A smashing time
Could be apocryphal – I heard this in a tea bar….
Peter Hills (trademark: – “Hello, squire!”), well known senior cameraman on crew 17, was doing an attachment as a TM2 (the man who runs the VTs at the end of the desk in the gallery, for the younger members).
It was in the days of 405, black and white, tense “as live” studio drama – and huge 10ft by 6ft mirrors used for back projection behind cars etc..A seriously dramatic bit of acting was going on at one end of the studio, whilst at the other, the Mole had to do a quick reposition. As the Mole turned, the arm somehow got away from its operator, and the inevitable happened. There was the most almighty crash as the mirror fell into thousands of expensive pieces, followed by a deadly hush – broken by a little voice from the loudspeaker talkback in the roof – “You’ve fucked it now, squire!
Jimi Hendrix – Lulu
Has anyone seen that clip of Jimi Hendrix changing his mind live on BBC1 and playing a different song? A very famous clip from the Lulu show in 1968. I was there, cable bashing on Crew 7.
All the programmes in the series were recorded, and all were wiped in the great disasters that lost huge amounts of historic material (shame on you, VT). The clip survived, along with a lot more, because an engineer (who should be knighted) came round at 0600 every morning and serviced the heads of the VT machines. On the side, he was collecting – under the floor somewhere – chunks of programming that he liked, mostly rock stuff. He copied just this bit.
When Whistle Test’s Tom Corcoran found out some time later, he spent several years trying to get permission to re-broadcast the sequence. Eventually the rules were changed, and it’s been shown many times since.
Another recording of the series was made, on some early domestic format, by Maurice Gibb. I wonder if he still has it?
Stewart Morris …
A quote….
“Listen to the music, cloth ears” – Stewart Morris to a senior cameraman who hadn’t worked with him before.
Rock and Roll
One of the first moon rocks, from Apollo 11, was brought to TC7 during the Apollo 12 mission, to be seen on British tv for the first time. It arrived with great ceremony guarded by 2 security men, and locked in a heavy briefcase.
When the case was opened, the rock was revealed to be sealed in a perspex dome and mounted on a metal stand, irremovable and untouchable. It was explained that it was far too precious to be taken out.
The crew were very disappointed that they couldn’t touch the rock, until one of the British scientists being interviewed said “That’s all right, you can touch mine”. He produced a small plastic box which he opened and tipped out another rock which he handed round for everyone to play with.
Smoke gets in Your Eyes
When The Crazy World of Arthur Brown came in to TOTP to play “Fire”, it was done as a post recording, because Arthur wore a real fire crown.
Someone had decided also that the studio would have smoke in the air (very unusual then), so they got a special effects fellow called Bertram in, who had probably been at Lime Grove in the Gaumont- Kalee days. He brought a large machine on fat wheels which was, in fact, labelled Gaumont-Kalee. It had a delivery tube a foot in diameter.
Bertram tended this machine all day, to the amusement of the floor manager, who kept asking if he’d be ready. When the kids had all been chucked out, the moment came – the floor manager shouted “Now, Bertram” – and the tube belched an enormous amount of smoke, so much so that the Heron driver, me, couldn’t see the ground to see his marks, and neither could anyone else.
Arthur’s crown was extinguished, and we all waited 20 minutes till we could see again. The clip that is still shown is take two, with much less smoke and a chastised Bertram.
Heron makes its Mark
Still on TOTP –
… one day during the live show, the Heron I was tracking, with Al Kerridge on the front, ground to a halt with 28 bars to get to the other end of the studio.
I leapt off, and the crowd pushers helped me get the machine down the studio in time. Then we realised that the cable guard had jammed into the floor and taken a long gouge out of the lino. It stayed there for several weeks, and had a lead part in The Man in the Iron Mask, a Sunday afternoon serial. Eventually they re-laid the flooring, but not very well, and it bulged around the edges, making for some bumpy tracks. One night after the kids had gone, The Stones came in to play Jumping Jack Flash.
During the recording the crew’s top Heron driver (me again!) spun the machine round, and completely ripped out the squares of badly laid lino. After that they had to take the studio out of service to do the job properly.
PS Have you heard the one about Jim the crowd pusher? Actually, better not…
Be with you in the Gallery
The Young Generation were Stewart Morris’s dance group. They backed anybody who happened to be the featured artist for this month’s series (I wonder why?), and even had a series of their own. Nigel Lithgow and Lesley Judd were their best known products.
One Easter, Stewart had them do a special of their own in TC1 called “Jesus” (a word often heard from Stewart, but not in this context). It was a pretentious religious musical piece, and required an enormous Chapman Hercules crane, normally used for such delights as Lawrence of Arabia. It came with its own driver, who was pretty used to steaming through the desert, but not pretending to be an overgrown Mole in TC1.
Brian White was the cameraman, and it had a team of swingers, including Bill Jenkin, I think. The cameraman had a chap with him to wind a handle to rotate his seat and the camera, which was me.
Stewart, in typical form, set up a fast track back down the studio, with a right-angle turn by the control room window. The driver, eager to please, zipped along, and performed the track and the turn perfectly. Unfortunately, the massive weight of the arm just picked up the swingers as the base turned the corner, and it continued in the direction it had been going.
“J***s, where the **** are you camera 1?”, quoth our director.
The answer was very close to “Right behind you, Stewart”, as Brian and I missed crashing through the gallery window by about half an inch!
Many years later, as a senior Pres producer with the run of the library, I booked out the original 2″ transmission tape of the show and watched it one Saturday afternoon – probably the first person to see it in 15 years. It looked as cheesy as ever, and it turned out to have been cut-edited – ie the tape had been physically cut. As the splices went through the heads there would be a great thump, and the picture would fall apart, because the joins had stretched over the years of storage.
An aside – the whine of a 2″ VT machine was a daily part of my life for 20 years. There’s only one (of dozens) left at Television Centre now – to hear that sound brings on waves of nostalgia! Not dissimilar to walking back into the Phoenix, the studio at Evesham, last year after 35 years – it still has the same smell!
Everywhere she went, she would smell fresh paint…
The Young Generation were also involved in “Project X” – five secret days at the TV Theatre which turned out to be a sort of mini Royal Command Performance.
They set up a pair of thrones at the front of the circle for the Queen and Duke, and also completely re-furbished the ladies toilet. For three days we dared each other to go and look inside, and on the morning of transmission, we did.
Where, if it was anything like the gents, there had been peeling paint, etc, there was indirect lighting, pink mirrors, hairbrushes, towels and flowers, all neatly laid out.
We had to know if she would actually use it – so during the interval we kept watch.
She never went near it!
Rolling No News …
I was the late cameraman in Pres A one evening. In those days there was a weather caption at 9.25, and maybe a menu, then home.
On this particular evening, an Apollo was due to land on the moon – Apollo 15, I think. They had decided that it was no longer worth staffing TC7 all through the trip, and so James Burke was OOV (Out of Vision)in Houston, with Patrick Moore and others OOV in London, all controlled by producer Dick Francis in ICR (International Control Room), along the corridor from Pres A.
They were due to carry the landing live at 9.25 on BBC1 using NASA pictures, but at the last minute everything went pear-shaped when NASA decided they should do some more orbits of the moon. BBC1 was suddenly going to consist of just that picture of the Houston control room for the 45 minute slot.
At about 15 minutes past nine all hell broke loose in Pres A, as Pres Producer Pat Hubbard arrived from the bar and announced that we would cover, and went off to discuss with Mr Francis what we’d do. Left in the studio with seven minutes to go were five slightly bemused people.
The sound man went hunting for mics. Assistant producer Orwyn Evans and I rustled up chairs and a table stolen from Late Night Line Up, whilst the S.Tel.E and Harry the sparks did the lights. Then Patrick Moore and two others (we had expected one) turned up asking how they would hear James Burke in Houston. The sound man and I found some earpieces, but the only feed available was zero level talkback – starring the tired and emotional Pat Hubbard.
For the first, and, I think, only time in my life, I was in charge of the camera crew. Orwyn had left school wanting to be a cameraman, but not, it has to be said, live at 9.25 on BBC1 for his first show. Harry was dragooned into being floor manager.
I showed Orwyn the zoom and focus on one of the cameras and told to just do as he was told, then went to operate the other two.
As soon as we went on the air, Pat opened up the local Pres intercom to Network 1 and ICR, and shouted loudly and rudely at everyone. I tried to quietly use my camera intercom to explain to Pat that Patrick and co were hearing his talkback (as he was saying “Ok, tell Patrick to shut up”). Patrick soldiered on professionally (“We just don’t know!”) for the 45 minutes whilst wincing at the din in his ear. Next day, we made the Daily Mirror.
With my DV camera in my hand …
This isn’t quite a tech-ops story, but recently in an internet news group I contribute to (Google groups DV-L), we were swapping what some Americans called “war stories”. I wrote this one. It’s nearly tech-ops because I had my dv camera in my hand…..
In the late nineties I made a documentary in a BBC series called “Real Lives”, intended to be unidealised looks at various jobs. Mine was about bomb disposal.
It was a DV show, and so I was producer, director, cameraman, editor, etc etc. The only other member of the team was my beautiful 23 year old six foot tall assistant Antonia, soon to be known to the British Army as “Big Bird”.
For part of the filming we joined up with a training course “somewhere in England”. The second day saw us on a large muddy field where the course were to learn about disposing of suspect ammunition left on a battlefield. What do you do with it? Well, you blow it up. Antonia’s job for the day was to stop me walking backwards with the camera and falling down any of the large water filled holes that littered the field.
Late in the afternoon during a tape change Antonia appeared and said “I’m told we aren’t allowed to leave without we blow something up, it’s traditional”, and held up three sticks of plastic explosive she’d just been given.
I proceeded to film her moulding the explosive round various left-over munitions, and then had to retire with the camera because only the person with the detonator (and her trainer, in this case) is allowed to be around when handling such things – so that less people are around when it all goes wrong, I suppose. We then all retired to a bunker, where Big Bird got to blow up her explosives. Then the Army commander told me I wasn’t being left out, but as I had the camera they’d done the moulding for me. It was the last of the day, and they’d put all the rest of the explosive in. It made a very good bang when I pressed the button.
In the same film we also got to follow people around disposing of first world war phosgene shells near Porton Down, but the best scene of all was two guys on the training course sitting on a live 1000lb bomb trying to cut discs of sheet plastic explosive with a pastry cutter. It turned out to be too hard, so they used a penknife instead.
I don’t know what other companies and countries do, but in the BBC we had to fill in a Health and Safety Hazard form before each day’s filming. I didn’t know quite what to write on those days, so I put “all appropriate Army safety precautions will be taken, and a safety office will be present at all times” – which was entirely true, as he was the one who helped Antonia with the detonator.
Not a tech-ops story
In the early nineties I was asked to be the BBC’s maker of commercials. Somebody had decided that it was ok to sell books records and tapes on BBC1, provided the BBC had made them. I counselled against this, as a senior Pres producer – I thought it was bad politics. I said my piece and went on leave. When I came back, they had not only ignored me, but decided I was the person for the job.
As it happened, it was something I loved doing. I had been told off for doing on Radio Times “trails” in the past – they were supposed to hint at the possibility of buying, rather than actually kicking the punters in the teeth, and I was always too gung ho.
One day they wanted us to sell a diet book, and they asked for something simple and direct. I decided that a bikini-clad model in Pres A (the camera was operated by tech-ops) was just what was needed. She would have just one line to say.
I had no idea where to get models from. It was the height of political correctness around our department, but I asked our lady booker of artistes. She didn’t turn a hair, and gave me the numbers of several specialist agents. So I rang one. I explained to the rather camp voice that the model should look like the girl next door, rather than a sex siren, and that I would need to see the girl first before I put her on the air. He said no problem. Look in the catalogue he would send, pick some likely girls, as many as I wanted, and he would send them over so I could pick one. No charge, just pay the successful one the standard rate for the job.
So I picked half a dozen, got them in to Pres A in their bikinis, asked them to read the line, looked them over and selected one. It all went very well, apart from the embarrassing experience in reception.
The first girl arrived a bit early. I went down to collect her, and decided we should sit there and wait for the others. We made small talk in a crowded reception for a few minutes, and then she said “Would you like to look at my portfolio?” – a large folder she had brought with her. “Ok”, I said, and she opened it up. The pictures were very tasteful, provided you don’t mind full frontal nudity in 10×8 black and white with the world and Michael Palin sitting around you, whilst talking to the person featured in all her glory. “Very nice”, and “That one’s good” I said, flicking through.
It turned out that she worked in Boots mostly, thought she had done page 3 and really wanted to be a model. And she got the job, because she could actually say the line and look like the girl next door in her bikini.
The Monopolies and Merger Commission stopped the BBC making commercials a few months later. I told them so…
