Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
…
Nothing really matters,
Anyone can see,
Nothing really matters,
Nothing really matters to me…     [Queen]

 

Bernie Newnham

I think it takes a particular type of person to be happy to stay away from home for long periods, and a particular type of wife. In the army and navy the wives get together to look after each other, especially the young ones. Don’t know if crew wives do that.

Personally, I only find any travel fun if it’s for a short time.  The longest I’ve been away was seven weeks in Alnwick, at the hospital for “Morning Surgery”. We all went home at the weekends to our families. 

I had quite a few tedious short trips – often as producer I went somewhere early before the crew, to prepare. After a while one place was much like another – try to find a restaurant and eat alone, and go back to the hotel hoping there’d be something good on the TV.

None of the many trips had the work satisfaction as a live studio show, or as producer – "We’ll play this in straight from the edit" or " Don’t worry, there’s still 30 seconds, reset VT".

 

Geoff Hawkes

I’m with you on that one, Bernie. Though I envy the people like Pat for all the amazing places they were able to visit in the course of duty that were off limits to the general public, I’m too much of a home loving person to have gone for that lifestyle myself.

The longest I was away from home was for about six weeks for the trip to Australia for the Sydney Olympics in 2000 which I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to do as part of the studio team. I had a stopover in Kuala Lumpur for three nights on the way out to see something of the city and surrounding area, including a trip to the rubber plantations to see how the latex was bled from the trees like we were told about at school. Afterwards I stayed on afterwards to do the touristy bit of Australia, including Katoomba and the Jamieson Valley, Brisbane and the Lamington National Park, Alice Springs and the Red Centre with a climb up Ayers Rock which I think even in normal times you can no longer do; the Great Barrier Reef where I scared myself rigid when snorkelling by diving too deep and surfaced gasping for air and thinking how easily I could’ve drowned. The thought of it still makes me shudder as does the possibility of an encounter with one of the native nasties, like a funnel web spider or a box jellyfish.

The trip was fabulous but I was glad to have had a newly acquired mobile phone (my first) so I could keep in touch with home. While at the IBC we could do emails but I’m sure those of you who were there remember, perhaps with mirth, that it could take twenty minutes to get a connection to the UK. I hope it’s improved by now.

While I was glad to have done it and to have the memories, I would not have sought to repeat it on a regular or too frequent a basis. It’s good that some of you relished it so as to help bring the pictures and sound to our screens and speakers and thanks for your stories,

 

Nick Ware

Discuss: Having done both, I’d say that on balance, a comfortable home and loving family life is far more rewarding than going away for weeks or months at a time on often unenjoyable freelance locations, and as often as not, with people you don’t particularly want to be with.

 

Roger Long

“Full Circle” with Michael Palin on the BBC.

They were away for a year.

I asked Steve Robinson who was on that trip how they all got on.  He said it was actually 5 trips, the worst bit being marooned in Bolivia in tents by a muddy river.

The last leg was the longest,14 weeks in the Americas: they were knackered at the end, on automatic.

But they all got on, and they went to some great places like Vladivostok  and the Kola peninsula and Aleutians that I always wanted to see.

The only other cameraman I know who went to the Aleutians was Martin Sunders when he was doing “Albatross”.

I loved travelling, harder than filming many times, but well worth it in the age before mass tourism.

 

Pat Heigham

I had the dubious experience of going out to Ailsa Craig, where it’s quarried for the granite from which to make curling stones. As this competition had been added to the Olympic agenda, the US channel I was working for, wanted to make a profile film. A need for a piece to camera meant being THERE! It was drizzling, which played havoc with the range of my radio mics.

This lump of rock had two huge foghorns either end, to stop ships bumping into it!

One of the wonderful locations that freelancing gave.

Come out of your comfortable Television Centre studios and see what life really is about!

 

Roger Bunce

I must admit the phrase, "Come out of your comfortable Television Centre studios and see what life really is about!" worried me. (O.K. I get the irony) But if standing in the freezing rain, being drowned out by fog horns is "Real Life" then I’m against it! Personally, I have shot it all on CSO.

But that was the whole thing about TV Centre. It wasn’t Real Life. It was make-believe – total fantasy. I may not have travelled the world, but I’ve been to Narnia, and Wonderland, and inside the Horse-Head Nebula, and the Planet Skaro. I’ve travelled in time, from Ancient Rome, via 18th Century Pyrate ships, London in the Blitz and Albert Square, to the distant future and the very End of the Universe (nice Restaurant!) I’ve been shrunk to the size of an earthworm and flattened inside a two-dimensional comic strip. And all this without leaving TV Centre! (O.K. the Planet Skaro was at Lime Grove, but you get the idea.) And the sheer exhilaration of doing all these things live, or as-live, will always beat the slow-motion shot-at-a-time stuff which came later.

 

Pat Heigham

OK, Rog, I get what you are saying, but what you pose as your experiences, is as you say, make-believe, not for real.

Yes, I enjoyed the comfortable surroundings of Television Centre studios and the galleries, with controlled ventilation and heating etc. But being able to stand amid the ruins of the original Olympia, or in a Thai temple, or on NY’s Broadway, cannot compare with a TV studio!

Most of the ‘fun’ is doing your best to overcome problems that arise while trying to do the job, that’s when experience counts.

One situation that could have gone ugly, was transiting Munich Airport, while a G7 conference was going on. We always hand carried the camera, and in those days the separate Betacam recorder. The camera got taken away to be swabbed for explosive residue, my recorder was required to be switched on.

The batteries had been removed and were in their case already down the conveyor. With no battery power, the official pointed to a mains socket on the counter. I very nearly said: ”No, it’ll blow up!” but stopped myself just in time!

One of the things that I tried to instil to younger members of our industry, was to avoid calling bits of sound equipment by the conventional names of ‘rifle’ or ‘shotgun’ mike, ‘pistol’ grip etc. when assembling a customs or carnet list. Border guards may not be English fluent but they recognise words that could be construed as weapons. Had a problem entering Switzerland by road, with ‘snake arms’ These were bits of cranked metal which fitted an Elemack camera dolly. The Border chap was just about to stamp the carnet, then paused, said “ Livestock – I must inspect!” They were buried under several lengths of Elemack track in the bottom of the VW vehicle. Thank you, very much!

That was a nice location, 17 weeks in an undeveloped small ski village. Each dept had a vehicle and come the evening, they were considered pool cars if we wanted to go elsewhere for our dinner. It taught me how to drive in snow and ice conditions, which is sadly lacking in this country, unless you live really up North.

Well, you cannot get that experience in a nice warm TV studio, can you!

I will add another proviso – a movie that I was on, with a long foreign location, allowed family members to come out and stay. Two lots of ankle biters were having a scrap on the floor of the hotel bar. When separated by the parents, one sprog yelled at the other: “ Well, my daddy doesn’t like your daddy!”

Picked up with pillow talk in the bedroom – very dangerous, one still has to work with the guys on the crew. (Ref Nick Ware’s comment about not wishing to be with some folks).

Does anyone still think that the moon landings were faked? (I loved ‘Capricorn One’)

 

David Denness

Having worked on the Apollo moon landing at Jodrell Bank radio telescope with Sir Bernard Lovell broadcasting to pretty well every broadcast network in Europe and the USA I am inclined to remember Buzz Aldrin’s response to a journalist who suggested fakery, he punched the journo in the jaw and floored him.

I would be inclined to do similar myself to anyone suggesting the same within my hearing.

Be Warned.

 

Dave Mundy

Nice story Dave! It goes along with the ‘Flat Earth Society’ series of loony ideas, as the British astronaut Mr. Peak (ideal surname!) remarked recently in an interview that he has provided loads of photographs from space showing the orb of the Earth and he was still being questioned about the shape! The mind boggles, as they say!

 

Graeme Wall

Everybody knows it’s square, they said so on the BBC…

 

Dave Mundy

Only Michael Bentine knew that! He was reprimanded by ‘them-up-there’ saying that he wasn’t to use the Television Centre as a place of entertainment! The rest is history!

 

Mike Giles

I was at a planning meeting for a “Swap Shop” out of studio item at Television Centre and the House Services guy actually repeated that phrase, without a flicker of humour and I’m sure he meant it.

 

Pat Heigham

I did visit Cape Canaveral (now Kennedy) on a working trip to the States – again you don’t get that, stuck in Television Centre! There are many places on this Earth that work or holidays have not taken me to:

• West Coast of USA
• South America
• South Africa
• Russia
• India
• Japan
• China (not Hong Kong)

I know John Pritchard quite well who was the recordist for Palin’s adventures – what a super job that was, except that he had to be airlifted out of Tibet, suffering from altitude sickness.

I would have loved to work on Portillo’s continental/world train trips.

I spoke to the recordist, as I was keen to learn about any problems and the rig he used. He did a fine job.

 

Roger Bunce

It’s all make-believe, Pat. It’s a film. It’s Tele. It’s not real. So, one Director wants his star actually standing on the rim of Mount Cotapaxi, and the crew have to haul their ironmongery up to the top, while another Director chooses to create the same shot using a green screen and virtual reality. You may think that one is "more real" than the other but, either way, by the time it reaches the Viewer it’s just a pattern of pixels on a screen and audio digits. It’s not real. A lot of important people work in Real Life – from Bus Drivers to Brain Surgeons – but we didn’t. We worked in Entertainment, which should never be confused with reality.

To me the appeal of Camerawork was in making pictures – same reason I enjoy drawing and painting – and doing things with pictures – composing them, moving them; changing perspective; manipulating them in a way that manipulates the feelings of the viewers. Choosing an angle or a development to create an atmosphere, or change the apparent personality of a character. I liked the Cameraman’s role as con-man, convincing the viewers that they’ve seen something that the production budget couldn’t really afford.

I can understand the glamour of travelling the world, visiting exotic locations, and getting paid a lot of money for it – particularly if the hotel’s comfy, the weather’s nice and the scenery is photogenic. But I always found location shooting to be ultimately unsatisfying. All too often it’s a lot of effort to shoot a talking-head, from a static tripod, while wiping rain from the lens. Not exactly high art. And, what is there to photograph? Just stuff that’s actually there! Where’s the creativity in that? Anyone can do that. O.K. there’s a different sort of challenge getting there in the first place – lugging heavy flight cases through malarial swamps; evading the drug cartels; etc.- but, personally, (and I may be peculiar here) I’ve never seen the fun in any of that.

I was always happier in a world of false-perspective sets; glass paintings; suspended foreground miniatures; model work; split screens; inlay and overlay; 3-D V.R,; etc. and a unique double-sided-rotating-mirror shot! With these the camera could compose pictures beyond anything that the eye could see in real life. Nowadays, it’s all done on computers in post-production, which is no fun. But in the more Heath-Robinson days of my youth, when we were still inventing new ways of doing things, it all had to happen on camera, and the Cameraman played a key role in creating the magic.

Other things I liked about multi-camera, as-live studio work – particularly drama.

A: There’s that stonking great adrenalin rush that comes when the red light goes on. After almost three days of rehearsal, slowly cranking up the nervous tension to near breaking point, that coiled-spring finally goes ‘twang’. If you’re lucky it’ll propel you on a full ninety-minutes of non-stop, white-knuckle ride, with fight-or-flight reflexes set to maximum. You don’t get anything like that with shot-at-a-time work. Then (again, if you’re lucky) comes the other buzz – the gravity-defying euphoria as you realise – "Hey! We did it! Against all odds, it actually worked! Even a crap cameraman like me didn’t screw it up! (too much). And we’ll get to the bar early!" If they sold these sensations as pills, they’d be illegal. No over-the-counter medication could ever give you a double hit like that!

B: The primary reason that a crap Cameraman like me didn’t screw it up (too often) is because of all the amazing people around me. Not just the Camera-Sound-Lighting folks on this mailing list, who are obviously wonderful, but all the others – the Production People, the Scene Guys, the Sparks, the Floor Staff – many different teams working together as one super-team – all focused on the same objective – all supporting one another – all spotting the pitfalls ahead of time and digging one another out. Even the people who irritated me in the tea-bar became life-savers on transmission. (Which proves that any carbon-based lifeform, placed under enough pressure, will turn into a diamond!) It is a cliché to say that – It has been an honour and privilege to work amongst such talented and helpful people – but it has been.

So I shall continue to enjoy your tales of intrepid globetrotting and "Real Life" tele. but please allow us stay-at-home TV Centre types to take equal pleasure in our memories of Real Live tele.