Andy Waters – dock10

A day in the life. Meet Andy Waters, Head of Studios at dock10, the TV and production studios where 3,000 programmes are made every year, many of them among the nation’s favourites. He describes his working day at dock10’s purpose-built studio complex:

“It’s a lot of meetings, showing people around, explaining what MediaCity is, what dock10 is, and what we can do here. It attracts a lot of people because it’s not like anywhere else in the UK. Quite often when people visit, they think it’ll be an industrial estate with a couple of TV studios. When they arrive, they go, oh wow, this is a big deal.

We get a lot of international visitors. Last month we had the German ambassador; before that it was the Russian ambassador. They want to know how we created this whole city, this place that lives and breathes media content. It’s the scale that makes it special – we have the BBC and ITV here, but we make content for Channel 4, Channel 5, Sky, YouTube, Twitch, Netflix. And for us it’s all the same: the skills and technologies for making a programme for the BBC are largely the same as for a platform like Twitch.

I was the second person to arrive when we opened. It was a blank sheet, and it was wonderful: we were able to develop the studios in the way we wanted. Now we have this huge facility, but we’ve also got a sense of family. People care about what they do. They look out for each other. That saw us through the pandemic: the first three months were scary but then football came back, sport came back, entertainment shows came back, and we had to do things in a new way, but suddenly there was work to be done. And we became closer for it.”