jamesmastertoninterview

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The James Masterton Interview
Live Sports Producer

James Masterton is a live sports producer for talkSPORT and was part of the team behind
the station’s coverage of the 2006 World Cup, Champions League Final and outside
broadcasts in Singapore, Australia and South Africa.

Away from talkSPORT, James is a headline columnist for the music website Yahoo! Launch,
where he writes a weekly column analysing new entries in the UK Singles Chart. In addition,
he also works in informational technology for a radio production company. James has also
made several media appearances, most recently on Channel 4’s “100 Worst Pop Records”.

As a producer of talkSPORT’s live football coverage, what is a typical day like when
preparing for a live broadcast and do you work closely with the on-air team of presenters
and commentators when setting up for live coverage on the day of a match?
There are two sides to any kind of live broadcast. On the one hand you have the team at
the ground who will have arrived about two hours before we go to air to set up their
equipment and make sure they are able to connect to the studio and that everything is
working correctly. For matches in the UK, this is normally quite straightforward as we have permanent points at all the Premiership grounds so it is a case of turning up, getting in and plugging in. I maintain, however, that you have not lived until you have had to haul several cases of equipment up to the very top of the television gantry at Stamford Bridge: through the doors, up some stairs, across a set of benches, through another set of doors, into a rickety service elevator, through a corridor and up one final set of stairs at the top of the stand.

Also on occasions like the Carling Cup Final which we broadcast live last month on talkSPORT, we have radio microphones on site in order to do live after match interviews with this being a more complicated setup and can take up to three hours. In preparation for major events like this there are a lot of logistics which the outside broadcast producer will take on beforehand. For example, they will liase with the club or authority over number of seats needed ordering ISDN lines and gaining the correct media passes.

I am normally back at base in London and preparing the live show. Our job is to sort the running order for each show, deciding which guests go where in the build up to the match, when to talk to reporters at other matches for previews and preparing any other production that the presenters want to use such as pre-recorded interviews. Very often you find the programmes write themselves. During the World Cup I prepared the two-hour build up for all the England games. It seemed daunting but after you had found time for a report on the team bus departing, pieces with reporters in pubs or at the fanzone, linkups with Ian Abrahams and scheduled the bookmakers slot, it would be more or less time for kick-off.

You were part of the production team for talkSPORT’s coverage of the World Cup. What was the process in setting up live commentaries and the stresses and strains of working during this busy period?
I was one of the happy few that was left back in London and charged with making sure the live games went to air. I am full of admiration for the people who organised the logistics of the whole Germany operation. We had people booked into hotels across lots of German cities, studios set up in other hotel rooms and an almost constant flow of personnel who were shuttled around the country to be in the right place for each match.

After buying the rights to the event, it was six months before the World Cup when Matt Smith, Bill Ridley, Steve Hodge and Adam Bullock had their first meeting with Infront and HBS in Munich. It is not just a case of buying the rights from them we work with them throughout the entire tournament to ensure we get everything we need in terms of commentary positions and whether the equipment they have is suitable for what we want to do, and when it wasn't we worked together on solutions. We also had a three day long workshop with other broadcasters from around the globe discussing all broadcast logistics of the tournament. Television always takes first place and radio stations tend to like doing things a little different. In fact talkSPORT threw up a few new challenges for the host broadcaster, so we taught them something too. In terms of talkSPORT's planning, the initial stages started around one year before the event and included a total of two on site visits.

Back at base it was pretty relentless. For the first two weeks of the competition there were three matches a day, seven days a week. Happily I didn't have to do all of them but it did mean I barely went home for the first week. Unlike a normal match where you arrive at the ground, plug in and dial the studio, at the World Cup everything was managed through a central system. Hence, the guys would arrive at the stadium, set themselves up and then notify us back at base. We would dial our allocated number and hope that the right buttons had been pressed and that we would be connected to the guys in the stadium. Most of the time it worked, but it was when it didn't that you had the headache of calling the helpline and hoping they could work out why the routing had failed. I noted with pride that we never once began a broadcast without having connected to the commentators which is a testament in a way to the efficiency with which it was all organised.

Jim Proudfoot, Chris Cooper, Nigel Pearson, Adrian Durham and Alvin Martin, amongst others, were all key figures in talkSPORT’s coverage at the World Cup. Bearing in mind it was talkSPORT’s first official World Cup, how do you think the on-air product sounded for those listening back in the UK and around Germany?
On air it sounded fabulous and you have to credit the team effort that went into it all. Everyone played their roles perfectly. You had Mike Parry roaming around and generating headlines and giving his opinion at all times including his explosive rant at Alan Brazil and Graham Beecroft on The Sports Breakfast the day after England were knocked out was particularly memorable for myself. The Moose came into his own, out and about in the fan parks and could always be guaranteed to find someone interesting to talk to. One hot day he commented on the lack of clothing some of the ladies were sporting. I instructed him to go and find a naked Swedish girl to talk to and an hour later he was back and as good as his word.

The commentators were terrific. Describing an entire football match and preparing all the facts in advance almost every day is no mean feat. We thought we were exhausted back here, I can't imagine how people like Jim Proudfoot and Chris Cooper retained their voices.It was also a good chance to try out some other people, so sending people like Tim White and Ian Danter to the lesser matches for the digital-only commentaries was the chance for them to show us what they can do. It was great to see they were more than equal to the challenge. You have also got to credit the work of the people back in London. Hawksbee & Jacobs tweaked their format into the “Back Home” shows and the broadcasts from the Sports Cafe were perfect scene setters to the action and allowed people to share the flavour of the "watching the World Cup at home" experience.

I was very proud to be at the heart of the whole thing and to have been one of the people who brought some of the biggest sporting moments of the year to the nation. Just hearing the music again brings back a rush of nostalgia for that four-week period in the middle of last summer. The strange thing was that after it was all over there was no time to breathe, we were busy making plans for the new football season.

How much preparation is there for live events that take place further afield such as the West Indies, Singapore, Australia, South Africa and the Champions League Final in Turkey and France?
Things like the cricket tours were unusual as we were setting up to broadcast in a series of unfamiliar locations on the other side of the world, so some reconnaissance work was necessary. For the matches at the World Cup, it was a case of plug in and go as all work had been done by the host broadcasters. The groundwork had been done the previous winter when we had visited all the cities in advance and done the research by planning all the journeys and booked the hotels, both for accommodation and for broadcast.

For domestic matches as I've mentioned before we have a permanent broadcast point at all the big stadia so we can just turn up on the day and go. For overseas Champions League matches the clubs we have rights with look after things on our behalf and advise us on how many seats we have been allocated. We then book lines via BT who act on our behalf with foreign telecom companies. For the final itself we buy the rights and organise positions through T.E.A.M. who are licensed to sell the rights by UEFA. It helps that over the last three years we have built up a strong relationship with both T.E.A.M. and UEFA so the whole process runs smoothly.
For live outside broadcast events such as Singapore and Melbourne, it took around six months planning beforehand working with the local telecoms company, the place we are broadcasting from whether that be a hotel or bar, tourism boards and any commercial sponsors very closely. On both occasions we arrived on site four days before presenters in order to test lines and set up guests on the ground. Singapore was slightly more work as we were broadcasting from two separate locations: one been our studio overlooking the city and the other being at the announcement venue itself. For this we have to arrange sound feeds from the host broadcaster to be able to broadcast the event live.

For the Open Golf tournament we generally do one site visit beforehand, we have a portable cabin on top of the 18th grandstand where we broadcast from and generally 2 people on course commentating. In golf events all broadcasters do some commentary off televisions at their broadcast point as you cannot physically have people at every hole. For this we liase with the BBC and Trans World International around six months beforehand to supply us with sound and vision feeds up to our point. This involves a lot of cabling and generally our engineers will arrive on site four days before the start of the competition to make sure absolutely everything is completed and on most occasions you have to run around chasing people up.

Note that most of the above has been done by people who have rather more experience that I do. The only thing I've set up myself from scratch so far has been the Wimbledon greyhound broadcasts. We first visited the stadium and established where our broadcast point should be and where things should be installed trackside. BT were instructed to install the lines and where the boxes should go and once they were in I visited the stadium again with an ISDN kit so I could test the connection and make sure I could dial the studio up. Once that was done we could turn up on the day and trust that everything would work.

talkSPORT does try to differentiate themselves from BBC Radio Five Live in terms of style and presentation when they do broadcast live sports coverage but how and why does talkSPORT do this?
I don't know if we really have any firm policy but it always seems to me that we make sure the games matter as much to us as they do to the people listening. The BBC philosophy is that they are by and large neutral reporters so their commentaries tend to be straightforward reportage and analysis. I just think that is so dull. I can listen to a BBC broadcast of a game and nobody is making me care about what happens on the pitch.

When you are watching your team in action, whether at home on television or at the ground, you are not sitting passively. You are feeling every attack, tensing up as your defence is called into action, shouting either enthusiastically for a goal or berating the manager for his crap tactics. I feel that radio coverage should be no different. For European games when it is a UK side v a European side we are unashamedly partisan, cheering the British team home and recognising that for most people it damn well matters if they get through. Obviously you cannot do that for a domestic game, but as I'm sure you heard for the Carling Cup Final, the commentators can bring the drama of the game to life, whether it is for Chelsea's winning goal or the tense five minutes when John Terry was lying motionless on the pitch.

For any big game I can name the crucial moment and how it sounded in our commentary. Just remember Chris Cooper's voice breaking with astonishment when Liverpool got the penalty in the 2005 Champions League Final. His comment about grown men breaking down in tears prompted many people to do the same and they mailed and told us during the game. I still get chills listening to Jim Proudfoot doing the penalty shootout against Portugal in the World Cup. I produced the World Cup Special at Christmas and ran the whole thing more or less uncut as you could feel the tension build throughout and share with him the sheer emotional deflation and feeling of hopelessness when the final shot was saved.

A live sporting match is real life drama beyond anything a scriptwriter could dream up. Reputations are made and destroyed in seconds, legends can be created and one kick can change a destiny. That is not something you can be dispassionate about, not if you are doing it properly. To sum up my view, the BBC forget what it is like to be a football supporter. Our presenters, commentators and pundits are all fans, just like our audience and they communicate with them on that level.

We would like to thank James Masterton for the chance to interview him. You are unlikely to hear from James on talkSPORT but when you hear that next live event on the station such as the Championship Play-Off Final or Champions League Final, it’ll be more than likely that he’ll have been involved somehow!

The James Masterton Q&A Interview
Live Sports Producer
March 2007