Years ago when I was doing game design work, I had an idea for a game that I never ran but which I think could have been a lot of fun. The idea was this: A game in which the characters play gung-ho, gonzo TV journalists in a "go anywhere, do anything, get the news at any cost" near-future, semi-post-apocalyptic competitive environment modelled after Edison Carter’s "What I Want To Know" show on Max Headroom.
The title for the game would have been Action News!
One of the gimmics of the news trade in this game would be that the networks would fake the impression that they have studios all over the place by just taking their cameras from town to town, printing up a computerized background with the name of the local city, and pretending that they were "Here at our Podunk Bureau . . . "
In actuality, something like this exists in real life, and I got to sit in such a virtual bureau last night.
When I got a call to appear on Fox News, I assumed that I’d be driving down to the local Fox affiliate, where I’ve appeared before, and that the local station would do the uplink to the network.
Not so.
Instead, the network sent a limo for me (which made it like the second time in my life I’ve ever ridden in a limo), which was a good thing as finding the right place to go at 1 a.m. would not have been a fun thing for me. The right place to go also was not the local Fox affiliate. It was a virtual bureau.
These things exist in every city of significant size. They’re how networks get in-studio interviews with folks in cities that aren’t their major news hubs. I’d known about them, but I’d never been in one before.
The limo guy drove me downtown while I quizzed him about his work. (He was a real nice guy.) When we found the address, we first went past it because it looked like an abandoned walk-down storefront business.
In reality, it was a hole-in-the-wall virtual studio crammed with technical doodads. It had an entry way with a card table with a wrench and socket set sitting on it. A hallway filled with posters that the famous people who’d come there had signed. A bathroom with a folding chair and big mirror for getting hair and make-up right. A dark studio room with an incredibly short office chair, camera, lights, and various backgrounds that could be put behind the guest (including a massive TV for animated backgrounds). And it had an "other" room for the guest and cameraman to wait in where there were lots of rumpled newspapers and electronics and computer equipment.
There was just one cameraman. He was the only guy there. He wasn’t even the usual cameraman since it was the usual cameraman’s birthday. But he was a real nice guy and he got us hooked up to Fox in New York just fine.
The virtual studio, y’see, doesn’t just serve one network. They’s the local San Diego contact point for any national cable show that needs a live remote guest hookup. The cameraman told me they’d done Larry King there, they did a bunch for Fox News there, and the other folks. In fact, I realized, I was sitting in the same chair Sean Hannity had been sitting in a week or so ago, when I’d seen him sitting against the same pull-down San Diego night time skyline background I was now sitting in front of.
At least on Fox (I don’t know about other networks) the attitude toward the pope’s passing has, overall, been respectful and wanting to celebrate the holy father and many of the things he’s done, even though they do want to ask those "probing" politically-oriented questions.
They got me wired up with a mic and an earpiece and I listened as various folks in New York talked to me, asked me questions (usually whether I could hear them), and handed me electronically from one department to another while we waited for the segment I was to be on to roll around.
It did. I got asked several questions by the host, who also talked to Tim Gray by phone. (You mean I could have stayed home and phoned this in instead of coming down after midnight???) I got asked one question I particularly wanted to be asked (the gist of which was "Is the pope a hidebound conservative?", letting me have the opportunity to contrast what is essential from non-essential in the faith and characterizing John Paul II’s approach as "faithful openness").
And then it was all over.
The cameraman unhooked me, signed off to New York, I called the limo driver to come pick me up, and a few minutes later I was on my way home.
The limo guy was particularly jazzed by the whole experience. He’d gone back to headquarters while I was waiting to go on the air and he caught my segment on TV. He thought I came across as very calm and in control of what I wanted to say. He had known I was going to be on TV, but something about seeing it make it click for him, and I was tickled at how excited he was afterward. Said getting to meet a "celebrity" had made his night.
I just chuckled at that and rolled my eyes in the dark.
But the experience brought back memories of Action News!
