CHARLES BANNERMAN: Times have moved on much across the past 30 years with advances in communications technology
As a child of the ‘60s in Dalneigh, one Saturday afternoon ritual used to be to walk home from the Caley Park, wolf down my tea and then head along to Jocky Lawson’s shop to await the arrival, usually just after 6pm, of that Inverness institution The Football Times.
This was a wonderful Highland News stablemate; one of very few means of establishing the day’s Highland League scores and accessing match reports.
How on earth, with 1960s resources, they managed to collate, publish and distribute all that information so quickly has always been a complete mystery.
Well, not quite, because I did know that the “technology” of the day included my schoolmate David Love, now a well-known journalist of over 50 years’ standing.
But he started as an FT “copy boy”, grabbing a sheaf of handwritten copy from a reporter in the stand at Thistle, Clach or Caley, jumping on his bike and pedalling furiously to Football Times HQ in Diriebught Road before heading rapidly back for the next instalment.
By the late 1980s, I was a part-time freelance journalist, working for BBC Highland among others.
To obtain radio interviews from Fort William or wherever, someone had to trudge down to Inverness bus station to collect a five inch spool of audio tape, recorded on the Lochaber reporter’s barely portable reel-to-reel tape recorder and placed on the bus at the other end.
On Saturday afternoons I would sometimes help my colleagues John Willie Campbell and Hugh Dan MacLennan to phone round half the pubs in the Highlands from the BBC to ask “are the shinty boys back yet?” in pursuit of that day’s scores and scorers, which were then broadcast and dictated, word by word, to newspaper copy takers.
News journalists faced the same challenges and, although marginally quicker than the Pony Express or smoke signals, pre-millennium technology was slow and laborious stuff.
Nowadays I do that shinty report myself, but for BBC online, and on Saturday afternoons, I don’t even have to stir from my couch.
The Camanachd Association’s Twitter, Facebook and shinty.com not only give final scores, they post every single goal within minutes, if not seconds. While following this, I can also flick through other feeds for news of the Highland League and any other football I like. Meanwhile, Sportsound’s goal updates, and dreadful past participles, emerge from my radio and I remain recumbent while tapping out my emailed online shinty report on my phone.
Placing reels of audio tape on a bus is now as obsolete as the dear old FT itself. Indeed, I can walk out of stadia in Dingwall or East Longman, press a few icons on my mobile and manager interviews recorded on it will be waiting for me on a computer on my return to the BBC.
There have even been occasions when I’ve briefly abandoned the fruits of the all-inclusive to record and send a sports preview to the BBC in Inverness from poolside in Tenerife.
Advances in communications technology across a mere 30 years or so have been stunning, enabling the beaming of information anywhere and everywhere.
There are disadvantages, though, in an era when Prime Ministers and members of the Cabinet arrive and depart almost daily... and technology makes this very difficult indeed to escape!
