The Machines Don't Know There's A War On

I did my multi camera director training at the BBC's Elstree Studios & BBC TV Centre in London exactly thirty years ago. I realised pretty quickly that the job was, in essence, all about managing a team of highly skilled people, getting them to do what I wanted when I wanted.

A bit like the conductor of an orchestra, I was the only member of the team without a specific technical skill. All I had to do was give my crew an insight into what I was attempting to achieve concisely and coherently, giving them confidence that I was worth their time, and then encourage and applaud their efforts on my behalf by being collaborative, positive and understanding.

And in live television news, which I've spent a lot of the past three decades doing, the director is also the connecting joint between the journalists and the technical team, translating editorial ambitions into creative coherent visuals. Another layer of comprehending, understanding and managing a wide array of personalities and temperaments.

In other words, a psychology degree would have been more useful to me than any media or arts qualification.

Thirty years is a long time in any profession but for television it is ancient history. Studio automation means the psychology degree is not so necessary for the modern news director but a fluency in computer nerd-speak is.

I'm lucky that my current workplace has been somewhat reluctant to completely automate. On any given shift I lead a crew of 9 specialists, which is highly unusual in this day and age. But the idea of going through what we've endured in the past week, covering the outbreak of war in Europe and hour after hour of unpredictable, harrowing, rolling news without them, is unthinkable to me.

In fact, the little pieces of our set up that are automated very much worked against us when running orders and formats got thrown out of the window on day one of the war. It was my colleagues bringing every ounce of their experience, concentrating on their job while watching my back, reacting, adapting on a human level to unfolding events, that shaped our coverage.

Human beings helping to tell human stories.

On the other hand, machines wouldn't have known or cared that I was tired and likely to call the wrong shot for the last hour of the shift. The machines wouldn't hear the air raid sirens and hold off cutting to a correspondent who may be in danger. The machines wouldn't spot new pictures coming in off the wires and pick the right moment to tell the overwhelmed programme editor so they are not missed.

The machines can't read a room.

And when the shift is over, the banks of computer screens in an automated studio don't pat you on the back and say well done. The machines can't look you in the eye and acknowledge that it was a tough show. The machines didn't have the same human response to some of the images that flashed up on your monitors and know you may need some time to process. There is no camaraderie from a keyboard.

The machines don't know there's a war on.