Today’s adventures began with an early morning wake up call in Liverpool. We boarded our bus and began a short journey up to Salford, a suburb of Manchester.
Once we were there, we arrived in what is known as the Manchester Media City. This is an aptly named area as it is home to multiple buildings that house Salford University’s media department, ITV, BBC and more.
After arriving, we quickly got off the bus and began a guided tour by Dr. Annabelle Waller of Salford University. The campus is beautiful and hi-tech, similar to Point Park. During this tour we saw multiple state of the art student studios and other amenities. After the tour, we sat down with Dr. Waller and listened to a presentation about how Virtual Reality is changing the media landscape. I personally think it will be the new trend, but we will see how that goes.
When our talk with Dr. Waller finished, we had another lecture by James Probert, an associate producer at BBC. We walked with him about his role on Blue Peter, a children’s program that highlights their presenters doing crazy things such as skydiving. We spoke with James about his career path and what every day life is like as a producer at BBC.
After this lecture, we had some free time for lunch before the group came back together for an official tour of the BBC studios. This tour was something I was not really looking forward to, but our tour guides Hannah and Lee were amazing and super personable. They made the 1.5 hour tour seem like seconds and it was so much fun to hang out with them.
While we were touring a particular studio, we even had a guest make an appearance. We were speaking about how the Northwest News broadcast came out of that studio and Dona, the auto-que (read: teleprompter) associate began writing to us via the camera. This was truly memorable and a great laugh to wrap up our tour.
As we let out of the BBC studio tour, we board our bus and made our way up the road to our hotel by the airport. We had a couple hours to relax and then took a short walk to a pub for a nice group dinner to end the night.
Tomorrow, we board a plane to take us over to Edinburgh, Scotland and I am excited to see what happens next.