My First Day on Big Brother

Thursday 31^st May – Tech Day – Live Office Runner

Call time: 10 am

Today was my first day working on Big Brother. This morning I was really excited about getting stuck into the job and meeting the people I was going to work with but at the same I was very anxious, this was a really big opportunity for me and I just didn’t want to mess it up. When I first got to Elstree Studios, after my long train journey, I went over to the Live cabin and this is where I began to meet the other runners and the rest of the production team I was going to be working with. We all signed out our assigned walkies and made our way over to the Reality cabin to get our security passes which we would use for the run of the show. We got taken into a runner meeting to run through what was expected of us and what each of our individual roles were. We then had a whole crew health and safety meeting on set and then we were taken outside for a tour of the site. When we arrived at the Big Brother set I couldn’t believe how small it was. It defiantly looked 10 times bigger on TV and it made me realise even more the magic of cameras.

My first task was to help with the script run. We had to print schedules, camera cards in different sizes and scripts. We had lots of problems with the photo copiers as they kept getting jammed and the script run ended up taking us 3 hours. As it was the tech day we didn’t worry about it too much but it is definitely something we need to solve for the first live show.

For the rest of the day I did various office runner jobs like tea runs, booking out walkies and giving out dinner vouchers. I also had to take dinner orders from the production team and go out and buy or order whatever they wanted. I had to get money from petty cash from Penelope and make sure that I kept all receipts.

Later on that evening I got the chance to be a stand in contestant and walk out of the orbit, down the catwalk posing for the cameras, get interviewed by Brian and walk up the stairs to the house. This was like a dream come true as I had been a massive fan of Big Brother when I was young age. As there is going to be a twist on launch night I also had to be a stand in for that. All of the stand in contestants were sat on chairs behind the orbit with blind folds on, blankets over our heads and sound cancelling head phones on to see what we were aware of so that they knew what the contestants were going to be able to hear and see.

After this cars were called and it was time for us to head home.

I had a really good first day, everyone seems really nice and I just can’t wait for Tuesday for the show to actually start.