A three-job sound recording day yesterday, and a very interesting one. A long day shooting at the local NHS hospital, where we interviewed the inventors of the artificial pancreas, which monitors blood sugar and dispenses insulin for diabetics.

Also filmed in an intensive care unit, which is always strange, as you're aware that there are very distressed relatives of seriously injured people there, and you feel a bit bad about going on with your business while they're having such a horrible time. We've had someone's heart fail and the crash cart come racing in while we were filming two beds up on one occasion.

After that full day, I was off to one of the colleges to record a Cambridge Uni guest lecture by Mark Thompson, Director-General of the BBC.

I found Mark Thompson's address refreshing free of media and business jargon, and, reassuringly, he seems keen to make fewer higher budget, high quality programmes, rather than try to continue with the same number at lower budgets. Having seen what happens when the professional crew are replaced with graduates with a camcorder, I'm relieved. That's no way to differentiate the Beeb from the commercial competition, so that everyone pays the license fee happily.

Then back home after 12.5 hours of work to edit a Danish radio ad before bedtime! Not sure how great my jingle-writing was by that point, but it needed doing that night, so..!

It was a fifteen hour day by the time I was done. I've done longer, but usually on one job, so it's been much less manic than rebuilding equipment for the next task and travelling between locations and clients… Still, if I can keep that up five days a week, my bank manager will be very happy. But nobody wants that.

So we're not shooting in Bologna this week, for some mysterious and under-reported-on-telly reason. But I don't feel like I can moan, really, as we all know some stranded people who're being caused much more trouble. Volcanoes, eh? And some of the papers seem to have decided that we're saying "volcanologist" instead of "vulcanologist" these days. Hm.

What I did get to do this week was spend a couple of days shooting in our local maternity hospital again, and there's nothing to cheer you up like very small babies. Even the little ones in incubators don't distress me these days, knowing how most will have completely normal lives, are visited regularly by parents, and generally have it much better than their equivalents in El Salvador. Very nice to catch up with the director from the previous shoots again, too.

Been busily finishing off our NHS job recently, which remains an education and I still feel jammy to see so many different life-and-death jobs being done with such compassion and seriousness. I think you wouldn't get this overview of care, research and infrastructure if you worked in any capacity in a hospital - an exec wouldn't spend so much time looking at any one situation, a nurse only sees his ward, a porter only sees patients when they're on the move, a surgeon in theatre etc.

I was interested to learn more about the National Curriculum, and the direction in which it's headed, on another job last week, but apart from that my main educational experience for this week was actually attending lectures (something I didn't do much of at college). The first couple were at the Uni, recorded for Cambridge University Press. A talk on Women in Science contained a number of new (to me) names in the roster of neglected Victorian women of science, and a refreshing non-polemical discussion of Rosalind Franklin, who took the x-ray "pictures" which led Crick and Watson to their Nobel Prize for discovering DNA. A very nice talk on Why We Read Shakespeare was a bit less newsworthy for me, as my degree was in literature, but just as enjoyable.

There's such a thing as too much information, though, as my second set of lectures this week proved. The presentations of this year's junior doctors' research projects contained many illuminating gems, on subjects from the progress of alcoholism to end-of-life care. The discussion of gender reassignment surgery contained some overly informative photos of each step of the male-to-female operation, though. Interesting sociological commentary to go with it - the surgical problems are, if not solved, then surprisingly well worked-around. The social prejudice problems less so.

Perhaps most interesting to me was the research into health problems of the Cambridge homeless population, which corrected some ideas I had about how many people are in that situation locally, and what their daily circumstances are like, and uncovered some prejudice in the medical profession as well as problems from the patients' side.

Just got back from an incredibly busy short shoot in Rotterdam. Two of us ran round a school, interviewing students and teachers, then got a cab into town and tried to grab general shots of all the main tourist attractions (Erasmus Bridge, Hotel New York, SS Rotterdam, some old boats in the harbour, the Euromast...) all in a day. Very hard work lugging all the gear around and trying to keep our brains going, but nice, interesting people to talk to.

Flying from London City to Rotterdam means a small, propellor plane. Not keen, but as it wasn't too bumpy, and took under an hour, I'm not complaining - because of the time difference, we left the Netherlands at 18.40 and got into London at 18.30. That's efficient.

Rotterdam looked nice, anyway. Would drop in on the way past if I'm in the area again - I was surprised at the number of nice, old buildings, as the city centre was extensively remodelled by the Luftwaffe during the war. The modern stuff's good too, though there was rather a lot of neon near our hotel.

The rest of the week's been filming in the hospital, mostly. It's been fun sharing the writing for this NHS video, too. One learns a lot about the behind-the-scenes stuff; mostly it's very reassuring.

Well, it's been a busy old year, with lots of time hanging around doctors, partly for another minor op on my arm, but mostly shooting for the NHS, which culminated in a day with Sir David Frost. Lots more interviews with researchers, hearing about the prospect of new treatments for cancers, type 2 diabetes and more. Always exciting and interesting to shoot with people at the leading edge of their field.

Also delivered the 5 training videos I was writing and directing for the University - on time and on budget, despite all the other stuff going on (like sudden trip to El Salvador in the middle of my edit time!) so I'm very pleased. The exceedingly bright people I was working for said they found the process of shaking all the ideas into tight scripts and then executing them exhausting but exhilarating. Which is a nice way to describe any good day at work, doing this job.

This last few weeks have been exaggeratedly hectic, as we've just moved house. It's a nice quiet cul-de-sac, just outside town and easy to get to, and it's hopefully the perfect spot to build a studio in 2010. We'll get things drawn up as soon as possible in January - hopefully a perfect, acoustically treated studio for film/video mixes and voice recording... and possibly we'll fit the band in at some point too.

As a bit of variety, today's corridor pic was taken in the national maternity hospital in San Salvador. It's been an amazing, eye-opening week filming for the NHS in El Salvador. The main impression one returns with is that we really take for granted our life of luxury at home. We understand that intellectually, in abstract, but maybe it's good to see it first-hand from time to time.



It's the poorest and most dangerous place I think I've been. We were cautioned strongly to only eat food that the doctors who accompanied us considered safe, and we brushed our teeth with bottled water etc, but that's not exceptional. What's odd is how quickly I went from feeling very uncomfortable around non-uniformed random people with shotguns hovering around, to feeling nervous unless there was someone armed nearby. We were told that leaving the hotel for a walk was likely a one-way trip, and that leaving the hospital in the city centre without several armed police (especially with a camera) was not a great idea. A bloke with a shotgun supervised our five paces from hotel to load the bus every morning, looking up and down the street.

The maternity hospital was surrounded by a razor wire fence and guarded by a man with a pump-action shotgun. We got the hotel to call us a taxi for dinner one night, and upon discovering this at the end of the meal, our hosts looked a bit disconcerted and rang a driver friend to take us home. We were the only foreigners I think I saw while we were there. By all accounts, a cab ride was likely to end down a dark alley next to a parked 4x4.

It's like this because when the ex-pats who left for the US during the war returned, they imported LA gang culture to San Salvador. It's a regular occurence, if you're in public office, to get a call telling you when and where your kids are after school, and that they'll be killed unless you pay $20k in a week. The busses - the main form of transport - were often robbed by gang members. One of our hosts had been on a held-up bus recently - if you don't look wealthy, you can just pay a dollar and get on with the journey. If you looked like us, they'd apparently kill you for $5. But an average annual salary in El Salvador might be $1400.



So in this context, the maternity hospital does amazing things. They're not well resourced compared to a UK hospital, but they don't only treat the rich, and they're up against tradition. Most women still deliver at home (a lot, as it's a catholic country) and don't attend prenatal scans etc. Mothers are often only admitted when a complication has already become evident. The maternal ICU can take 3 or 4 patients, and the baby ICU has incubators with three babies in each. They're this oversubscribed in a country where home delivery is the norm, and in rural places women go to witch doctors before hospitals. And the maternity hospital was damaged in eathquakes and hasn't been rebuilt, so some areas are abandoned, and some have iron braces propping up walls. So it's amazing to see how quiet, orderly and under control everything seemed, how compassionate the women seemed, changing 200 babies in a room for those kids whose mothers are still in care.

Our hosts were a UK doctor and the government health adviser. They made the whole experience very safe and pleasurable for us, educated us about the country and the issues, found us safe and fantastic food, and generally made it a very stimulating and eye-opening visit. In return, it seems the presence of a camera crew to film an agreement between the El Salvador government and our UK hospital catalysed some action. We met government ministers, filmed in the ministry, and after interviewing the incredibly sharp and energetic 87-year-old Health Minister, each received little goodwill presents with handwritten notes for our departure.

So quite an experience, and one that puts my little everyday problems on returning to England in perspective. As I thought while we stood on the volcano outside San Salvador, doing some landscape shots, I'm pretty lucky to be able to do this sort of thing for a job...

Amid the mad scramble to finish everything before the weekend this week, I had the pleasure of seeing Andy from Bruizer again, on a nice, straightforward little job for the NHS at the Duxford conference centre. Needless to say, had to dive out and take a picture of some planes even though I suspect that's not strictly allowed...

Busily trying to shoot the training videos I wrote last week at the moment. Finished a loooong shoot day in Cambridge, and I'm being sent to Coventry again tomorrow with m'colleague Neill to finish the "live-action" shoot. Bits of animation and screen-shots yet to grab.

It was also the screening of Wasted, the teen drugs and alcohol awareness film I did some work on earlier this year, this week at Cambridge's Arts Picturehouse. Pete had done a great job cutting it, and the kids in the cast and youth workers were all justifiably proud of themselves.

The NHS job is proving every bit as interesting as it looked, and this week we filmed an operation, between interviewing doctors, researchers, surgeons and patients.

The op we shot was a prostatectomy using a robot - surprisingly uninvasive, and we were interviewing the patient two hours later, sat in bed with tea and biscuits. It was amazing to see the dexterity of the surgeon at his control station replicated so precisely by the probes in the patient’s body which we could see on a big monitor.

Obviously, being in the theatre meant wearing scrubs, which, as you can see, do not flatter me. Along with starting to understand which colour piping on the dark blue nurses’ uniforms means a specialist or nurse practitioner etc, I learned on Wednesday that in operating theatres, qualified medical staff wear blue hats, whereas a white hat means “don’t ask me; I’m a numpty tourist”. One to look out for if you wake up on the operating table one day and want to know what’s going on.

Anyway, I’m certainly glad to live where I do, as our hospital seems to be the place to go for lots of things, and all the people we’ve interviewed have seemed both bright and compassionate.

Started a nice new bit of (sound) work this week on a film for the NHS to encourage support for biomedical research facilities in Cambridge. Looks to be another interesting and educational job.

Before getting to the main week of shooting later this month, we warmed up this week by interviewing a famous doctor and hospital patron. I saw the corridors underneath the public part of our large local hospital (voted best NHS hospital last year, I learned) for the first time - it’s a whole other world of zooming vehicles. Fascinating.

Coming up: filming an operation...