Welcome to the first installment of What They Don’t Teach In TV School, an occasional series I’m starting to teach the new crop of TV tadpoles a few of the hard won lessons from a life on the road. Please enjoy the first of Frenchy’s Weapons of Mass Instruction.

Today’s lesson? Tour Buses.

One thing that all television freelancers quickly learn, though TV school doesn’t teach it, is the hard facts of travel. The simple act of getting from here to there and then back home again can often be more time consuming, more soul draining, and more burnout inducing than the actual production of a television show is.

Case in point: The WWE tour often covers three hundred miles or more between shows, which means moving tons of gear and hundreds of humans through the night. This massive feat of logistics is necessary to pull off a one day set-shoot-strike show of this proportion.

And it usually goes off without a hitch. Usually. When something goes wrong, say, a tour bus getting lost in southern Texas on the way to another show many miles distant, in the middle of the night, things can get ugly in a hurry.

And get ugly things did last night as my bus did exactly that, somehow wandering off course on the way from Monday’s show in Corpus Christi to Tuesday’s show in Laredo, which only got worse as the remaining awake TV crew whipped out their iPhones and tried to help, Google Mapping our lost bus deeper and deeper into the heart of Texas.

Here is a line that, when lost deep in the heart of Texas at 1 AM, being guided by iDiots with iPhones, you never want to hear your bus driver say; a line which they also don’t seem to warn you about in TV School: “Shee-it! The San Diego Highway? We’re really screwed up now.”

Worse is when the iDiots start arguing which left is the ‘right left’ to get us off the dreaded San Diego Highway, all the while mystical stop signs suddenly appear in the middle of the unlit, deserted two lane road as if from thin air, forcing the bus air brakes to be tested to their limits, slamming sleeping freelancers around in the bunks on the deserted back roads deep in the heart of Texas, lost on the way to the next show in Laredo.

Best of all is coming to the hundredth unmarked intersection, after seeing nothing but darkness, tumbleweeds, mystical stop signs and check cashing places, suddenly stumbling into one of the many WWE support trucks, possibly as lost as us, and finally making a impromptu convoy to the right highway in the middle of the night while most of the crew on the bus sleep right through the late night adventure.

The one thing they DO teach in TV school is the show must go on, they just don’t teach you how much unglamorous work is involved in ensuring that show does in fact go on.

Author: frenchy

One Response to “What They Don’t Teach In TV School – Part One”

1. peanut61 says:

   November 10, 2008 at 7:56 AM

   I wish I could have been a bird in the sky watching this. I thought James was the only one who got lost in the middle of the night and needed Marty’s help to find his way. Do we need a course in Tom Tom 101, Garmin 101 or Rand McNally 101? Which shall it be.

   Reply