TV3 News Studio

Behind me, TV3 correspondent Stephen Murphy is discussing the dropping of the Eurozone Recession story in favour of a one minute opinion poll.

That's right, I'm in TV3 headquarters, the palace of dreams, where real time news happens, real time. It is a veritable mediocre fest of hands on, drab cables, stacked under and over desks, writhing through screens and cases, editing suites and video feeds, like an amorphous, many faced sloth, sad and old but positively functional. The desk I'm using is hap hazard with a dubious soundtrack, from Alicia Keys to English Folk, and I wonder at the usual occupant and his colour coded keyboard. I know it must be functional but I have an uneasy feeling it isn't, that it's just how he likes it, old school and pastel, like the movie Tron, which, despite various praise, looks fairly gay and doesn't really work.

I took a quick tour into the news studio, a blue backdrop crawling with remotely operated cameras that slink silently like hunting jaguars. It is peculiar to stand in an empty set and notice them tilting slowly or rolling quietly, circumspect and insidious.

It wasn't as glam as I'd imagined, but despite it I felt important, like a visiting cohort in a revolutionary cafe, a stranger in a vocational information factory where the well informed have long since stopped advertising their intellect so they can get to the actual business of using it.

Understated and distilled at the expense of charm.

DIARIT: 6/10