One Year ago Community Radio Broadcasters from the award winning BCfm Radio arrived in Brazil to broadcast hours of live programming to Bristol, capturing the atmosphere and the excitement of the Fifa World Cup 2014 following months of hard fundraising and logistical planning to ensure the historic project could go ahead and more importantly would deliver the planned 5 hours of daily broadcasts, online TV content and pre-recorded pieces.
The Award winning flagship One Love Breakfast Show which is produced at BCfm and also broadcast on Ujima Radio was where the idea first came about after a joke between Breakfast host Patrick Hart and co-presenter Harriet Robinson who were talking about how lucky the big TV and radio stations were to be covering the world cup in such an amazing country. They then began to joke “Let’s start a campaign to get the One Love Breakfast to broadcast live from Brazil, imagine that ” and after a tweet from KLM Air France who offered to pay for 2 flights, the campaign began to make the trip a reality. Each presenter put up £500 of their own money to secure the remaining flights and hotel accommodation and then an entire series of events took place to raise the £5000 needed for the trip. They even got BCfm station manager Pat Hart to run the Bristol 10K and local bands, businesses and the public all joined forces to push the total up to the 5k target. Presenters from both BCfm and Ujima Radio alongside fellow community station Glastonbury FM all chipped in. The team of 5 flew out to Rio De Janeiro on June 11th 2014 from the Stations home at the Beacon Centre St George.
The presenters’ technicians and producers worked 20 hours each day to send live broadcasts, reports, pictures and online TV footage back to Bristol, often travelling to areas they were told to stay away from just to get the real stories. On one trip to a favela there were gun shots outside the building they were visiting as they watched some youngsters practice guitar in a disused warehouse.
Assistant Station BCfm Manager Harriet Robinson said “The Fifa world cup has been described as the greatest sporting event on earth and we at BCfm were so proud to be a part of it. It was a massive technical challenge, it didn’t all go to plan and were had to rely of an Apple iphone to get the signal back to Bristol on two of the days at a cost of nearly £1000 but it was worth it! Our brief was to capture the diversity of the World Cup in terms of culture and inclusion and I believe we did that, it was an honour”. She said.
The national organisation that hands out the Radio version of the Oscars ,The Radio Academy were so impressed that they cited the reports from Brazil as one of the reasons for BCfm’s Best small station in the South West accolade in 2014.
Hear reports from Brazil all week (from 15th June) on the breakfast show from 7am and during Getting Bristol Home from 4pm. And watch the video reports on the BCfmradio.com TV channel here
