Valentine’s, chocolate ads, bans and overweight kids

Friday 09/02/07 

Story:            Valentine’s, chocolate ads, bans and overweight kids

“Hey it’s Friday afternoon, it’s been a really busy week, let’s rush to do a last minute story about Master Foods announcement last Monday to stop targeting ads to the under 12s, oh, and let’s tie it in to next week’s Valentine’s Day, and lets arrange the whole thing, film it, edit it and send it today.”

No one said those words but they might as well have done so because that is what we ended up doing.

I actually began the day sitting in a hospital room in my underwear and being looked at by 7 people. Those being, my consultant, his assistant consultant, a radiologist, a surgeon, a senior physiotherapist and two sports injury specialists. Oh the attention!

I should have been happy that the NHS’s resources were directed towards solving my hip and back pain, but actually I felt more like a mouse and a cold one at that.

Then afternoon saw me filming Masterfoods made chocolate bars in a convenience store near our office. We had tried the newsagent that supplies us with our papers everyday but they wanted to charge us £200-£300 for the honour! The easily recognisable bars involved included Mars, Twix, M&Ms, Maltesers, MilkyWay etc. After filming enough of them we took a piece to camera of my reporter gesturing to the rows of bars and myself following her gesture to finish the shot with a close up using the macro setting on the lens, of a couple of confectionary bars. I used this same tool later when filming flowers outside Liberties. Its affect is to bring the immediate item into focus and throw the rest further out of focus, it certainly has its uses, in this case for chocolates and flowers. We filmed at some upmarket shops including exteriors of Godiva on Regent Street, some other gift shop and also inside and outside a chocolate store in an arcade off Piccadilly. The smell when we walked into this store was fantastic, and despite all the pink shaped heart packaging all over the place the air was dominated by a minty chocolate smell, my favourite.

One of the producers had also managed, at very short notice, to arrange an interview with someone at the British Nutrition Foundation, near Holborn. It didn’t turn up any very exciting sound bites but at least it put some form of ‘expert’ opinion into the piece. Vox pops of shoppers and a shot of the London Eye with it’s valentines red lighting ended the filming so I could get on with the editing side next. Thanks to a Norwegian couple we interviewed on the street we discovered that places like Sweden and Norway are, not surprisingly, way ahead of the UK in terms of advertising restrictions towards the young. And so my reporter had to change her script to include this as well as to show that it seems that Masterfoods are really just jumping the gun on legislation due to come in anyway this Summer. We also spent quite a while searching our own bureau library for footage of overweight children, without much success, they had mysteriously disappeared!

All done by 2300 but as broadcast date was not to be until Tuesday 13th there was still a chance things could change before then…