As I type this on my irritatingly small phone keyboard, I'm looking out over a massive pit of BBC workstations at Broadcasting House. The canteen area in which audiences wait before radio recordings has a wall with glass windows and, no matter how often I've seen this sort of thing on TV, it's still weird to see it in real life. It's like the secret lair of a bond villain, complete with odd tracks just outside the window for equipment to go back and forth.
Why am I here? Because I was lucky enough to get tickets for the recording of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme. Happy as I was to get that confirmation e-mail, it's got nothing on the relief I felt when I got a little sticker on my e-ticket 20 minutes ago.
The advice that the ticket unit gives you is: "admission on site 6.15, studio doors open from 7:15". What they don't tell you is that, of you turn up at 6.20, the queue will already be right the way round the corner of the building and the people all around you will already be joking about getting turned away in an "I'm not going to admit just how bothered I'll be if I'm turned away" sort of tone.
Fifteen nerve-racking minutes later and I was in.
I'm now in a very informal queue that seems to have formed just because a couple of people went to stand by the doors. I'm not sure that we even know that they're the right doors but no one is going to miss out on a good seat for the sake of a little extra queueing.
I don't know if things have just changed a lot since the last time I went to a recording or if this is the John Finnemore effect. I've seen one girl in a pilots jacket so I suspect the latter.
Why am I here? Because I was lucky enough to get tickets for the recording of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme. Happy as I was to get that confirmation e-mail, it's got nothing on the relief I felt when I got a little sticker on my e-ticket 20 minutes ago.The advice that the ticket unit gives you is: "admission on site 6.15, studio doors open from 7:15". What they don't tell you is that, of you turn up at 6.20, the queue will already be right the way round the corner of the building and the people all around you will already be joking about getting turned away in an "I'm not going to admit just how bothered I'll be if I'm turned away" sort of tone.
Fifteen nerve-racking minutes later and I was in.
I'm now in a very informal queue that seems to have formed just because a couple of people went to stand by the doors. I'm not sure that we even know that they're the right doors but no one is going to miss out on a good seat for the sake of a little extra queueing.
I don't know if things have just changed a lot since the last time I went to a recording or if this is the John Finnemore effect. I've seen one girl in a pilots jacket so I suspect the latter.
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