Ringing Forums

Obviously, there has been a lot of interest in the press over the last couple of months around Ring for the King, with requests for interviews in papers, on radio, and filming requests from national, and now more recently an increasing number of international TV stations. Most of these have started off centrally, some have been redirected to more local people to handle, others have been a mixture of the two.

One thing I tell TV crews in particular is that to organise a group of ringers, get permission from the church, parental permissions for young people and so on, can sometimes take a few days to set up. We need to find a good location, where the ringing will sound good, where the ringers would be happy to be filmed and interviewed, where it is going to show good representation of age, gender, ethnicity etc wherever possible, and show ringing in a positive way. People give up their time freely to accommodate cameras and sometimes intrusive, over excitable journalists.

A couple of recent TV requests show the sharp contrast. The BBC piece that involved Ipswich ringers pre-recorded, then Birmingham ringers live at a ridiculous time in the morning took over a week to set up, film, put arrangements in place, and the time and engery of several people to make it happen, as well as the ringers who gave up their time for free. I understand the Birmingham band did manage to blag some money out of the BBC to cover breakfast and some travel expenses. On the flip side, Sky News called me on a Saturday afternoon, just as I was on my way out to ring a peal, demanding filming at 2pm that day ready for their 5pm slot. I did suggest that it would take time to arrange and I couldn't do anything right now as I was on my way out. It seemed they decided to go direct and contact the accommodating people in Kent and actually pulled off a good piece. Again, everyone rushed around and gave their time for free.

BUT, given the majority of these filming requests are arranged quite last minute, ringers sometimes have to be brought in from neighbouring towers to fill the ropes, people may even give up a few hours work or caring arrangements or whatever, so should they be compensated? We charge for ringing for weddings and some places charge a modest fee for teaching where its done outside of normal practice arrangements, and we charge visiting ringers for tower grabs and peal attempts.

On the one hand, its great we're getting the coverage, ringing is definitely in the public domain now, and its all for the greater good, but actually, as this is outside the norm and special arrangements have to be made, should we be requesting a nominal fee from TV crews? Would that stop them coming, or would it highlight these things do come at some level of cost to the participants and their time should be acknowledged and compensated?

I have no real strong views one way or the other, and it's too late to capitalise on it now, but it was just something that occured to me recently that if we had charged each of these filming requests, even a modest sum of say £50, towers featured could have been able to use that for whatever fixtures and fittings they needed, or put towards travel expenses for participants, or their tower christmas do.

Thoughts?