Hearing the producer in your ear

By James Jones, founder of Granary Digital · September 2026

What actually happens on air

You sit in a chair, alone, looking at a camera. In your ear is a small earpiece, the IFB. Through it comes the presenter in the studio, sometimes miles away, and a producer who talks over the presenter to tell you that you have thirty seconds, or to wrap, or that the running order has changed. If the sound is set up badly you also hear your own voice, a fraction late. Then a question arrives and you are expected to answer it fluently while all of that continues.

Why it is hard

Speech is a feedback loop. Hear yourself late and the loop breaks: people slow down, repeat words and lose their place. Broadcast engineers prevent it with mix-minus, a feed that carries everything except your own voice. Being talked to while you talk is a separate skill, and it is learnable, but only by doing it.

What a meeting room cannot do

Most media training is a trainer across a table with a camcorder. The questions can be hostile and the feedback excellent, and the earpiece is still missing, so the day rehearses the answers and not the conditions. The first time the spokesperson wears an IFB is the real interview.

What our training day does instead

• A real IFB earpiece, with the trainer in a separate room acting as presenter and producer, cueing and interrupting as a gallery would.
• Mix-minus configured correctly, so the rehearsal feels like a broadcast. We can also deliberately break it for one take, so the trainee knows what a bad line feels like before it happens for real.
• Three 4K cameras and immediate playback, so the trainee sees the shot an editor would have used.
• Broadcast sound, so the small habits a phone camera hides are audible.

The studio, the rig and the crew are ours. The training is delivered by Hilary Jeffs of Jawsmith, who has coached Cabinet Ministers and FTSE executives since 2006.

Who this is for

Anyone who will do a live or as-live interview: spokespeople, executives before results, experts who get called when their subject is in the news, charity leaders during an appeal. If the interview will be down the line, the earpiece is the interview.

Days are quoted per brief. The media training page has the format, and the cost guide has the market ranges.

Related guides

• Media training at the studio
• Interview formats explained
• How much does media training cost?
• What happens in a media training day