Come on Charlie, it’s 6 o’clock – we’re leaving in 30 minutes. Not the wake up call a 15 year old wants to get in half term, with previous mornings not having been graced with her presence at all, but this was BBC calling. We were off to St Paul’s church in Birmingham to do a live broadcast of ringing and interviews in support of the Ring for the King campaign.

Many ringers, and even more non-ringers, saw the ringing broadcast live on BBC Breakfast and then subsequently on lunchtime and evening news. So many in fact that over 1000 learn to ring enquiries are now being sent out to teachers everywhere. How did it feel at the coal face?

Firstly, Breakfast TV is, by definition, early. We couldn’t really work out why it needed to be live given they also had some pre-recorded footage from Ipswich, but they wanted to blend that with live stuff, and that’s where the Birmingham team came in. The presenter also didn’t know why it had to be live but said live TV added a frisson of excitement. You can mess up with no way back.

The only other times I have been ringing before the sun comes up have been stunt multiple peal performances. I’ll always remember a lovely outdoor barbecue breakfast at Quex Park after the first of four peals of Maximus. This time cooked breakfast was supplied by a local café, with tower captain Richard Grimmett extracting both a taxi and breakfast budget out of the Beeb.

Tony Daw was there at 5am to let in the BBC engineers, and 10 members of the St Paul’s Birmingham band were already up the tower ringing a course of London Royal when Charlie and I got into the ringing chamber at 6.45. That was for a sound check, with the cameraman communicating with the live broadcast team outside. All was going to plan.

Ring for the King has caused a bit of a media frenzy. I took a 6.50am live slot of BBC Radio Five Live the week before, Vicki Chapman got to do a local media round robin – just like Liz Truss famously did. Even that publicity nearly broke the Ring for the King helpdesk, which has the ART Admin team sitting behind it, but it was only a portent of things to come. We have put future media requests on hold for a moment to check we have capacity to deal with them and maybe change the message.

With the ringers doing their stuff upstairs, attention focused to the live interviews. Timing had been variable, and the piece could have been pulled if Putin had done something stupid, but we got told that we would be live at 7.50 and my fellow interviewees, vicar, Elizabeth Wilby and Charlie Linford, assembled in the nave. I had briefed the girls on the sorts of things to say but they didn’t really need it. Both spoke eloquently about what they like about ringing, with no lines fluffed, no umms and no gratuitous use of the word ‘like’!

If you’ve not done live media, it is made easier by having pre prepared answers to the questions they might ask, and some target sentences that you can reel out. Sort of “that’s a good question, let me answer a different question”. I particularly wanted to get across that ringing takes quite a long time to learn, to deter those who think they can just come along on Coronation Day. Although we had given the BBC this story some months earlier, it was the BBC who chose to run it now, and we recognised that recruitment and teaching of ringers in 11 weeks is a tall order. However, it was still too good a PR opportunity to miss provided we made the right points.

I managed to get a new word into the script which came out of the brainstorming session with Yellowyoyo the week before. This was from a part of the session when we were trying to come up with the ‘values’ of ringing – half a dozen words which capture the essence of what ringing is all about. So in addition to pointing out what a skilled activity it is and how long it takes to learn, I was able to say “learning to ring for the King is the first step on a journey of discovery in bellringing” – the word ‘discovery’ is meant to capture the fact that we are always able to learn new things, go to different places, meet different people.

We did a second piece live for BBC News Channel at about 9.30, this time swapping in Richard Grimmett for the vicar – it took the presenter many goes to call him ringing master not ring master! Richard was able to say how strong the band is at St Paul’s, built on a pursuit of high striking standards and a strong social side. (‘Quality’ is another one of the value words we suggested in the Yellowyoyo briefing).

It was not long before we started to find quite what an impact the coverage had had. Alarm bells were flashing at “Ring for the King HQ”, aka the ART Admin team, and by the end of the day there were getting on for 1000 people who had expressed interest and given their contact details. The specially created website ringfortheking.org had been designed to act as a filter, explaining what ringing is all about, and getting better qualified leads.

So what happens next? Within a week or so all the enquiries should have been sent either to known teachers, teaching towers, ringing centres or associations. In the St Martin’s Guild we have a spreadsheet with about 15 enquiries and we are running a taster evening in advance of running extra School sessions to get them all taught. Of those 15, some will just be thinking they’re helping us out, but the majority will genuinely want to take up ringing, and this will just be the first step for them. It has been very interesting to see how many of the 1000 are returning ringers, which could be the focus of any future publicity.

The shout outs go to those who organised the ringing both in Ipswich and Birmingham, those who spoke well to explain what ringing’s all about, the ART admin team for sorting out all the enquiries, and Vicki Chapman for getting the story out there in the first place. This has been a good bit of ringing PR and it’s now up to us to get these ringers taught well and supplementing bands throughout the country.

Simon Linford
President CCCBR

P.S. If you have not seen the videos, and you won’t get them on the iPlayer because they are not kept, the Weald of Kent Bell Ringers Facebook group managed to capture both the Breakfast and BBC News pieces.