:: BIRMINGHAM behind the scenes :: An insight into Birmingham’s invisible army of night workers

In the last few weeks we’ve been in talks with BBC WM to have an audio piece we had prepared about invisible work in Birmingham broadcast on the station, and it’s now been uploaded on to the BBC WM website to be streamed on demand. The program is called Your Space and has recently moved from its Sunday night slot to an internet-only broadcast, as the BBC find that this attains a larger and more diverse audience than its original on-air slot.

You can listen to the show and view what the BBC had to say about our project on the Your Space part of the BBC West Midlands radio website here. Alternatively you can listen to the show by clicking this button:

You can even download it as a podcast in MP3 format on our page at Switchpod.

This audio is a culmination of all our research, interviews and has been our main drive for the reaslisation of this project. The radio piece was created from a series interviews conducted with night shift workers inluding casino croupier, rail maintenance worker, warehouse operator, a cleaner at the train station, a taxi driver and even roofer consigned to working at night for “public safety” in the main shopping areas, where there was deemed a risk to the public of falling masonry during the day (no such consideration for workers undertaking such tasks in the dark!).

The backing track was created especially for this piece by one of our collective, and has been edited with the dialogue to create a somewhat sinister industrial ambience, and in this 6 minute montage we challenge the listener with a scenario of what life would look like without all the preparation that has taken place overnight by night shift workers, as well as convey some of the injustice and hardship of such a thankless yet indispensable area of work.

Update 24/04/2008: In order to increase our potential audience, we have uploaded the audio along with a montage of the photographs we took for this project on YouTube and this can be viewed below:

Alison Bell from BBC News 24 in London – a night shift worker herself – took an interest in our project and kindly gathered some quotes from her colleagues working the same shift about their experiences of working nights:

“It’s like taking a flight to New York every day for four days in a
row.”

“Yes, and trying to make sure you take your brain and stomach with you.”

“It makes you realise that sleep is the most satisfying human need.”

“It’s puts you out of sync. It’s hard to sleep in the day, especially
before the first shift in a block. As for the effect on my social life -
what social life?”

“You get fatter cos you do no exercise and you have to eat to stay
awake.”

“Yes, and you eat bizarre things that you wouldn’t eat during the day,
just because it’s nighttime.”

“Bad things – sleep deprivation. It’s really hard to get quality sleep
at any time. Then on your days off you can’t readjust to sleeping at
night. Good things – we get paid more if we do night shifts. Also, it
gets you out of the rat race – rush hour commuting, busy
banks/shops/gyms – you can go and do all those things when it’s quiet.
But it’s unnatural – you’re denying yourself the normal normonal
activity.”

“I’m a parent – I have no social life anyway. Night shifts are
surprisingly compatible with childcare. But they do leave you braindead
and lacking in inspiration.”

“It gets you out of office politics – the managers don’t work
overnights!”