Mike Gibbons is Head of Live Sites and UK Coordination for the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Prior to joining LOCOG, he was the Project Director, BBC Live Events where he set up a pilot project to establish what became a network of nine Big Screens in the Public Space Broadcasting Project. This led to his being part of the first Urban Screens Conference in Amsterdam 2005 and being Chair of Manchester Urban Screens Conference 2007. In his role with LOCOG, Mike and his team are co-operating with the BBC and relevant city councils to install large LED screens in urban centres across the United Kingdom as part of the programme to bring the Olympic Games in 2012 to as many people as possible. These screens will then be a legacy of the 2012 Games.
This interview was conducted between Mike Gibbons and Scott McQuire at Urban Screens Conference 2008: Mobile Publics, Melbourne, October 4, 2008.
Scott McQuire (SM): I last talked to you a couple of years ago when you were nearing the end of the pilot phase of the Big Screens project. So perhaps you could talk about how that project was evaluated and where it might go, before we talk about what’s happening with London 2012.
Mike Gibbons (MG): The first nine screens proved to be quite interesting, because the pilot, which was in Manchester, worked so well, that there was a real demand to move on. So you had three, four, five big cities in the north and midlands – the core of the English part of the United Kingdom – set up, pretty much straight away. The survey work that was done at that point was unequivocally good. It was all ninety per cent’s in terms of approval ratings, desire to participate, social benefits, civic usefulness. The next phase was a complete contrast because then you got people who, responding to all sorts of reasoning, decided they wanted to join the party. So you got quite small boroughs, and medium-sized cities, saying, ‘we want to put a screen in, we actually want to do this as well’. And in some cases they did it, and then thought, “what do I do with it?” In other cases they started the process and then said ‘we realize we need a partner’. Therefore, the BBC was asked in to several projects, from quite different starting points.
But I think, over the period of time, all of those places became indivisible from the rest, so although they were associates, they became part of the pilot. And finally, in the last eighteen months, a couple more medium size towns came on board who had equally decided that there was a civic benefit for it and had found the funding. But at the end of the day, what you had was nine projects, each of them individually devised for their own particular set of circumstances, but utterly dependant for the core funding on a set of external circumstances, which weren’t going to be universally applicable across the board or across the UK. Therefore, whatever you looked at in terms of future rollout, if this was being done on the basis of civic good, or universality, or the opportunity to engage or share in a project, you were going to have to spend many, many years before you could start to contemplate a network that gave everybody access to it wherever they lived. So you needed another way of delivering that infrastructure.
The London 2012 Olympic Games clearly gave some potential opportunity as a way to deliver the whole project. We didn’t know whether there would be the interest from an Olympic perspective. But the thing we did know was that, however you were going to contemplate a rollout, you had to be in a position whereby you weren’t creating individual projects every time. You needed a template, a matrix, that you could in effect take off the shelf and say ‘what are your circumstances?’ So ‘you’re plan A’, and ‘you are plan B’, and ‘your’s may be plan C’. Actually, by and large, there’s only two sort of models that you require. But there needed to be the robust technology, there needed to be the suppliers who could do it, you needed the system to drive it. In many ways, where we ended up, as we go into this current phase, was concentrating very heavily on the technology, rather than the content. Because, ultimately, the five years of experimental project work was all about ‘how do you make a system work?’
It would be very easy to have got seduced by that, and to say, ‘well actually, we worked out the solution’. We did a lot of work on that, engaged in a lot of technology discussions, a lot of conversations with manufacturers and people who put together the content management systems that drive your screen. You could easily say ‘yes we’ve sorted that all out, hooray, we’ve done it!’ When actually, of course, all you’ve done is create the platform, and that is almost invisible until you do something with it. It’s when you do something with it that it ultimately makes sense. It doesn’t matter how good your technology is, ultimately the content’s the thing that really matters
SM: So London 2012 is the vehicle for the next five years of rollout?
MG: Yes. And the reason for that is, of course, that on the 31st of December 2012, or whenever it happens, the London 2012 Olympic machine disappears. You can’t build the Olympics into this on a long-term basis. Remember that, from the very beginning of the project, it depended on the city, and the BBC, the combination of the national and the local. In both cases, the edges are blurred, but they have their own special areas: one looking after content, the other looking after the public space, both of them with an interest in the content, both of them working in the local community. That model will apply in 2013 as much as it did in 2003. We’re very conscious in whatever we do that bringing LOCOG into this as a partner is only about facilitating that process.
You still have the position where you’ve got the BBC providing the mainstay of the content, and managing the content, alongside the city, borough, town, whose events team are in charge of that public space, and have their own content they want to bring to it. Both of them have a responsibility to reflect their own area and to generate content that goes in there. Of course there is also national content that is non-broadcast, which isn’t the BBC’s. National commissions, for instance, in film and video, which have grown over the years, have always been a part of the project and will continue to be.
The full version of this interview is published in the Urban Screens Reader, which can be downloaded here.
View the BBC Big Screens gallery.
Banner image of BBC Big Screen, Plymouth, UK, courtesy of Mike Gibbons.