Like the advert says, The Brentwood and District Talking Newspaper does exactly what it says on the box, it's a newspaper that talks to you. Only rather not being made of paper this newspaper comes in the form of an audio cassette and it's material is made up of presenters reading out those local news stories that will have appeared in the Brentwood Gazette.They've been performing this service for the towns Blind and partially sighted

listeners for some twenty five years and have the proud boast of never missing an issue. Not that this had been an easy task. Talk for instance to the organisations happy band of volunteers and they'll tell you about weeks when adverse weather conditions, national postal strikes and sudden loss of a studio has brought out that vital team sprit in both volunteers and those organisations who weekly assist the group.
There was the the time for example when nation-wide power cuts meant that one team spent an evening huddled around a battery powered cassette recorder reading their scripts by candle light, or how during a series of angry local newspaper strikes by printers, the papers reporters carried on collecting the areas news just for the talking newspaper. Even when the

The use of this studio location was short, when their then landlords -The Essex County Council decided to evict them. But friends in high places came to their rescue with Brentwood Council offering the team space on the top floor of the Old House Arts Centre. Here where in what was the old caretakers flat, the group built a control room for two studios, a production area for it's mass cassette copying equipment and an area for an engineering workshop and space for the groups massive collection of archived material.
After twenty or so years problems with the structure of the building involving health and stafty, and a very steep staircase that gave problems to their more elderly members meant a search for a new home. Once again Brentwood Council came to their aid with the offer of a set of rooms under the Town Hall. Allthough slightly smaller then the old Old House studio.

The new area contains a studio, control room, copy room and a large office. But the key to the success story of the Brentwood talking newspaper has to be it's sixty strong team of volunteers, who collect a number of large sacks of bright yellow postal wallets from Brentwood's post office to sort through the returned cassettes, check them for any faults, erase the previous weeks contents and stack them up ready for the copy team.
Meantime the editor of the team responsible for the new issue will have collected, fresh off the press and before they are even on sale, a few copies of the Brentwood Gazette. Throughout the late afternoon they will have selected the twenty or so stories they will use. Not all the stories covered by the local press can be used, if only because there is just not enough time available on a sixty minute cassette, so only the most important local stories

will be used. These are edited for speech and handed to the four presenters who each Thursday evening, from their Old House studio act as news-readers, recording their local news via a microphone mixer on to a specially designed cassette recorder that records two master audio cassettes together, one acting as a back up in case of any technical problems. By 9.30 their task is ended, and the master cassettes after being checked are left for the copy team to take over.
These good folk love early mornings, so much so that at 7am every Friday Morning they will start the task of copying on a bank of high speed copy machines close on two hundred sixty minute cassettes, each of which will go into it bright yellow pre addressed free post wallet. By 9.30am all is finished and the sacks are ready to be delivered.
With luck, and Brentwood's Postmen take great pride in making sure they do, the areas blind listeners often get to hear the local news before their sighted neighbours. Once listened too, all that's required is for the listeners to pull out their address label, turn it over and pop it back into their local post box. And this is where the bright yellow colour comes in handy because even if they forget to turnover that address label. The bright yellow wallet is so well known among the towns post office staff that on a number of occasions the team has often had the wallet and cassette return without a return address. So used are our friendly postmen that the non appearance of the wallet in the post box when they collect the mail is often the first sign of a listener living alone possibly being overcome with Illness or in need of help.

Producing the towns Talking newspaper is a team effort, but this band of volunteers is not resting on it's laurels. On the technical side their engineers are busy installing brand new cutting edge digital recording and High speed copy equipment which will dramatically improve the quality along with a revolutionary computer editing system to speed up the editing of features and interviews, used to produce Sound of Brentwood, the groups monthly magazine in sound.