Continuing the irregular series I started by mentioning the gantry at Reading Hockey Club and at Reading FC, I present number three in the set: Smallmead, home of Reading's speedway team.

There has been talk of redeveloping Smallmead for a very long time. Suffice to say that in that time, actual redevelopment of Smallmead has been somewhat lacking. The commentary facilities at the track are certainly an interesting challenge for the budding reporter.

To get to your position you have to go to the end of the bar, through a door, up a rickety, winding, wooden staircase (the sort that threatens to collapse but you know won't, because it hasn't for the last century), then through another locked door and into a glorified shed atop the main building. The view out looks like this:

It could be a whole lot worse. For example, when Sky cover speedway at Smallmead, the local BBC team has to move to its back-up position, which is not a glorified shed. It is simply: a shed.

To get to that shed, you have to feed your cable out of the window, then shimmy out of a back door and around the roof a la James Bond, before grabbing the cable and tip-toeing over some corrugated metal to the backup commentary position. The alternative is to go downstairs and stand by the bar. Guess where I'll be when the Sky cameras move in on Monday night.

Smallmead isn't just used for speedway - it's also a greyhound track, so there's some interesting buttons in the commentary position, which doubles as a television point for dog racing's equivalent of a "third umpire":

So in a nutshell, that's the Smallmead gantry. In a word: "precarious". Having said that, I'm not complaining. From Monday my speedway reports will be live on evening share, which is the term used for programming that is carried by more than one local BBC radio station. From 7pm our station joins its siblings in Oxford, Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire and Dorset to carry the same programmes, until 5am the following morning.

This means my speedway reports, from 7pm til 10pm, will appear across the region known as BBC South. So Amy J, in Oxford, will have the delight of being able to listen to the same speedway reports as Amy K's parents in deepest, darkest Kent, not to mention my grandparents in Brighton. This is all very exciting - even us reporters like the occasional "Hello, Mum!" moment (or I do anyway). Tune in on Monday from around 7:20pm...