its another week in the glamorous world of television. I've just arrived at Radio Merseyside where I am based this month - actually quite a nice place.
I love working in my home town. Liverpool is a wonderful place, I never tire of coming here. Although the city centre is changing I always feel welcome and feel at home. Surprisingly I felt the same way when I was in New York last year... did I forget to mention that I may go off at tangents???
Anyway... bit of a hectic weekend at home resulting in spending Sunday in A+E with my son, JnrCameradude. He managed to stab himself in the eye with his thumb nail.
It sounded like a fork skewering a pickled onion.... bluuuurghhh
His big sister nearly vomited, my wife thought he had blinded himself and I shuddered at him actually touching his eye.. (I have an eye thing, as well as a clown thing and an attic hatch thing... more about those as the weeks go on). When Jnr eventually opened his eye he had a perfect gouge mark above his pupil and off we went to A+E thanks to the SCARY AS SHIT LARGE RED LETTERS ON THE NHS DIRECT WEBSITE THAT IMPLORE YOU TO GET TO CASUALTY IMMEDIATELY.
I don't know if you've ever had the experience of a children's casualty department at the weekend in an inner city but my god, what the fuck do the staff take to still be courteous in the face of a mix bag of morons, bigots, tossers and panicking mothers?
What shocked me most was the number of drunken parents who turned up with their injured children. My son wanted to know why one man was shouting at his child, who was bleeding from a gash on their chin, to 'sit the fuck down and stop bloody whining'.
Eventually we were seen by a weekend locum Opthamic consultant who was from Germany. A very stern looking lady in her early 20's who wanted my son to tell her if is vision was disturbed. He's three and would tell you dog poo was orange and smells of lavender if he was scared enough... holding a child up to a specialist eye imaging machine was a new experience for me but Jnr got through that. Then Fraulein Koch (made me snigger) put eye drops in Jnr's injured eye - the effect was to dilate his pupil. Now he looks like he has been affected by a nerve agent. One fixed dilated pupil and one pin hole sized. Luckily his eyesight shouldn't be affected and will need antibiotics for a week or so.
NEW CAMERA RELEASE... AGAIN
Also this week saw Sony launch ANOTHER new camera. The PMW100 - its an XDCamEX format camera and is about the size of a Z1. Predictably lots of people on Twitter are extolling it's values and seem to have forgotten about the camera they raved about that was released last week.... and the one the week before that!
I'm all for technology and updates to the tools of my trade, but for fucks sake, lets just decide on a definitive format for television. I do feel sorry for my freelance collegues who have to buy new cameras now. It's a tough choice on which format you go for because you are tied in to working for one broadcaster as there is no longer the defacto broadcast format.
It was only about 15 years ago that Beatcam SP was the world wide format of choice, Digital Betacam for higher end production and 35mm film for anything higher. You knew where you stood in camera purchasing. You bought a bleeding expensive camera (BVW400's were about £45,000) and you did your job. Everyone happy (unless you worked for Thames or Anglia then you had to have MII).
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Me at Thames with a tube camera, a sound recordist and a spark.
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Its all about WHAT and HOW you shoot rather than what you shoot ON.
As I've Tweeted before, people should really learn their trade before they come with fancy titles for themselves and get daddy to buy them the latest CanoFujNikOny WDXQ790B camera.
Viva la Betacam!
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