My Costa Rican TV debut wasn’t exactly what I expected. Actually, I didn’t really expect it at all, so there’s a place to start. Projects Abroad offers free English classes for adult community members and they wanted to advertise it on a local television station. The teaching coordinator asked Poppy and I to be the ones to come talk since we’re both teaching English and have a decent level of Spanish. In true Costa RicanProjects Abroad scheduling style, the day we were originally supposed to do it was a full week before it actually happened. But Friday morning, we finally made it to the television station to “film the commercial.”
In a sudden bout of preparedness, Marielos had prepared us a “script” of questions and answers about the classes we’d be offering. As we sat in the lobby attempting to rehearse, we started piecing together what was about to be asked of us. We saw people walking through the lobby and moments later appearing on the channel feed playing in the lobby. Based on the question/answer format of the script, we realized that we weren’t going to be recording a 30-second commercial; we were going to be interviewed on live TV! After sitting on the couch waiting for almost half an hour, the camera guy suddenly came in and rushed us into the set. No prep. No sound check. No “Look here, not there.” Not even a “Hold the mic here, speak clearly.” About fifteen seconds later, we had quietly slipped on to the couch across from the host and been handed our microphones.
In the brief time before the camera turned to us, we had time to observe the set and the studio. It was nothing like how I envisioned a television studio (even a low budget one) to be. The rain outside on the tin roof added a layer of heavy noise to everything. The people from the sound mixing room were yelling at the camera guy who was walking about and talking to other relevant people in the studio. All that noise while we were on live TV. Our set was one of seven located in a large warehouse type room. It consisted of two couches and a small coffee table with some curtains strung up behind us to break up the beige wall. Other sets had themes more like “Carribbean” “Western” “Breaking News” or the like. Behind our set was a “wall” made of iron bars and chicken wire that opened into a drive-through garage type area. Occasionally, cars would drive in, maybe honking as they locked their car. Not exactly CNN.
The host briefly intro’d our program and purpose before starting to “grill” us about our language school. Poppy and I had picked a couple answers that we each knew and so we transitioned back and forth pretty seamlessly when talking about the “when and where” kind of stuff. The hardest question that we didn’t anticipate at all was “Why should people learn English?” Luckily, I’d graded this one on my fifth graders’ exams last month (ha!) and had some answers ready. With minimal Spanish stumbling, we made it through the questions and answers for almost seven full minutes on live TV. I was quite proud of us.
When we finished, we both confusedly asked Marielos who on earth watches this kind of programming. Apparently this is *the* channel to watch for people like housewives who are, conveniently enough, part of our target audience for our English classes. We left the studio rather confused but satisfied with our performance. Unfortunately, since the piece was live, we never actually got to see or hear how the final version turned out, but apparently we were on TV. And that’s how I survived my live Costa Rican television debut.