Journal 47

I had another taping of Focal Point last night. I would by lying if I said that the show gets going like a well oiled machine. Actually I don't think I have ever been to a taping where at least one thing didn't go wrong. The taping usually starts out with people showing up on time around 6p.m. We usually set a goal of getting started by 7p.m. so we don't spend most of our night there. But then something never fails to go wrong, usually it has something to do with the prompter either not working or being at the wrong resolution to show up on the monitors hooked up on the cameras. One time actually the reason we were having problems was because the prompters weren't plugged in! That took about 10 minutes to diagnose. I am used to these types of things, but this show in particular went really bad. When we finally did start at around 8:30 it took us way longer than it should have to shoot the show. We tape the show "live-to-tape" so theoretically it should only take 30 minutes to tape since that is how long the show is, but one of the luxuries of doing this is that we can allow screw ups which take up a lot of time.