Shaun Ley's week

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/uk_politics/7808119.stm

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By Shaun Ley Presenter, BBC Radio 4's World at One

Oh no, what have I said?

The phone call from the office came mid-afternoon on Christmas Eve.

I had not been at home for very long, and could tell from the tone of the voice at the other end that something bad had happened.

Mr Clegg's missing interview caused a headache for WATO producers

Live broadcasting carries with it a certain degree of paranoia.

In 18 years at the BBC, I have been on enough journalism courses to appreciate the potential pitfalls in a live interview.

So my first response was to assume that either I had myself said, or had allowed one of my guests to say, something libellous on air.

It was almost with relief, therefore, that I absorbed the news.

Christmas stockpot

In fact, it was the absence of something rather than its inclusion which had caused the panic. One of our interviews was missing.

I should at this point pause to explain. News makes only limited allowance for Christmas.

With the exception of Christmas Day itself, we provide the usual thirty minutes of news and comment every day.

A missing Nick Clegg meant a very large hole in Boxing Day's edition of The World at One

Unfortunately, many of the people and organisations who make the news and supply many of our interviewees take a rather more leisurely approach.

The only way to fill the programmes adequately is to ensure that there is a stockpot of pre-recorded material to transmit over the festive period.

Newspapers do much the same thing. Although we would not hold back news, we hope that by choosing some big names to speak to, what they then have to say will be newsworthy.

Large hole

So from about the middle of November, our colleagues in planning are doing their normal job whilst at the same time approaching potential interviewees, commissioning our reporters to produce special material, and generally trying to fill what they know will be a news vacuum.

It was one of these interviews which had vanished. The Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg had agreed to speak to us just before he went off on holiday.

His contribution was to be broadcast on Boxing Day, one of a series of interviews with political big names from the three biggest UK-wide parties and the SNP.

Mr Salmond's interview had to be re-edited to fit

All of them would be transmitted at around eight minutes in duration.

A missing Nick Clegg meant a very large hole in Boxing Day's edition of The World at One and if we could not have found another leading Lib Dem, considerations of political balance would have made it difficult to use the other party interviews.

No wonder my caller sounded panicky.

So where had the recording of Nick Clegg gone?

Twilight zone

Although we still talk about taping interviews, these days everything is digital. All our material is saved into the computer; and that is where our stockpot had got us into trouble.

Put simply, the memory was full. So someone helpfully deleted material to create space, and, without noticing it had not yet been transmitted, sent all nine-plus-minutes of Mr Clegg into digital oblivion.

My colleague asked me what time we had recorded the interview. It turned out that there was a back-up in the studio, a sort of 'black box' of broadcasting, and we might be able to retrieve it from there.

In the event, that is what happened and Mr Clegg was brought back from radio's twilight zone.

The purge is not the only obstacle our pre-recorded interviewees have to survive.

We dropped one pre-recorded Christmas element because the same interviewee turned-up on another Radio Four programme talking about the same subject just a couple of days before our interview was due to be broadcast.

Christmas is supposed to be the time of good will to all, so it seemed a bit unfair to put you through the same thing twice.

Events can also overtake an interview. We used far less of my conversation with the Czech deputy prime minister than we had planned because, by the time it was broadcast, both the airstrikes on Gaza and the gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine had happened.

A wide-ranging interview which had not included those subjects would have sounded a little odd.

Instead, we used a shorter version, focused on Czech attitudes to the EU and his views on re-running the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

Even if they still make it on to the programme, those Christmas interviews can still fall at the final hurdle. In a live programme like ours, things change whilst we are on air.

A year ago, it was the death of Benazir Bhutto, confirmed in the final few minutes of the programme, which changed things.

On New Year's Eve, it was a series of live interviews on Gaza, which - thanks to a lax interviewer - had overrun.

So Alex Salmond, who had wanted to pre-record his interview the previous day, was not going to fit on.

That meant a frantic last minute re-edit by one of my dexterous colleagues to ensure a version of the interview which would fit the available space.

If they had not pulled it off, I would have been left to fill the gap (which might have served me right).

For all the potential problems, we need the Christmas stockpot.

You only have to look at the continuous news channels to realise why.

With the awful exception of war and natural disaster, most of the news-making world grinds to a halt over the festive break.

Government, businesses, local authorities, charities are not doing anything newsworthy.

Without the efforts of our planning team, we would struggle to find 30 minutes of news and comment every lunchtime, and be forced to fill the programme with something a good deal less substantial.

That really would not be The World at One.

<i>Martha Kearney is away.</i>