Many months ago, I wrote about my involvement with the BBC’s new Farsi satellite channel, BBC Persian TV. Well, the programme I was lucky enough to have helped devise, launch and develop – Nowbat-e Shoma – won a gong at the BBC Global Reith Awards last week. I am delighted for the team - as far as I’m concerned, they deserve every award going.
In her introduction to the Best Global Output, Multimedia category award, the presenter, superstar singer Annie Lennox, said “The judges… raved about the winning entry: ‘truly inspirational, modern and fresh, the programme is seamlessly multimedia’. It shows how multimedia interaction could nearly bring down a political regime”.
No exaggeration.
When I was asked to devise a daily interactive TV show for BBC Persian, I knew it might cause a bit of a stir, but I had no idea that, within a few months of launch, it would find itself at the heart of the biggest non-domestic news story of 2009. I was far more concerned about finding an editor and some presenters and the difficulty of forming a team when hardly anyone in the available pool of talent here in London had any experience whatsoever of television. (The channel is broadcast from London, by the way, in case you’re confused - the BBC is banned in Iran).
I was joined by a former BBC TV News colleague, Kevin Geary, who was working for BBC World Service TV at the time, and had run a weekly interactive programme for them. Luckily, we had a template to work from – the BBC Arabic TV programme, Nuqtat Hewar, which I had worked on until its launch in March 2008.
We set about finding two main presenters (the show was to go live five days a week, with a repeat in the evening) and a Head of Interactive to edit it and run the interactive section of the website. We struck gold early with Siavash Ardalan and Pooneh Ghodoosi, who were being considered as potential newsreaders. Siavash was already hosting a weekly radio entertainment show incorporating listener phone calls, and was brimming with ideas, self-confidence and energy. Pooneh looked, moved and sounded like she’d been created in a laboratory dedicated to turning out a sort of Platonic ideal of a television presenter – if so, they reached perfection with Ms Ghodoosi.
We asked a lot of them: they had to conduct a stream of live phone and webcam chats, read out emails and SMS messages, introduce voxpop videos, and interview the co-presenter at least twice during the show. There’s a lot of preparation - they have to know the subject of the day in depth. As the show is live, and they’re almost never off the screen, they have to have their wits about them at all times: this job requires smarts, stamina, keen editorial judgment, and an ability to really listen to what callers are saying and to be able to respond sensitively and appropriately – which isn’t easy, given emotional charged subjects, crackly phone lines, jerky-vision webcams, and editors and directors filling their ears with instructions. Reading the news must be an absolute doddle in comparison.
To make it even harder for them, the show is located in a busy, noisy newsroom rather than a nice, quiet studio. And, just in case that wasn’t enough to cope with, they also have to interact with a set of fancy graphics on a video wall which viewers have to be convinced is actually a huge touch-screen display – which, of course, hasn’t been invented yet: getting the choreography right requires weeks of practice, but the effect is worth it (at least, that’s what we kept telling them!).
I should probably have been bumped off the project for expecting any presenter new to TV to handle that sort of pressure – but Siavash and Pooneh both rose to the challenge superbly, and surpassed it. TV presenters aren’t always the world’s smartest individuals (too much thinking can lead to panic and on-air disaster), but these two were fearsomely bright.
We then had to find co-presenters from the production team, including an Afghan (the service covers Afghanistan as well - another quiet, uncontroversial corner of the world), to select and read out the SMS messages and emails that arrive while the show is on air, to review the blogosphere and relevant websites, introduce viewers’ pictures and videos, and conduct the occasional live blogger phone interview. Luckily, and somewhat bizarrely, there was barely anyone on the team who couldn’t do the job with aplomb.
Filling the key Head of Interactive position was the knottiest problem: we needed someone who understood new media in general, and the blogosphere and social networks in particular. They had to have a vision of how to develop the service - both on TV and online - to create one vast ongoing conversation between Farsi-speakers from all backgrounds, representing all points of view, from every corner of the globe (the diaspora is huge and far-flung) – and they had to believe that if we built it, the audience would come (personally, I didn’t have a clue whether they would or not). And they’d have to be able to control a team of mouthy, opinionated clever-clogs – Iranians and Afghans aren’t slow to express their opinions – learn TV production techniques in a matter of weeks, and find people to fill several key roles within the team, mainly from abroad (and you don’t do that by sticking an ad in The Guardian).
Peasy!
Given that we had little hope of finding anyone to even remotely fit the bill, we made contingency plans to have the programme edited by a Brit until a Farsi-speaker had been trained up to take over. Then we happened to meet Sina Motalebi, who was working for the World Service Trust, to ask his advice on other matters. A few minutes after our chat, it suddenly occurred to us that we might – just might – have met the person we’d been searching for.
In 2003 Sina had the distinction of becoming the first blogger in the world to be arrested for something he’s written. His subsequent travails included spending 23 days in solitary confinement. He left Iran later that year and sought asylum in Holland, before moving to London. Sina is a sort of identikit foreign intellectual – tall, skinny, intense, articulate, a brain the size of a solar system, and the ability to grow a full beard between breakfast and lunch. But unlike many intellectuals, he is unstuffy, self-effacing, good-natured, engaging, sensitive, charming, decisive, and automatically commands respect. The first time we saw him at work in the gallery during a pilot for the show he reacted instantly to what was happening on screen and boomed out his instructions with great clarity – and we knew we had struck gold again.
Nowbat-e Shoma launched, along with the rest of BBC Persian TV, in January 2009. The programme was instantly swamped with phone calles, emails and SMS messages. It was a palpable hit. As with the BBC Arabic version, Nuqtat Hewar, we had taken a traditional radio format – the live phone-in show – and through all kinds of visual and editorial tricks, and by making it as easy as possible for viewers to communicate with us via any number of devices, turned it into a lively, fresh, engaging TV experience.
In June, Sina Motalebi was put in charge of BBC Persian’s Iranian elections coverage. Nowbat-e Shoma was scheduled twice a day to cope with the deluge of calls, messages, and, most tellingly, the user-generated videos which proved so crucial in telling the world the true story of what was really happening tin Iran.
I don’t want to sound overly mystical, but It was as if the channel – and Nowbat-e Shoma in particular – had been created for this very moment in history.
My congratulations to the Nowbat-e Shoma team. It was a privilege working with them, and a privilege to have been a part of something that so obviouslymatters.
The Global Reith Awards ceremony can be seen here – coverage of the Nowbat-e Shoma award starts at around around 41’40” – and Sina appears slightly awkward at finding himself on the same stage as Annie Lennox, one of his heroines!
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