Is It Live?

A favourite gripe of mine is that often I do not care that a guest who is being interviewed is live in the studio on a magazine show or a news programme whether on radio or television.

My local commercial television on its news programme often insists on introducing a guest and after the interview the camera shows the presenters looking in the direction of the guest and they turn back to face the camera and you can tell that the guest is not there and probably did the interview hours ago. Another clue being that they do not give a shot with all of them in view. As most of these interviews are perhaps someone promoting something or not an urgent story does it matter whether we think its actually happening at that minute?

And now on the National BBC radio station Radio 5 the presenter has introduced a guest on the phone and made it sound as though it was a live interview but as a technical fault happened they had to come out of the interview, admit it was recorded earlier and start again. Its not the first time that I have sussed out things are a mixture of live/recorded. There is this thing now that we have to make the viewer and listener think it is happening now, this minute.

I have seen two tv shows going out as live with the same guest so one has to be recorded. A dj was guesting on an afternoon tv show as "Live" but switched the radio on and his programme was going out as though it was live. It can be both annoying and/or funny the way they try to fool the public. I wonder if they really manage to do so.

Gildy