One Saturday broadcast and the schedule that held it together

Marcus runs a small events company in the north east, and in the early weeks of autumn he rang us with a problem that sounded simple. He had a two-stage evening show booked, a streaming audience promised to his sponsors, and a crew he had never worked with before. What he lacked was someone to own the running order.

I was asked to mix, but the first conversation made it plain that the vision mixer was the smaller part of his worry. He needed the people, the timings and the cues sorted before anyone touched a camera. That is where our production management side came in, with Callum overseeing the day.

Marcus was honest about it from the start. He had been handed a spreadsheet by a previous supplier and could not tell which lines were firm and which were hopes. We agreed to start from nothing and rebuild it together.

The first job was to separate fixed points from guesses. Doors, the headline set, the sponsor message and the final stream cut-off were fixed. Everything else moved. We wrote each fixed point on one page, with a name beside it for who called it and who acknowledged it.

A producer's work at this stage is mostly asking awkward questions. Who speaks first on the second stage? What happens if the opening act runs ten minutes over? Marcus had answers for some and shrugged at others, which told us exactly where to build slack.

By the end of that week the running order fitted on two sheets. Every line had a start, a length, an owner and a fallback. It was not clever, but anyone on the crew could pick it up and know what came next.

• Fixed points written first
• One named owner per cue
• A fallback beside every risky line

Crew coordination is where a new team tends to wobble. People who have never worked together do not know whose voice to trust on the talkback, so everybody talks, and the channel fills with noise exactly when it matters.

We settled it before load-in. One voice called the shots from the gallery, one technical manager answered for the equipment, and the stage manager spoke only to confirm readiness. Cameras reported faults to the technical manager, not to me, so my attention stayed on the cut.

Marcus joined the briefing and said little, which was right. Afterwards he told me he had never heard a crew so quiet in rehearsal, and that he had worried about it until the first run-through proved the point.

Something always does. Here it was the second stage, where a delayed soundcheck pushed the first act back by roughly a quarter of an hour while the stream was already live and viewers were waiting.

Because the running order carried slack, the producer did not have to invent anything. A short sponsor segment, planned as a fallback, slid forward, and the graphics operator had it ready. From the gallery I simply cut to the wide and held it while the stage settled.

Nobody watching would have guessed. That is the quiet aim of the whole exercise: a problem that never reaches the audience because someone decided in advance what the room would do about it.

When the stream ended we did not pack straight away. Callum gathered the crew for ten minutes, and we wrote down what had worked and what had not, while it was still fresh and nobody had gone home.

Marcus kept the notes. Two weeks later he sent a message to say he had reused the two-sheet running order for a smaller show of his own, without us, and that it had held. That pleased me more than any compliment about the picture.

Production management is easy to overlook because when it is done well, nothing visible happens. The show simply runs to time, and the mixer gets to concentrate on the pictures.

• Debrief while the crew is still together
• Keep the notes for the next show