Radio 4's Broadcasting House donned their wellies spent the weekend at the Hay Festival. It rained a little, so much so that . We asked broadcast journalist Simon Maybin to talk us through the weekend.听
What happens when you take - Radio 4's Sunday morning news magazine programme - out of the Broadcasting House building and plonk it in a field in Wales?
We found out this weekend and were quite pleased with the result. By happy coincidence, the BH team ended up in this particular field at the same time as the Hay Festival (who says the Radio 4 schedulers don't know what they're doing?) and that meant we were joined by 200 odd fans of the show for our broadcast.
The audience all seemed very nice actually, but it is slightly odd to trudge through the mud and rain to come and sit in a chilly tent at 8.30 on a Sunday morning.
Cooped up in our central London office, wondering if W1A is meant to be a satire or a documentary, we usually jump at the chance to take the programme out on the road. But it's not just the Welsh hill air that appeals; it's also the opportunity to get up close and personal with the BH listeners.
We didn't want the audience interaction to start and end with Sunday's programme, so we put on an event as part of the festival programme on Saturday morning and called it "Talkback: Broadcasting House with Paddy O'Connell" (he's the presenter, for the uninitiated).
The idea was to tell people a bit about how we put a programme together but mainly to hear from our listeners what they think of what we do and what we could do better.
Just before 10, as the Saturday morning rain (which turned out to be remarkably similar to the Saturday afternoon and Saturday evening rain) drummed out a rhythm on the canvas of the 主播大秀 tent, festival goers took their green plastic seats in the makeshift auditorium.
Immediately it was clear they were a somewhat smarter bunch than the BH team, their full wet-weather gear and umbrellas highlighting the inadequacy of our we-thought-summer-started-last-week attire.
Once we got going, there was praise for Paddy's humour and the programme's tone. One woman even compared BH to crack. It sounded like praise, anyway.
But people weren't shy about saying what they didn't like too. One man said, as someone who lived in in provincial England, he heard far too much about America and far too many American voices on Radio 4.
A woman at the back felt there should be more religious broadcasting on Sunday mornings.
After a chat about the programme in general, Paddy talked the audience through our running order for Sunday's show. People chipped in on the length of different items and what should fill the slot we had at the start of the programme.
Paddy revealed we had a gap on our press panel and were wondering if someone from the audience could join the author Lauren Child and journalist David Aaronovitch reviewing the Sunday papers. This idea got an enthusiastic response with one man suggesting it might be an improvement on some of the pros we put on.
So as Paddy gossiped with the audience before the programme started on Sunday, he asked if anyone had read any newspapers yet. He was met with a worrying silence. Even the rain had gone quiet (it would be back shortly).
Would anyone like to have some papers, Paddy wondered, read through them and then talk about them on national radio in under an hour's time?
Amazingly, two hands shot up like this was a moment they'd been waiting for all their lives.
So Liz and April were plucked from the audience, sat at the front, and given a set of papers, which they immediately began devouring.
As they beavered away, Paddy and the rest of the audience got on with the show. There were tough questions from the tent for Labour MP Alan Johnson on Ed Miliband's leadership and interesting contributions to a discussion about the World War I centenary celebrations.
The audience participation wasn't entirely hiccup-free though. The paper reviewers Liz and April had helpfully been one in a red jacket and the other in a blue one. But by the time Paddy came to them the jackets were off and so were Paddy's notes on who was who.
Despite that and the cold (the heaters were kept off in case the electricity used knocked out the power to the broadcast truck), the programme finished with warm applause inside the tent.
The festival goers shuffled off to their next events, and we packed up our kit and headed back to the studio, where there's always a teeny tiny bit of you that wonders if there's actually anyone listening out there.
Simon Maybin is a broadcast journalist on Broadcasting House and PM
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