10-Dec-99 WGBH Pledge Night
Anne organized Dragon Systems' participation in WGBH's pledge night this evening. That's public television, channel 2, send it to Zoom, Boston MA 02134.
WGBH considers themselves the flagship station of PBS. They have imported most of the BBC shows for PBS and put wrappers around them. Zoom was and is again their production. Julia Child was from WGBH. This Old House, New Yankee Workshop, the Victory Garden, also.
We got to the station around 5:30, about 25 people from Dragon, 15 or 20 people from the Urban League of Boston, a dozen or 20 kids from the Bridgewater State College Outing Club, and a half dozen members of the Boston Association of Certified Financial Planners. One point for correctly identifying all the players.
As you would expect, the station has pledge nights down to a system. They fed us and showed us a publicity video about public television and trained us in what to say on the phone (it was all written down) and how to fill out a pledge form and how to find the codes for thank-you gifts from other nights if people asked.
The action was up a flight of stairs in studio A, the biggest TV studio in New England. In the left-hand side of the studio were several tables, with ten phones on each. Arlene, Anne, and I found seats on one side of a table across from a woman and three guys from the Urban League group. One of my co-workers (probably the first person in the world to dictate in Italian to a computer!) sat down next to me, and another woman from the Urban League showed up a little later and sat at the end of the table.
The phones took a little practice. There were buttons labeled "log on", "ready", "headset answer", "exit", and "rest". There was a little box with a volume control and an on/off button going to a headset.
Almost all of the phone calls that come in on a pledge night happen during and right after pledge breaks. There was a whiteboard in between the volunteers' tables that had the time of the next pledge break, and the lights would come up a couple of minutes before one started and everyone was supposed to be back by their phones. I don't think there was ever a time when more than a third of the volunteers were speaking on the phones, but the station can always hope. In between pledge breaks, that is, during the regularly scheduled program, the station staff showed us around a couple of studios.
If you stop and think you can probably figure out what a TV studio looks like. It has a high ceiling with lots of electrical outlets for lights, each on a separate dimmer. There are TV cameras, and not like home camcorders. The professional ones roll and have super-smooth mechanisms to raise and lower them. Besides that, they have a monitor mounted facing up in front and a partly silvered mirror that lets the person facing the camera see the monitor while looking right into the camera. If the person facing the camera is reading the news, that monitor is what they're reading from. I think our guide said the cameras cost in the quarter million dollar range.
There were sets all over, just like theatre sets, but in groups. Our studio had mostly two batches. One was holiday living room-like, with the wall behind washed with a deep blue light with white stars projected on it. People making the pitches for pledges were sitting or standing in front of it. The other was more fun: it was the set for the introductory segments of Mystery, designed by Edward Gorey. The set is black and white, and part of the floor was painted in a matching texture with special water-soluble paint. Yes, said our guide, this is where Diana Riggs will be taping the intros to Mystery in a couple of weeks. And over against the other wall is where we used to have a whole kitchen set up for Julia Child to tape her show.
Wow! So there I was, in the middle of media history, and all I had to do to deserve it was to help the public donate about $600 to the station.
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