When I started in television nearly 30 years ago, to take broadcast-quality pictures out and about you needed an expensive camera requiring an Olympic weightlifting-style lift and jerk to get it on your shoulder. Now you can film astounding quality stuff on your average smartphone. Video technology has moved on beyond recognition. Sound technology, however, seems to have changed not at all.
This week I filmed an edition of Winter Walks, the brilliant BBC programme in which someone is filmed, well, walking in winter. The camera technology is astonishing. I held a featherweight 360-degree camera on a stick, to capture everything from my viewpoint, while a tiny drone filmed stunning stuff from the sky. But every half an hour we’d have to stop for the poor sound man to unzip my coat and faff around changing batteries on my two radio mics, and adjust them to stop any rustling.
