Rob Halliday started dabbling with moving lights in the early nineties. He was one of the first of a generation of programmers who hadn't come from the Vari-Lite school and learnt on Artisans; though he did later learn to use an Artisan (and has an enormous amount of respect for the console and the lights it controlled), he was a DMX-light guy with a theatre background.

His first big West End show as programmer was Cameron Mackintosh's 1994 production of Oliver! at the London Palladium, directed by Sam Mendes and designed by Anthony Ward with lighting by David Hersey. This followed on from a chance encounter with Hersey a year earlier on Piaf, where Rob came in to cover the desk for a day but didn't get to leave, ending up as the production electrician for the show's tour. "Oliver! seems like it was from a different age now," Halliday notes. "There were two programmers, one running the theatre's Galaxy with the conventional lights, and me running an Arri Imagine 3 controlling ten VL5s and twelve VL6s plus the scrollers (but not those lights!), then with a Macintosh controlling ten Pitching Digital Light Curtains. And controlling just that seemed like very hard work at the time!"

In the years since, the moving light rigs have got bigger, but the control systems have shrunk; in the UK, at least, most major shows and musicals run with just one lighting console controlling everything, a move that Halliday led the way on. "In 1996 with Martin Guerre we had two programmers on two consoles, but when we were done we merged the conventional data into the moving light desk to leave one console (plus backup) and one operator running everything. A year later, on the first Les Mis tour to use moving lights, we had fourteen StudioColors, some DLCs (still on their own Mac) and a relatively small rig. It didn't seem worth having two people to deal with that, so we put it all onto one console - a Strand 530 - and it worked fine. A year after that, the Oliver! tour brought the DLCs onto the desk, too. One person was running everything, meaning that the Lighting Programmer and the Designer could work really closely together to get to the desired result very quickly."

That period also saw Halliday start the relationship with the lighting console he is now most closely associated with, Strand's 500-series. "That console and I did not get off to a good start, as Bill Richards of Strand and anyone who was at the first demo at the Old Vic will recall! But in mid-1995 we were offered a good rental deal to try it on the Blood Brothers tour. After a hiccup on the first day where you couldn't run cue 0 to fade the lights out, we got on; more importantly, Strand sat behind us on that show and started taking notes and responding to them, something they did from then until they day they finally discontinued the console."

Halliday used the console for every show from Blood Brothers through to New York's Mary Poppins - with 170 moving lights plus scrollers and conventionals one of the biggest rigs ever seen on Broadway.

"I really don't believe you can be a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to lighting consoles; I think you really have to be a master of one. Because what you're there to do is create light on stage, not play around with a lighting console for the sake of it; you should be concentrating on that, rather than trying to remember or figure out how the console works. If you know one product really, really well you can just get on and do things without really thinking about how you're doing them.

"In some cases a shiny new console might have some function that would do some things quicker - but if you really know you're console you can often still get to the end result faster doing things the old-fashioned ways. Plus the console crashed perhaps twice in fourteen years, which is always useful when you're dealing with big rigs with a lighting designer in a rush and a producer breathing down your neck!"

That said, he has now found two new consoles to use: MA's grandMA (used on Mary Poppins because of its pixel-mappers ability to deal with the 26 DMX universe LED cyc), and ETC's Eos (used at Leicester's Curve and elsewhere), both of which do the job and mix moments of brilliance with moments of absolute frustration!

"And of course, on really big, complex shows, having more programmers can help - but that really works when you can network consoles together and work on a common showfile talking to the rig through a common infrastruture, as we did on The Witches of Eastwick in 2000, rather than just having lots of separate desks each talking to little bits of the rig. With the best network systems, you can collaborate on programming the whole show, programmers helping each other out, rather than having a 'conventional' person and a 'moving light' person - though it is amusing to note that the US theatre world is finally discovering that one programmer can happily deal with the entire rig."

So, what exactly is a programmer? "That's a good question. The job used to be called the board-op - and a student recently said to me that they thought programmers were just 'board-ops with air miles,' which made me laugh.

"But when moving lights came along, things got complicated. Lighting designers used to state the intent of their lights when they focussed them - this is the backlight, this is the wash, this is the throne special. When they were plotting cues they were just turning the right lights on at the right time. With moving lights, you gain an incredible amount of versatility because you can make up the 'intent' of the light as you go along, as you find that you need that special on the throne, or that the backlight needs to be in red instead of blue.

"But the more choice you have, the more decisions you have to make - and now you're making them in front of everyone rather than in front of your drawing board. You need someone to actually put those decisions into practice. To take "I need a leafy blue blob over there' and figure out which lights can do it, how to get them to do it, to make it look nice, to store it safely, all that stuff, while the designer looks at the stage and makes decisions and thinks about the next cue and talks to the director. That's what the programmer does."

"But through all of that, the programmer isn't just a "very efficient data entry operative," as someone who really should know better once described us. They're a very efficient data entry operative with a very good artistic eye, and an understanding of what the designer is trying to do. That's why you find that designers tend to work with a very small number of programmers - people who they know see things the sane way they see them, and who they trust to deliver those results quickly and accurately every time."

Having been programming shows for a long time, does he still enjoy it? "Absolutely, yes. It's one of the best jobs there is - you get to sit and play with lights on stage all day, and the director (usually!) comes and shouts at the designer not at you! It's also a constant learning experience, seeing the different solutions that designers come up with, the different looks they extract from the same equipment."

"It is a job that I've been saying for some time will go away. With the Artisan you needed a programmer because that desk was just literally a keyboard to the lights and you needed some who understood that. Newer desks make it easier, and I've long thought that in time you'd get a desk that would do all of the hard stuff for you, so the LD could concentrate on the lighting. We don't seem to have got to that yet. Plus every time we get close, the things we have to deal with get more complicated - video, media servers, LEDs and the like. So, instead of getting simpler, the team is actually getting more complicated - the LD, the programmer, the production graphic artist! It's hard to believe that one person used to be able to light a show on their own!!"

"Plus I'm always aiming for the 'perfectly programmed show' - no garbage data, no lights moving around without coming on, everything preset properly, all the cues and data written in a way so that they're self-explanatory to whoever ends up running the show. And then the perfectly documented show so we all remember exactly what everything's doing the next time we do the show. There's always a new challenge.

"And, of course, they've stopped making my console... so I have to find and learn a new one (or persuade someone to make a better one!) Or maybe I should just light more shows so someone else has to deal with all of that....?"