Strawberries and cream: BBC Sport taking advantage of a great return to Wimbledon for The Championships By Heather McLean, Editor
Thursday, July 1, 2021 - 13:56
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Wimbledon 2021 has challenged BBC Sport's production, but it has overcome the obstacles and is enjoying the Championships
The Championships is back and BBC Sport is on site at Wimbledon to bring all the excitement and drama of this world-renowned Grand Slam back to our screens after its 2020 hiatus.
This year the BBC has worked with host broadcaster, Wimbledon Broadcast Services' (WBS), to minimise crew on site, reconfigure studios and offices, and work out how to make the most of the strawberries and cream while maintaining social distancing.
BBC Sport has a new virtualised studio on site that it has developed alongside technical partner, Moov, on which Ron Chakraborty, BBC Sport's lead executive for major events and head of the Championships broadcast for the British incumbent, comments: In this sort of trying year, when there are a lot of challenges for our production, to have something new that we can show off is really nice; a nice bonus.
Yet the broadcaster also has other studio areas to consider, all of which needed refining for social distancing. Chakraborty says: Studio-wise, obviously the main studio was fine, although we're sitting two metres apart, but we knew that the platform up on the hill that we do the highlight show from was way too crammed to have Claire Balding and two guests. So Wimbledon built a new platform with social distancing in mind, which both us and ESPN are using. We used it this morning [Wednesday 30 June] with Sue [Barker] and Boris Becker and Sam Smith all safely distanced.
BBC Sport is working on a schedule with ESPN for the platform on the hill, which includes gaps to allow the area to be fully sanitised.
Part of BBC Sport's crew working on site at Wimbledon 2021 in technical partner, Arena's, OB truck
Challenging play
As to those challenges mentioned by Chakraborty, this year there have been many for the BBC Sport team and their OB supplier, Arena. He states: [There have been a] lot of challenges. I suppose space is the first part of it. Wimbledon have been brilliant. They're always very organised and I've seen the various challenges that the other majors have faced and also other sporting events have faced, and worked out how they were going to do it. But every venue is unique and Wimbledon has its own unique challenges.
For us it's probably three areas when it comes to the space part of it, he goes on. One is the broadcast centre, then the other areas are studios, commentary boxes, and then I suppose, player access as well.
So the broadcast centre was tough, Chakraborty explains. It's been around a while, about 30 years, and I think as more and more people and more and more [TV] platforms come and have filled it up, suddenly our office and the one next door have got about 20 people in there; [but] once we put in social distancing, there's got to be [no more than] five in [this office] and five in [the other]. So you [have to] work out where does everybody go?
I think the fans have really reacted warmly [to the on-court interviews], especially Murray on the first night. Every answer seems to get cheered, and I think the players react well to that as too as they've spent most of the year playing to empty stands so actually having a Wimbledon back the one of the four Grand Slams that wasn't there last year has been really special to them
What Wimbledon worked out pretty quickly was they did a survey of all their rights holders and said, well, who's coming and who's not, and for people who are coming, please make your delegations as efficient as they can be and tell us how many people you're bringing . So once they'd done that, they worked out how much space was available and where [they could] go.
[However] at the same time the pressure was on us to say, well, how much of the operation needs to be here? And we knew that the main broadcast scanner OB truck had to be here because there's so many feeds coming in from all over the complex. But we decided we could take a lot of our post production back up to Salford. So four of our six edit suites are back in Salford, [plus] the ingest operation, library, Chakraborty continues.
Those four edit suites that have been moved to Salford would have been situated in portacabins on site in London, so now that space has been freed up, staff that have to be on site have been spread across the two offices within the broadcast centre and those cabins.
Chakraborty adds: Similarly, we've got about 40 commentators who are [normally] all packed into one room; that changed [with social distancing] and Wimbledon created three offices so they're all spread out in there. They're all sort of sat opposite each other at a two metres distance. So that's how we've kind of worked that part of it, just to try and use the space as efficiently as possible. Obviously we're surrounded by perspex screens. The moment you leave your desk, you're putting your mask on. So all the kind of standard challenges you've got of any sports event really.
Including staff in the OBs on site in a regular year, BBC Sport would have around 200 people at Wimbledon. This year, thanks to pulling crew up to Salford to work remotely and minimising people on-site as much as possible, that figure is down by one third.
BBC Sport's Wimbledon social media team is also in Salford this year, and it is going well. Says Chakraborty: We seem to be doing all right there. We filmed an opening that we thought was a bit of an old school TV thing, like a gag with Tim Henman and Boris Becker yesterday [Tuesday 29 June] looking forward to the footba
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Strawberries and cream: BBC Sport taking advantage of a great return to Wimbledon for The Championships By Heather McLean, Editor 
