Back to the camp

Wednesday 20th June

Donetsk

When we met at the hotel reception for the drive to this morning's location, the campsite on the outskirts of the city from which we had done our broadcasts before we were not quite as awake as we would have liked.

Rav had managed an hour or so of sleep after dealing with the needs of the programme and news desk at Daybreak in London, and getting the report edited. Tiffany had suffered the same consequence as me from having drunk so much coffee so late. Both of us had perhaps managed two hours of near unconsciousness.

We heaved our weary selves into the car and I drove us to firstly pick up Maria, who looked a tad fresher than us and was sensibly sporting a nice Euro 2012 baseball cap, it was gong to be a hot one, then going to meet Keith with the satellite truck for the drive in convoy to the campsite.

Coming to open the gate to the camp

No stress getting in this time. Maria had obviously left a lasting impression. They were not going to temp inducing her wrath again.

Chillin' after last night's celebrations 

The morning was nicely evenly paced with broadcasts into the news bulletin, a sports one, one little tease, one short programme one and a bit into Lorraine's programme just to round the morning off.

The stupid satellite system could not find itself again so Keith had to give it a bit of a technical kicking again to get it going.

The ITN truck with Keith doing his thing

The techie stuff that Keith gets to play with..

.. the back. Dish of the day; Spaghetti 

It had become almost a routine proceedure now. We were all ready to go with all the technical things in place well before we went on air which was a real relief  none of us were in the mood for dealing with any stress.

Rav and Tiffany go through the scripts

Time alone to memorise the lines

The rest of the day had the possibility of shaping up to be a bit of a pain in the ass that would deprive us of catching up on any of the sleep we'd lost over the last couple of days.

We had to go to another hotel. The Prague would be full tonight.

Emily in London had sorted us a couple of nights in another hotel in the centre of the city for another couple of nights.

Before we left the campsite tentative plans were in place for the next part of the tournament.

The England and France teams had obviously decided not to fall in with the plans of most of the fans and media. If they had France would have beaten Sweden and England would have drawn with Ukraine or at least beaten them by less than France should have beaten Sweden.

Then England would have come second in the group as was hoped for at best. The result being the next game being played here on Donetsk.

Most of the media and a large number of the fans had arrangements in place to deal with that. Hotels had been booked and tickets to the quarter final game.

We would now only have one night in our nice hotel in Donetsk before having to head to Kiev after doing some live broadcasts in the morning.

When we got to the Park Inn it was such a relief, a new, very clean, efficient place with spacious rooms and good air conditioning.

There was no requirement to do any shooting, sorting out any locations or finding guests for the limited broadcasting that was planed for us in the morning.

It was the first time that we would have a few hours of free time and did not need to be together.

Tiffany and Rav opted to retreat to their respective rooms, indulge in a bit of room service and hit the hay early.

I on the other hand decided to go for the restaurant option in the hotel and then get an early night.

I think we we were all tucked up and asleep by at the latest 10 pm

That would give us almost a full eight hours before having to be up to head to the stadium for our live broadcasts.