Chris Patten

No 2-truck had an Ampex 1100 VTR and was used as a Tender but later converted to accommodate 4 second hand Marconi Mk IV’s and another Ampex VR 2000, more staff were employed in 1965.

• Chris Patten engineer (who eventually in 1969 moved to Ampex in Australia
• Iain Nowell joined as a rigger – who now runs as ‘True Blue’ Australia
• Roy Garner (cameras ATV) – plus many others to follow such as rigger/driver.
• Mike Wilson – who was to leave and become a wealthy man by selling beauty products over the Internet.

Roland Brown went on to build for Iain facilities throughout London for Trillion and The Moving Picture Co. even as far afield as South Africa where he was instrumental in setting up Video RSA and other facilities. Many of the crew, as did I, went on to form their own companies for they gleaned and profited in many ways from having worked with Trevor Wallace and InterTel. Iain Nowell, whilst shooting for a company in New Zealand many years after the above, survived a helicopter crash and burnt his hair off. This should be listed in The Guinness Book of Records next to The Great Fire of London as the Shortest, Smallest fire in the world. His hair that is! The helicopter took a little longer to burn away. But he and the pilot were mighty lucky to escape with their lives as the pics show. The Pilot in a saline bath set up by firemen with Iain’s head foreground swathed in wet towels.

There is a picture of the inferno they leapt from, and the aftermath of the destroyed chopper.

InterTel was a renowned and an established player and the only Broadcast Facility available, being hired by the BBC for Football, Cricket, Tennis, The Derby and many other local top events by ABC Wide World of Sport, NBC, CBC, and just about all the ITV companies. We covered a spectrum of events from University Lectures, Party Political Proclamations, Papal and Ministerial deaths, Horse racing, Church services, Boxing, Albert Hall and Festival Hall concerts and of course the flip side of a multitude of the first-ever Pop Videos for a myriad of stars of the day both for the UK and the US market. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, Cilla Black, Sandy Shaw, Cliff Richard, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Lulu, Georgie Fame, Moody Blues Manfred Mann, Petula Clark – just a few of an endless list of that era that constituted the heyday of the POP explosion in Britain.

We once drove back from St Moritz nonstop over two days and a night to rig and record shows such as The NBC “Hullabaloo” and ABC’s “Shindig” for the American market, made well into the nights at Haliford Studios. Lulu doing 23 takes on her hit ‘Shout’ as she just couldn’t get it right so late into the night. (I well remember Horst (cameras – who was slightly older) fell fast asleep in his viewfinder at about one thirty in the morning). But some years later Lulu and I did much better – with a single colour camera shooting another hit, also a night shoot, beating and blazoning her way down Oxford Street atop an open double-decker London bus amid the garlands of Christmas lights.

Horst Wentsel

Chris Patten recalls the Bedford 3-truck with the old Ampex 1000X was set up as a news unit to outsmart the 16mm film crews, for we could pitch up on site record and the BBC would at worst, if no line was available, dispatch-ride the tape to the nearest site for immediate transmission. A definite improvement. One such event was the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in the then Rhodesia by Prime Minister Mr. Ian Smith. Zimbabwe is still in the News even today.

At the height of the Beatles, InterTel did a link up with French TV from the Cavern Club in Liverpool, it was compared by Petula Clark, and broke new ground on the international scene as one of the Biggest Pop events in French TV history, with artists such as Petula herself, Gene Vincent, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Manfred Man and a host of others. The show was to celebrate Ten years of Pop History. Such a giant Pop industry exploded out of that tiny Beatle riddled basement club.

Dave Ashley-Smith

All these events required InterTel to maintain a high standard of expertise and cutting edge equipment, large investments were constantly made in the latest sound desks, for Dave Ashley-Smith had become a renowned sound mixer, we were surely one of the first to have 16 channel recorders on board as Dave was called upon by the top groups to mix and balance for them. Camera lenses and ancillary equipment were required to be state of the art. Rank Taylor Hobson supplied Varotal V zooms and football was covered with Varotal 3s – a beast of a lens that protruded out front on a support carriage and had a Varotal 3 on a later colour camera (nearly as long as the ski jump) three times extender you could manually flip in and out, on a cloudy day in tight mode one had to be very alert to hold focus as the depth of field and focus was minimal.

Pictures had to be of the highest standard and Steve Beamish may not have been everyone’s favourite by any means as he was known by several names when wearing his managerial hat: The Führer, “Look out here comes the ‘Colonel’ and the blinds are down” (Cross!) But! When it came to ‘racks’ and picture quality in black and white there was no one better, his pictures were top drawer and I always wanted him on my camera any day of the week, even if sometimes (correction ‘often’) he gave me stick. To his credit he had a managerial role to play, and we weren’t the easiest of characters. But smile Steve. “Eat your pudding: first for life is not guaranteed”.

Roz and yours truly

Over the past year or so InterTel had been steadily growing and the staff compliment had doubled as well as the equipment. Judy Dearden (vision mixer) had been moonlighting or freelance at InterTel for most of the shows, now there was talk that another vision mixer had joined InterTel full time. I was at Hurst Park Racecourse when I first saw Rosalind Neal arrive, a young very attractive blonde who had come to switch for the race meeting. A pretty basic event in switching terms but, many years later she was to become known as Roz Storey for Roz and Harry Storey married and it was under that name that Roz became so well known. As InterTel grew so did Roz and she stood her ground in what was, in our case, a man’s world. Roz Storey managed every mixer thrown at her. Vision mixing desks such as Grass Valley’s grew exponentially in complexity and capability over those years, but Roz grew at the same rate. No matter how fast I or anyone else thought we were at offering shots Roz was there to grab the quickest of happenings and she saved many a director from looking terrible or ordinary. She even made me look good as I would offer extra to my shot requirement. Roz went on to work by demand on Operas, Ballets, Concerts and covered the multitude of mixes and special effects required on many World tours for Pavarotti, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson and just about the whole Who’s Who of the biggest names in the world of entertainment across the planet. Roz sadly died in 2006 after fighting breast cancer for several years but worked right up to the end on “Who wants to be a millionaire”, smiling and exuding her warmth as troopers do.

For InterTel, covering horse racing was a lucrative affair as we covered race meeting after race meeting at Kempton Park. Though boring for us non punters it certainly earned the bread-and-butter money between the bigger more exciting jobs. Come rain or shine I spent far too many guys and relayed them to Pay TV and the international circuit Another first at that time was the introduction of Eidophor (big screen projection of B&W TV images). Dinners were held at The Hilton Hotel as well as the Odeon Leicester Square and many other venues where InterTel would locally provide the pictures of a big fight, or in the case of an American held fight, would take a feed of a 525 signal from the US, send it to the BBC to be converted to 625 monochrome then return the signal for us to add local content (other local fights on the night) and project the Clay/Ali fights and others for paying dinner guests spread around other Top hotels throughout the country. Just such an example was the Mildenberger vs Ali in Frankfurt Germany (which I am reliably informed by Harry was the first sporting event to be televised and broadcast internationally live via satellite) where we covered the fight in Frankfurt, relayed the signal to other InterTel production teams in London Hotels and around the country who were covering local fights, then Eidophor-projected the Big Fight on large screens to high paying dinner clients. The Eidophor machines of that time were massive, and the picture quality was often abysmal, but any picture was far better than none … more can be gleaned by visiting their website. I was fortunate to be part of the above camera team and also to attend the famous Wembley fight with Henry Cooper. I was privileged to sit with Henry alone in a studio watching the Forman Frazier bout when George lifted Frazier off the canvas with an uppercut. Henry exclaimed! “Wow! Unbelievable power”.

It was near to this time that the InterTel A.G. unit managed by Jaques Lesgard was brought in from Germany, with it came the crew: Vic Cornish, Technical engineer, Tommy Bartels engineer. The cameramen were Harry Bell, Colin Callow, Maurice Fleischer and Horst Wentzil. Jacques soon moved on to ABC Wide World of Sport.