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Tuesday 16 October 2012

Final 3 days of work experience: Wednesday!

I've been a naughty blogger...as I've been doing stuff and not had the time to sit, think and write.

The latter 3 days of my work experience were very different to the first two. I'd been thrown in straight in at the deep end with Matt, but on Wednesday he was due to go up and work on a documentary so I'd lost my shadowee...you can't really be a shadow without something to shadow, can you?

Wednesday

Matt introduced me to Elaine, saying we'd be a match made in heaven! Like all the other reporters she was great and listened to where I've been, what I'm doing and where I'm at for the moment. My week was during the "floods" so she was placed onto a story somewhere up near Fleetwood about Residents refusing to pay council tax. I'd have been more than happy to go up, but the producers decided I should stay back and work on my own story to do with disabled access with Mel, when she came in...

so Elaine rolled away and I waited.
...and waited.
Then after around half an hour it was realised that it was Mel's day off.
So I felt a bit lost.

Rob, the producer had grown into quite a good little mentor and he showed me how to find stories, scouring through local and national newspapers. A story might be really interesting, but is it the type of story that would be good visually?
Anna then spoke to me after dinner (or lunch as people seem to call it nowadays) and asked me to do some planning towards the story about disabled access.
Hungry for soemthing interesting to do, i logged onto ye olde Facebook and made a status...

No one noticed the slight spelling mistake at first...
Mini access rant/point
I got  a good response and some good discussions about different places from different people. Jan was particularly helpful in telling me about Farmageddon near Ormskirk that despite boasting national awards in tourism, it still remains inaccessible to wheelchair users like myself. When asked whether it could be adapted for chair users the excuse, as always is "health and safety"...pathetic. Just saying. Anyway, we didn't go ahead with this, but thought I'd mention it. Yes, the most important and news worthy places are those of essential use such as train stations, public buildings and shops. But in all honesty, as a younger teenager...places like Farmageddon and other "fun" attractions being inaccessible had a major impact upon my social life. Birthday parties are held in places like that, and a lot of the time people don't bother asking...so people don't get invited. It's only been as I've got older and "led" friendship groups, have I gained the courage to ask and organise and go places. It's frustrating to not be able to take advantage and have fun in local places where "normal" people go to have fun...but I cam ski, kayak, climb mountains and be "so inspirational" but not get scared in Ormskirk!

Anyway...back to main experience blogging!
I decided to correct my minor spelling mistake of the word "public" and within 3 seconds i received a phone call off what sounded like some kind of air compresser. It was Ste Unsworth.
In between laughs, and struggling to breath he managed the word "pubic."
But after his moment. (He has a lot of them) he told me about his nightmare of train/bus journey he used to have to take to get to get to College last year simply because Hindley train station is inaccessible.
In order to get to Bolton from Hindley, most people get the train:
HIndley -> Bolton.
In order to get from Hindley to Bolton University, Set had to...
Get the bus from Hindley to Wigan.
Then the train from Wigan to Bolton, doubling back on himself!
This allowed us to a bit more research into public transport with Ed mentioning that London Tonight had done a report on public transport and it'd be quite cool do a report that's similar...so things started to move with that...and things still are.
(I'll update you all on that in a later blog, we've done some filming, but still have more to come!)

So despite the early frustration, Wednesday was a productive and interesting day. I saw how stories are formed from ideas and a bit of inspiration, as well as looking for ones that are already there!

When Elaine returned, she also told me that she'd been greeted by not so much water and a bit of improvising with sandbags had to take place.

Sandbags, as Fred assured the gallery during the lunchtime bulletin, really do prevent flooding!
Really?
Yes!

Thursday's blog will follow as soon as I can tear myself away from rolling around everywhere...

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