A new BBC broadcast centre in Plymouth

It’s not often the story comes to you, but today it has. HRH The Duchess of Cornwall is stopping by for a tour of the BBC’s new multi-million pound broadcast centre here in Plymouth. Local dignitaries are camped out in our conference room, and they’re all looking through the window into the radio studios where I am about to spend 10 minutes with HRH showing her the studio. No pressure.

Our new centre has been designed as a mini New Broadcasting House (very close to the design principals used in London – but with an added view of the sea). The centre is home to BBC Radio Devon, Inside Out and Politics Show South West; BBC One Spotlight (the most watched regional TV news programme in England) and it’s also a regional hub which connects our sister stations BBC Radio Cornwall and outlying BBC Radio’s Jersey and Guernsey – in the Channel Islands.

So my part of the mission today is to tell HRH all about BBC Radio Devon. We are a bit proud of our new radio studios, they’re cutting edge. And a bit of a leap of faith, because all the audio we play isn’t stored in our new building, it’s not even in Plymouth, or in fact Devon. Birmingham and London host the audio for us, and also for four other radio stations which the BBC has refurbished using the latest playout technology. The aim is to ultimately refurb all 39 of the BBC Local Radio stations in the network.

So - think of us as a big iPod – the technology (home grown – created by BBC engineers in the finest traditions of the BBC) is a system called ViLoR, it stands for ‘virtualised local radio’. When our presenters press PLAY in the studio, the audio content (all the music and interviews we record) is being played hundreds of miles away. We’ve been on-air with ViLoR for six months, and the system has been so robust it’s a rare thing for us to have an on-air technical problem. In fact, on the one occasion when we did have a technical issue in our new studios, it was such a rare occurrence; it took us ages to work out what to do. Contrast this with 12 months ago, where we were working from ageing studios with playout technology which crashed regularly and often took us off-air.

But the real reason I’m loving our new building is not the environmental award that it’s won, not the fact that we’ve got air con throughout for the first time (!) and it is not that the new headquarters is home to cutting edge news-gathering and broadcasting technology; these are all brilliant – but the reason I’m really loving the new building is because it future-proofs the BBC’s commitment to the South West. A commitment that began in 1924 when the first BBC offices in Plymouth were built. And that’s good for the region but also for the BBC.

At the Devon County Show recently (Devon’s biggest ‘day out’ with hundreds of thousands of Devonian’s going through the gates) I lost count of the amount of listeners and viewers I chatted to. They don’t distinguish between the brands or platforms we have locally or nationally, they connect with the BBC as one organisation. They expected answers from us as much about Strictly as Spotlight; because for our audience, we’re the ‘way in’ to the wider BBC – because we’re the face of the BBC in their city, town or village and it’s us they turn to both for praise and questions. And that’s why we’re here because we’re rooted in the community we serve. That’s not a mission on the wall or a brand statement – it’s just what we do.

Here are some fun facts about the new BBC South West HQ:

• The investment makes us the most high-tech news production operation in English Regions
• 70km -There’s enough cabling in the new building to go the distance between Plymouth and Exeter
• 17 - The total number of TV studios, radio studios, galleries, graphics suites and edit suites in the new building
• I can see the sea from my office window.

Mark Grinnell is the Editor of BBC Radio Devon