Name: Private Lives. Part 1. | BBC Learning English.
Uploaded: 2026-02-26T12:52:03.000Z
Duration: 9 min 58 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Reflexive pronouns

I see myself as a West country girl who has lived all her adult life in London.

The second conditional

I think that if I were to get married and have children and give up my career, I would want to go back and live in the countryside again.

Adverbs of degree

I think London is a very good place to live for young people in private lives.

Mo is 34 years old and she was born in a small village in the west of England.

When Mo was 18, her dream was to work in the theatre.

Now she's a show manager at the Royal Albert hall in London.

As we'll discover, Mo is a determined young woman who's very enthusiastic about her job and we'll hear her talk about the house where she lives, her concerns about the environment, as well as what it's like to work behind the scenes at a great British building.

First, Mo retraces her steps from working hard for her A level exams in her final year at school to going on to drama college and becoming a show manager at one of Britain's most magnificent venues.

I was determined to get good A level results so that I could go into whatever career I wanted to.

However, what I really wanted to do, I think was acting or presenting, something like that.

So I gave up ideas of that and began to think about jobs backstage, such as stage management.

I went to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and studied stage management there.

Then I worked for a series of small theatre companies and ended up at the Royal Albert Hall.

Mo lives in West London and travels to work by bicycle or underground train, depending on the weather.

She's home loving and a landlady since she rents one of the rooms in her house to an old friend.

It's the first property I have ever owned and I love it.

I have a lodger who I've known for many, many years.

My favourite room is probably the living room.

Mo supports two organisations which campaign to protect the environment and she saves items of household rubbish so they can be collected by local government workers and reused.

I'm very concerned about the environment.

I'm a supporter of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.

I recycle from home, paper, card cans, bottles.

I'm also a vegetarian, not a Strict vegetarian because I do eat fish.

Mo and her friends make the most of living in London.

They often go out to restaurants and bars and they go to the cinema or theatre at least once a week.

Mo feels very fortunate to work at the Royal Albert hall, which has about 300 shows a year, including classical and pop music concerts, ballet, boxing, comedy acts, tennis, sumo wrestling and even ice skating.

It's clear that to get to know Mo, we need to appreciate the place where she works.

If you'd like to come with me now, we'll go up these stairs.

This is staircase 11 at the Royal Albert hall and it's going to take us up to the gallery.

From the gallery we'll get a wonderful view of the whole of the auditorium of the hall.

When she reaches the gallery, Mo stands in the back row and proudly surveys the vast auditorium.

It's a glorious space which can hold over 5,000 people.

It's like an amphitheatre with a huge glass and iron dome high above the auditorium and stage.

Mo continues our tour and takes us into a very elegant seating area.

Bought by Queen Victoria over 125 years ago and now owned by the present Queen, Queen Elizabeth ii.

Today we have an event on called Youth Makes Music and the orchestra are on stage, they're about to start rehearsing.

They're all youths of 16 or 17 who once a year come in and have the hall for the day.

This is, after all, the nation's village hall.

Many villages in Britain like the one Mo grew up in have a village hall where local events take place such as summer fetes, amateur theatre, group productions and even wedding parties.

The Royal Albert hall is a grand scale venue where ballet companies and orchestras from around the world can perform to huge audiences.

One of Moe's most precious memories as a member of an audience at the hall is of a pop concert.

I think my favourite type of music is probably rock music if I'm honest.

And my favourite artist has to be Eric Clapton.

Managing a show like that Eric Clapton concert is Mo's job.

She finds out in advance what technicians and musicians will need, discusses what they can put where and then informs staff at the hall how the show will be managed.

Mo takes us to meet her colleague Adrian Bray, the technical show manager at the Royal Albert Hall.

He's in charge of what he calls the butch side of putting on events, hanging lights, flying in scenery, laying cables, typically at 7 o' clock in the morning, three or four articulated trucks will pull up outside the Royal Albert hall laden to the gunwales with kit that has to be brought into the building, installed and made to work in time for performance at 7 o' clock that evening.

So to get all this kit in, I'll be rushing up to the roof and rigging chain hoists to pick up the lighting dresses and the speakers.

I'll be crawling about underneath the stage laying in cables that allow the lighting controller to operate the lights, the sound controller to operate the sound.

It's a long old day and it's very nice at 2 o' clock in the morning to close the doors, collapse back down into the show management office and have a cup of tea and say, there, another show, well done.

Adrian and Mo work together so that a show is taken care of technically, artistically and safely.

We're now in the centre of the roof of the Royal Albert Hall.

We're standing 140ft or 40 metres above the arena floor.

It's very strong, so we're quite safe, but we're a long way up looking down from here.

Balloons and streamers are dropped once a year at the end of a lively evening of classical music known as the Last Night of the Proms.

The Proms is an annual series of about 70 concerts featuring music from all over the world.

Preparing for these concerts is a very exciting and demanding time for Mo and Adrian.

The Last Night of the Proms is like a huge party and it ends with a celebration of British music.

The Last Night of the Proms is probably our most famous event here at the Hall.

not only that, it's a huge party for all the Prommers, that is the audience of the Proms who have been to most of the prom concerts during the season.

As soon as the television cameras have switched off and the last of the Prommers has left the building, I have to go on stage and wade through yards of ticker tape and streamers and party poppers and start sweeping it all up and taking all the lights down and putting all the cameras away.

But it's the build up to the Proms 70 odd shows earlier that's a very exciting period.

It's world renowned and I'm very, very proud to be a part of it to end the program.

Mo talks about a member of her family whom she confides in and who has always inspired her.

I think the person I admire most in my family is my grandmother.

She's a very well respected member of our family.

She's a very determined woman, full of courage.

And even now that she's in bed all the time, she lives at an old people's home.

She's still very forthright with her views.

I try to be a little more diplomatic than she's always been.