Six Workflow Mistakes We See Before a Live Broadcast Goes Wrong

Many teams cue by habit. The director knows that the second guest needs a count of five and that the graphic comes in on the third word of the headline, and none of it is written down. This works for months, right up to the morning the regular director is ill and a colleague steps in with only a printed list of titles.

When we review cueing, we ask each crew member to describe what they listen for and what they do next. The answers rarely match, and the gaps are where mistakes happen on air.

The remedy is not a heavy script. It is a short cue sheet that states who calls what, using which words, and what the expected response is. A relief director can learn it in one rehearsal, and the regular team often finds it settles disagreements they had stopped noticing.

Almost every gallery can tell us what happens if a guest link drops. Fewer can show us where that is written, and fewer still have tested it with the whole crew in the room. A fallback that has never been rehearsed tends to fall apart in the first ten seconds, because nobody agrees who speaks to the presenter and who changes the output.

We ask teams to list the failures they actually worry about: a remote guest freezing, a camera losing signal, a microphone going dead, an item running short. For each one we write the first action, the person who takes it and the point at which the team moves to the next option.

Keeping the list to a single page matters. A crew under pressure will not read two, but they will glance at one pinned within reach of the director.

Teams rehearse the opening and the close, then assume the middle will look after itself. In practice the trouble sits at the joins: the move from the desk to the standing interview, the return from a pre-recorded package, the handover between two presenters who must walk past a camera. These are the moments where cue timing, camera movement and lighting changes all collide.

On the floor I have watched a perfectly good item undone by a presenter stepping into a shadow because the lighting state for the next set was only checked with a stand-in.

In our reviews we mark every transition in the running order and ask for at least one dry run of each with real people, not stand-ins. It adds minutes to a rehearsal and removes a good deal of anxiety from the live show.

The last mistake is treating a workflow review as finished once it has been delivered. A running order template, a cue sheet and a fallback page are working documents. New equipment arrives, a presenter changes, the format shifts from a thirty-minute programme to an hour, and the written procedures quietly stop matching the studio.

We suggest a short check after the first few broadcasts that use the new documents, asking what was ignored, what was unclear and what was missing. Then a further look every few months, especially as the dark evenings of autumn bring more live evening programming and more pressure on the crew.

Small edits kept current are worth far more than a polished document nobody has opened since it was filed.