It was a pretty nice day on Saturday (17thApr), sunny, a bit of nip in the air but a good day for the footie. So I had decided to go see the super Saintees (from Perth) take on another bunch of Saints (the Mirren variety – from Paisley) and give them a sound whipping. As it transpired we were lucky to get one point out of the encounter. So I should never take anything for granted. However just as I was thinking about making my way out, (I was doing some emails in at Wildwood), we got a call from a client who had a very important business person who needed to travel out to the far east to make a presentation on their behalf but the mountain dust had kept him firmly in his place. His place was in Northern Perthshire. So could we make a film of what he had to say so that they could play it at the conference and Sharon, one of our new producers, said “sure of course we can.”
So I kinda got roped in, my own fault really, by saying I’ll fix that up. She’d already phoned Simone but Simone was busy being the vice-chairperson of the PBN (Perthshire Businesswomen’s Network) so I thought that was a bit unfair so I should just fix it up – football being an unneccessary distraction from serving our clients. We needed camera, lights, sound, autocue and to get an edit done. By this time Maggie had made her way up here and very kindly offered to edit any bits that needed to be done. We hoped that with the autocue there would be none but suspected that some black magic may be necessary. Then when she heard how long the piece was to be she thought “No way can we get that onto an ftp site, and so she set about devising how to make the file size smaller. Which, of course, she did.
So then I phone up Jackie to try and organise autocue; everybody phones Jackie when they want autocue, but her phone’s off, I leave a message, and she calls me back a wee while later and in an unusually ‘soto voce’ tone she says “ hi Jim were you looking for me? “ she doesn’t say “hi Jim it’s Jackie” but Jackie never needs to say it’s Jackie. Her voice is totally unmistakable, and I said “yeah where are you?” she says “I’m at the match” “what match?” I said, she says “the Celtic match”, I said “what on earth are you doing there?” She says “I’m working for Sky” “Oops” she says “I’d better go but I cannae help you this afternoon”. No probs’ I said so I had a fish around and I found another name inside the Bubble (our MIS), Ros. So I phoned Ros.
I said do you do tele-prompt and she said yeah. I said you won’t know who I am but my name’s Jim from Speakeasy. She said “sure I know who you are, we work for you frequently through your London office and up there with Simone and Sarah” Oh do we have an account with you?” She said “yeah”, I said “ok can you get me somebody this afternoon?” “Where’s the shoot?’” and I told her . “She said I’ll try, I’ll definitely get back to you”. Then I thought I’m kind of running out of options here and I phoned Fraser, who’s an old pal, and his phone rang as if he was in a foreign country which indeed he was – on holiday and stuck in Puerta Fuerteventura because of the mountain dust. Oh no! more seafood and Bacardi – what a shame – but he suggested a name and Frank it was who came up trumps. Later in the day to be fair Ros phoned me back to say she could get somebody but they’d have to come quite a long way so we stuck with Frank who did a sterling job for us and the shoot went ahead, the gentleman did his piece; it was shorter than we thought so the compression problem was not what we’d expected. It duly went online and our clients were jubilant.
I heard the last 10 minutes of the super saintees game on the radio and I was less than jubilant. We were 2-0 down then grabbed one back to make it 2-1 and then in the 93rd minute we got a penalty and then the wizard who is Paul Sheerin spotted the ball and slotted it into the onion bag to give us a share of the points. I suppose I should accept that even though we have thrashed Rangers 4-1, Hibernian 5-1 and had several others such results this season, the other saints are quite a decent team. There you go that was the Saturday job.
Ps. The super saintees were celebrating their 125th anniversary this year and Speakeasy produced the commemorative DVD. There might be the odd copy left if you hurry.
Jim Adamson – Managing Director
