Is a shake up always good news?

This week I’ve made a start on producing television’s annual live coverage of the Lord Mayor’s Show.  Come Saturday 9th November I’ll be directing the coverage for BBC1.  Although that’s a month away, anyone who knows about pulling together 90 minutes of live primetime television, will know a month is not actually that long at all.

The Lord Mayor’s Show is a three-mile long procession that snakes its way through the City of London.  And it’s three miles of the most eclectic mix of parade floats imaginable.  Think Notting Hill Carnival and throw in an extra scoop of history and pageantry – 798 years to be precise   This year, parading past Mansion House will be camels, dogs, humans, antique cars, steam engines and Rapier missiles to name just a few.  Over 100 organisations will be taking part, welcoming the new Lord Mayor of London to office.

As well as facing the usual logistical and editorial challenges that lie in wait when covering a parade of this scale, something else has struck me this year. And that’s how things have changed. Don’t get me wrong, the Lord Mayor’s Show has always been a pageant of colour and vibrancy that marches past Mansion House, but look a little deeper and one finds the sands shifting. And when the sand beneath your feet shifts, it’s natural to be a little nervous.

“Out with the old, and in with the new”. That’s the saying isn’t it? Well, this year more than ever, I challenge the merit of that sentiment. I have a new production team, and a new OB supplier in (NEP Visions). I’ll be honest, initially I worried the ‘all change’ policy might prove a headache. The previous production team was savvy to the foibles of military protocol and language. The previous OB supplier had the knowledge of rigging the show – a complicated OB where you get just three hours of road closure time to get cameras and mics in position before you’re live on air.

How much time would it take to get the ‘new’ team up to speed?

So it’s fair to say that I began the week with a little trepidation.  I felt it was more important than ever to hold on to some of the previous years broadcasting traditions.  But it wasn’t ever about maintaining tradition for traditions’ sake.  I wasn’t about to resist new ideas just for the hell of it.  I just knew I was going to have to explain why things had been done a certain way in the past, and why they should carry on being done that way.

So the first thing I did was to call a meeting where the ‘new’ production, and the new OB team could meet with the ‘traditional’ City contacts and me.  It was then that I could do the explaining.  And that’s when I understood I’d been wrong to be nervous.

I soon realised that while explaining to the ‘new’ people the traditions of the Lord Mayor’s Show and the tradition of how we broadcast it, I had been doing them all a massive disservice.  They listened patiently, asked questions of me and the City folk – and do you know what?  It was all rather enjoyable.  To see them engaging with the 800 year old parade, and 79 year old broadcast was a real pleasure.  And it wasn’t one way either.  There have been modifications – a new way of transmitting our signal for example, a bolder approach for our presenters when getting involved with the parade.  All these suggestions and more have come from the ‘new’ people.  And thank goodness.

It’s not about throwing the old out and ushering in the new. It’s about keeping the balance between the two.

I hope this years’ programme will transmit a sense of pride in the ancient pageantry on show. As unusual as it might look, there is something very ‘British’ about seeing stocking wearing, tri-corn hat waving, Mace carrying protagonists step out of a 350-year-old Golden State Coach. But there is also much to be said for the 686th Lord Mayor of London (Fiona Woolf CBE, and only the second woman to be elected in 800 years), tweeting while inside that very same coach. Surely the first time a message will have been tweeted from such historic surroundings.

Hopefully, come 12.10pm on Saturday November 9th, viewers across the country will be thinking we struck the right balance. The emails, tweets, Segway steadicams and fresh presenting approach will have enhanced this age old Lord Mayor’s Show. I wonder what Thomas Leggy, the first Lord Mayor of London, would make of it all?