Cornwall calling

Fingers crossed as tomorrow I start my first week reading the news on BBC Radio Cornwall. The last time I read the news for a BBC local radio station was in 1979 (four years before Radio Cornwall was born.) In those days the job seemed to involve several people, including one whose main function seemed to be to press a button which made a bulb in the studio go from red to green. Scripts were pounded out by typewriter and read from sheets of paper. Some of the studio equipment, which had been salvaged from Broadcasting House, needed time for the valves to warm up.

These days the quest for ever-greater value means that one person does pretty much everything. I think I have three separate studio computers to operate simultaneously, reading the news from a screen (let's hope it doesn't go blank) in between navigating the BBC's own internal computer system, which lets me find stories on other networks. I watched a colleague doing it last week and it looks pretty scary.