Seating plans

This comes under the ‘dull but necessary’ category of the director’s work. One person (normally the director) needs to decide where each guest is to sit. This information is distributed in a simple form that everyone will understand. Do not make it more complicated than it needs to be.

The floor manager will make sure the guests have arrived, gone through make-up and are sitting on the right seat in time for the planned slot. If they are not going to be ready (e.g. guest fails to arrive) the FM should let you know in sufficient time for you to make alternative arrangements.

The sound team will usually want to mark up microphone channels on the sound desk with the name of the guests.

Vision mixers find it useful to have a seating plan so that they can cut to the correct person during an introduction. It also gives them more confidence when captioning people to know for certain who they are.

Editorial considerations

Deciding who should sit where is not as straightforward as simply filling in holes on a seating plan. You should understand which of the visitors is most important to the story. Is there a danger of one guest overshadowing another? You may want to place the more fragile person near the centre of the set. Who disagrees with whom? Do you need to have a physical barrier between two people? (I’m thinking of a table here, rather than barbed wire.)

Greeters and green rooms

Some programmes with many guests appearing each day have professional greeters. They make sure the guests are comfortable while waiting to go to make-up or the studio.

Traditionally the room guests relax in is the ‘green room’. I’ve no idea where the name came from, but I’m sure one day a smug old person who has been working in television since John Logie Baird first declared This picture is non-sync’ will tell me.

Making guests comfortable has a couple of advantages. It improves their on-camera performance and you are more likely to get stars to come back again if you treat them well.

In lower budget programmes, or in shows with few guests, the job of greeting guests often falls to someone on the production team. It may be inconvenient for someone to take the time to look after a nervous visitor, but it needs to be done, and it needs to be done well.

Seating plan for breakfast television programme