A Year of TBN

Tiffin School is a forward thinking grammar school that puts a firm emphasis on independent learning and enterprise for their students. They have implemented a controversial “independent study” program, and from low down on the school impress upon the students that it is up to them to work and gain results. And in that vein, a new idea was put forward, one that would push the students to their limit. Could the students of Tiffin School organise and run their own TV station?

A great furore was made about Tiffin TV when the concept was first imagined. In seemed like a fantastic proposal and pupils from all years leapt to involve themselves in this unique project.

Everyone waited with bated breath to see if our team would manage win money from our sponsors. What happened next?

Nothing. Or so it seemed. Excitement waned and attention wandered as people forgot about Tiffin TV, or TBN as it was crowned. The school was not even informed if the presentation was successful.

Over nine, long months later the management team announced their first broadcast, their tone one of triumph. Then people watched the broadcast. It was an anticlimax of an anticlimax. It was broken.

Streaming problems meant that it was impossible to watch and the sceptics smiled smugly as they watched the video jerk and freeze. The broadcast may have been a brilliant piece of journalism, a powerful insight into life at Tiffin, but no-one could watch it so no-one could review it. Silence again reigned in TBN.

The view from inside TBN was somewhat different. To the outside world all was silent, but to those involved, their life suddenly became filled with work. Those who joined TBN expecting an easy ride were either jump-started to become model workers or fired. Indeed the mass exodus in the first month showed that the honeymoon period was over rather quickly. Left behind in TBN was a bare backbone of battle-hardened staff. These veterans worked hard, organised difficult assignment and met impossible deadlines. It speaks volumes about their dedication that teenage boys woke up at early on a Saturday morning to travel down to Hampton School and film a rugby match in the biting cold and wind, all for TBN.

Those who were never involved cannot grasp the effort it takes to run a TV station, even one as small as TBN. Those smug sceptics cannot even guess the time put into making that twenty minute broadcast, the lunch times spent organising and filming, the hours spent editing and the days spent making the piece coherent as a whole. We look at TBN with mild disinterest as a failure, but we are fundamentally wrong in our shallow thinking. TBN has shown that the Tiffin spirit will win through, whatever the odds. Watch out for the November broadcast. It promises to be a cracker.