20th Jan 2015
Tuesday, January 20
Whereas Sunday was one of those rare days where you can glide serenely through as everything falls into place, Tuesday was not.
The day began badly when it transpired that Ad Sales didn’t think Toyota would like the fan piece and rejected it. This was done without them even looking at the piece or even trying to sell the idea to Toyota.
The fan piece was put together after they dropped the ball promising Toyota we could do a behind the scenes piece with one of the referees… If they knew anything about major finals like the AFC Asian Cup they’d know that the organizers and federations rarely, if ever, allow the media to speak to officials.
So, in essence, they screwed up, we gave them a perfectly good alternative, they rejected it and we were forced to save their unappreciative hides…
We managed to film our piece with the grounds man Justin Lang when the call came that we had to find a 5th subject.
After talking to the wonderfully named Paul Christmas, he suggested that we interview the Press Centre Manager and he would try to arrange it for us.
We could do nothing but wait during which time I was taking increasingly frantic phone calls from Christy Simson my boss who was obviously starting to feel the heat…
Eventually after 5pm we got the green light to interview Alice Wheeler who rode to our rescue. We had under an hour to get what we needed before the Toyota Kids Escort participants arrived as we had to do a feature on them as well.
Just as we finished with Alice, the Toyota kids walked past us on their way to the changing rooms which was rubbish as we were supposed to film them arriving!
Cue more frantic phone calls to Paul who sorted it that we could interview a couple of the kids before and after the match so that was a huge relief.
There’s an age old TV adage: never work with animals or children and that proved accurate. Interviewing young kids is very difficult as they freeze in front of the camera and use one-word answers. These kids were aged between six and 10 which meant I could only ask simple questions which made matters worse!
After two excruciating attempts to get the kids to speak up we had just enough to make a feature.
With that done, we could relax for a few minutes and watch Jordan take on Palestine and we witnessed a moment of history as Palestine scored their first ever AFC Asian Cup goal which was awesome.
Post match we interviewed Alice and Justin again to complete their features and bring to an end an exceptionally long and tiring day which required a couple of beers to recover from.