Picking a Winner
The time has come to name and shame a few of my colleagues after what I can only describe as an episode of high farce this afternoon. In fact, it's on days like this that I wonder how we ever manage to make any programmes. I don't mean to be harsh, but, well, here's what happened...
You may remember a few weeks ago we were conducting an online survey of the Radio Scotland website. A little box would pop up, inviting you to give your opinions of the site. In return we promised you the chance to enter a prize draw. The prize was a digital radio. Thousands of you took part, for which we're very grateful. So far so good.
Today it was time to pick a winner and I was asked to do the honours. I'd pick a name out of a hat and then we'd take a photograph of me holding the prize. Simple enough, you might think.
First of all, Sally, my PA, refused to print out the thousands of individual e-mail addresses on the grounds that it would waste paper. She has this thing about trees having read somewhere that they help the environment. So then Stuart, from audience research, devised this complicated system in which he would assign each e-mail address a number and all I had to do was pick a number between one and 10,000. BUT, and here's where the panto started, Stuart said we had to "be faithful to the universal laws of chance." We all looked at him. Frankly he spends too much time locked in a small office looking at pie-charts. Anyway I wasn't allowed to just think of a number, it had to be "mathematically random". Not, at that moment, having access to a NASA mainframe computer, we scribbled the numbers one to ten on a post-it note, tore it into pieces and put them in a big ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ bag. Then Stuart's colleague Alice realised we would have to add a zero to the bag because we might need a four digit number. More paper was torn up and thrown into the bag. Sally wasn't pleased and went off muttering something about the ozone layer.
I picked four scraps of paper and we then matched that number against the relevant e-mail address. By this time Keir and Carol from Interactive were talking about editorial guidelines and whether or not we were allowed to award prizes, paid for by the licence fee, to a listener from outside the U.K. Some calls were made. I believe the United Nations may have become involved at this time.
As it transpired, the issue became hypothetical because the winner turned out to be resident in this country. All we had to do now was take a photograph of me holding the prize. I asked Keir for the digital radio and he gave me a blank stare. Carol said it had "been ordered but hadn't arrived." For the purposes of the photograph I asked Keir to nip upstairs and borrow one from the MacAulay and Co production office. He dashed upstairs while the rest of us stood and waited. And waited. Ten minutes later he returned looking much the way Indiana Jones looked after that narrow escape from a rolling boulder. He held the digital radio aloft and we all cheered.
Time for a photograph. That's when some fool - I think it was me - suggested we go outside and take the photograph. Five of us then trooped through corridors , out the back door and found an appropriate setting next to the 'Welcome to ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Scotland' sign.
All very simple really. Next week we plan to get together and discuss how to change a light bulb.
