Patrick Heigham
My second interview to try for employment with the BBC was with Esler – Senior Engineer, who tied me in knots, and proved that I didn’t know Ohms Law, (which I knew I did!).
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Geoff Fletcher
I had a similar experience on my interview in June 1963. I was working at GEC in an R&D lab when I applied to join the BBC, and had just completed a long series of experiments and tests involving resistivity variance in cables. I had been using calculus a lot in working on my results figures. At my interview, I was given an electrical problem to solve and completely missed the simplicity of it, as my mindset was full of the last three months experimental work and calculations. I feverishly covered two A4 pages with calculations before coming with what turned out to be the correct answer. The engineer bod at the far right end of my panel asked to see my workings. He then came out with the following deflating remark delivered in extremely depreciating tones “Very impressive Mr Fletcher, but have you never heard of Ohms Law?” Just to put the cap on it, when they finally released me from my torture, I tried to exit the interview room through a cupboard door instead of the door to the corridor.
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Peter Combes
Geoff Fletcher’s contribution is a good example of what one can come up with under the stress of an interview. When I came down from Cambridge I knew a lot of Pure Mathematics, which was impressive but of little practical application. The advertisement for BBC Technical Operators looked fun and I soon found myself being interviewed by an impressive group of people, at least one of them a senior BBC engineer. “Could you draw a circuit diagram for a simple audio amplifier?” Well, I did that, and even managed the negative feedback loop, which was about the limit of my knowledge of such things. “Could you draw a television waveform?” I had read about that in a little book about television that I read on the train. I was just completing that when I realized I did not know how the audio was incorporated. I pointed vaguely to the bottom of the waveform, and muttered, “… and the sound goes down here” The Senior Engineer sat up suddenly. “The sound goes where?” “Well, er, there is no other information at the bottom of the sync, and the sound is of relatively low frequency….” I trailed off. The SE opened his mouth and shut it again and spent the rest of the interview with a faraway look in his eyes. It was several years later that I discovered that it was about the date of my interview that BBC Research started developing “Sound in Syncs” to solve the problem of video and audio getting out of step when sent along different transmission paths. It was running within a couple of years, and reaping international awards within ten. Nobody ever got back to me on the subject, but I sometimes wonder if my adrenalin-sodden brain actually came up with a very good idea during my interview…….
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Alec Bray
I had seen an advert in the newspaper for BBC File Cameramen, and as I had started the school film club, I thought that this would be a suitable opportunity. So off I go for the interview at the Langham. Lots of questions about the techniques of film making – like when to cut as someone goes through a door and so on. But then it turned out that the vacancies were for NEWS cameramen, and here I came a cropper, as I was not able to effectively answer questions about some of the parliamentary personalities of the day and their positions on government.
“Well” said my interviewer” I think that you will do well in Television” and sent me off to an interview for Technical operations.
One Saturday I was a just-left-school schoolboy, watching “The Chem Lab Mystery” at home on the telly: the next Thursday (having finished the BBC TV TO induction course during the week), I was a working adult at Lime Grove studios working on – “The Chem Lab Mystery”!
There was a whole new language to learn, too: “tweak it up a gnat’s” being a prime example. You tweaked it up, if you could not do it by hand, with a tweaker (aka screwdriver). I found out quickly, too, what filthy places the TV Studios were – the dust and dirt on the camera cables was really rough on the hands.
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