The secret support behind every successful sports presenter

By Leo Robson

Towards the end of ITV’s transmission of the Rugby World Cup semi-final between England and New Zealand in 2019, the internal audio feed went dead. “We were in the middle of an advert break,” Mark Pougatch, the presenter, recalled. “Normally you hear the hubbub of the gallery – the producer, the editor, ‘ten seconds to come-back...’ Suddenly there was silence in my ears.” Then out of the corner of his eye, he spotted an autocue with the words, “Keep talking”. Pougatch – one of Britain’s leading sports broadcasters – had one person to thank: Sophia Walker, who has the job on set of prompt operator. “She acted very calmly but very quickly. That was the only way of getting a message to me. Via her.”

The incident was “chaos”, recalls Walker, who has been working in the television industry for almost 15 years. Whatever the sport, a producer will write a script before a game, often collaborating with the presenter, before sending it on to Walker. She sees her role as a proxy for the audience. A lot of “ops” – broadcast jargon for a prompt operator – “will sit there and put up whatever,” she says. Walker likes to think about whether a line is unclear, offensive or just ill-suited to the person assigned to deliver it. During a broadcast, she maintains audio contact with the presenter because, as she puts it, “I’m the last set of eyes.” Sometimes, a presenter such as Pougatch seems so fluent that Walker will say he simply doesn’t need her. “And he’s like, ‘Sophia, I will always need you.’”