Today I went on a tour of the BBC White City, Media Centre and the Television Centre. I don't want to ramble on but I will tell you I saw where they film The One Show, the Top Gear and TARDIS meeting rooms, the area where Doctor Who Adventures (along with hundreds of other BBC magazines) is assembled, the news rooms, studios and 5 Live radio rooms, the massive aircraft hangar-type two-story space where the journalists and researchers go to make sure the BBC news programmes and sites run smoothly (which was both terrifying and fascinating at the same time) and also the Blue Peter garden which was absolutely tiny but so, so cool to stand in.
Not that I was expecting it to be stereotypically 'British' and very stoic and all about the work, but I was pleasantly surprised to find walking about the Media Centre that there was a definite element of fun. It was brightly coloured with, for example, Australian and Vietnamese sections which were random to get 'in the zone' and more unusually-shaped chairs than you could shake a stick at. Everyone seemed very happy to be there and rightly so.
The second story involves, for legal reasons, a bakery chain that for the sake of this story is called 'Plimmons' and a man who is called Mork. Anyway Mork slept in a week or so ago and promised not to do it again after Plimmons head office gave him a verbal warning. He was telling a young, impressionable and highly skilled, reliable, well-trained, responsible and all round catch called (for the sake of this story) Lane, whose name is pronounced with a J, about a festival he was going to with his fiance. Mork told Lane-with-a-J that it was a horror themed festival and he was going as the Devil. He continued to explain that he was planning to wear mechanical wings that extended to eight foot (four foot each side). Lane-with-a-J thought Mork was an idiot, and that surely that would irritate anyone withing an four foot radius of him, but said nothing, after all, she's extremely polite. Mork said his fiance was going as the girl from The Ring, inside a real television set. Lane-with-a-J found it difficult to hide a look of withering scepticism.
Mork didn't come in for work on Tuesday. It turned out the Devil and the scary Asian girl had been at the front of the crowd and the TV had cracked Mork's fiance's ribs. Lane-with-a-J didn't want to question why they didn't get out of the way when they realised there was a problem, but quickly remembered that Mork had been caught and fined for possession of cannabis and cocaine the week before. Lane-with-a-J assumed Mork and his ladyfriend had been too high to notice anything. Apparently Mork had been selling some kind of inhalable gas drug thing (see how hip and 'in' I am?) at the festival and also ended up in a police station.
Mork is getting fired soon from Plimmons.
Lane-with-a-J is hardly surprised.
Lane-with-a-J sounds awesome. A girl whose name rhymes with 'Anne' enjoyed this blog post.
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