Hugh Sheppard

Swinging Laurie Duley on “Anna Karenina”  with Shaun Connery and Claire Bloom for Rudy Cartier was the happiest. No monitors for the Mole then – in 1961 – so everything down to the tracker (who’s name I can’t recall) and me putting ourselves in Laurie’s shoes – or into his viewfinder. On the night, our pleasure knew no bounds; not one finger raised from the panning handle for in or out, up or down, left or right, throughout. What you saw is what we got.

35 years before the BBC mast and 27 since, and still one of the finest memories. 

 

Geoff Hawkes

I joined in September 1963 but it wasn’t till 1964, post TO18 before I got to do any serious Mole work, with Frank Wilkins on the front and Clive Halls swinging. Thankfully by then we had a monitor on the arm, if not a tracker one under the platform at the  back, though that would’ve been out of eyeline and of less use. I remember hearing from more senior crew members how in former days the trackers had to learn how to frame a shot by judging camera distance and angle but I never acquired that skill. Even then on training days with Laurie Duley (or “Lawrie” as Pauline in the office spelt it since it was “Lawrence”) telling us juniors firmly that we shouldn’t need a monitor. To me it sounded almost as ridiculous as saying that the cameraman shouldn’t need a viewfinder and I can understand how trackers and swingers who did a good job without a monitor must feel an extra sense of pride at their achievement.

Clive Halls incidentally was such a cheery, encouraging sort of guy that it was a pleasure to work with him and I was sorry when he left. That was in the golden age of studio drama with “Play for Today”, “The Wednesday Play”, “Thirty Minute Theatre” and specials like “Elizabeth R” with Glenda Jackson as well as the occasional ballet or musical too. Among them was a play called “Progress to the Park” which we did in TC1. Walking back into the studio from a tea break, a man asked me casually how it was going and I said somewhat scornfully that the play was “typical Alun Owen,” a spur of the moment comment. I thought no more of it till a while later, the producer Cedric Messina came over and asked us who’d been upsetting the playwright! Somewhat ruefully I owned up and had to explain.

There were more lessons to be learnt than simply how to operate, weren’t there?