when i think of the studio of the television station “tv land” i imagine a lonely guy sitting at a table smoking a cigarette, eating a sandwich in the middle of a vast warehouse full of video tapes mindlessly plucking out one episode after another of never-ending reruns of 70’s sitcoms. (kind of a video version of dr johnny fever) How close is this to the truth? Or is it more automated than i would imagine?
Depends on the size of the TV station. The small independents, yeah, it’s like that, just the guy and the engineer, but at the bigger stations there are a lot more people around.
There are usually secretaries, there is a repair guy who rushes around fixing things (which is when the “please stand by” sign goes up), the anchor people hang around and do stuff, there are “suits” who hang around, there are video editors and other tech people like that, if the station does its own news there will be makeup and lighting people and camera operators hanging around.
Most good-sized TV stations have tours you can go on, especially if you have a school group or Girl Scouts or something like that. I went on the local ABC affiliate’s tour last year with a school group and it was fascinating.
Hey craiger,
Uh, you probably noticed this by now, but each time you hit the “Submit Reply” button creates a new posts, even if it looks like nothing happened.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=22947
It’s an old problem, and I’ve been guilty of it too.
Well, when I worked for a television station in Master Control, the job basically consisted of sitting in a smallish room with a bank of VCRs, several shelves of tapes, about 20 monitors in different locations, and a door leading to the transmitter which I had to check on occassion. My job consisted of cueing the tapes up, letting the computer know which VCR they were in, then kicking back and letting them play. Unless something went wrong that required my attention, I sat around for about 6 hours for every 2 minutes of work I put into it. A lot of newspapers were read and phone calls were made during that job. However, I didn’t select the tapes we were going to play, some other department of the station did that.