when at 5:30am the majority of the team had gathered into the studio for the final result coming in from Winchester, and we all celebrated at the end of the show when we learnt that Steve Brine the local conservative MP had been elected.
During the debrief, although we were tired, there was a sense of pride and satisfaction amongst us all, as we knew we had put on a great show. Our traffic was through the roof compared to our average bulletins and we had even managed to break some results to our audience before the BBC with thanks to your reporters out in the field at various constituencies across the UK.
Overall, the Election Coverage Show was extremely successful, the quality of the show was outstanding for student work, and given the current state of our government, one would not rule out another election sooner rather than later, and if that happens the WINOL team will be ready and waiting to put on another show!
