I may have said this before earlier in this site, but at 119 pages in, I’ll say it again. Before the internet, history was written by people who could afford, or were being paid, to write it. In the case of the BBC it was Director Generals and “big names” who could sell books for publishers who would be the only source of knowledge of “how it was”. Now anyone can say what it was like from their point of view, and this is ours…..

First from Roger Bunce, by way of a warm up, a little fun…..

Roger Bunce

Happy New Year 1977 (This message may have been subject to delay)

BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION
ENGINEERING TRAINING DEPARTMENT

BBC Engineering Examination No.122 Part 2 May 1977 Television

Full marks Total: 100

You are required to remain awake for FIVE questions.

Each question is given a maximum of 20 marks. The mark allocated to each part is shown in brackets on the right hand side of the page and will be dependent upon the size of the bribe. Marks will be deducted for wrongness.

1.

• a.   With the aid of a diagram, explain the function of the drop-out compensator used in a panning handle (4)
• b.   Why is a round lens used when rectangular pictures are required? (4)
• c.   Which end of the camera should be pointed at the subject material in order to obtain acceptable interlaced pictures when working in the PAL mode? (2)
• d.   Why is it dangerous to swallow a Plumbicon tube? (4)
• e.   How many cameras would it take to completely cover the floor of TC6 using
  1) EMI 2001 and
  • 2) Praktika Super TL (4)
•    How would these numbers differ if a paying audience was involved?(2)

1. a. Discuss the problems which might arise when NATLOCK operations are attempted with the following:
   1. Stationary source and moving studio (4)
   2. Stationary studio and scanner with spongy brakes (4)
   3. Regional studio and producer with exhausted budget (ignoring overruns) (4)
   4. No NATLOCK equipment (4)

b. The phrase “You want locking up mate!” on a control line obviously refers to a timing error at the mixing point. How could this error be quickly overcome, and suggest a suitable reply to send on reverse talkback. (2)

c. Compose an award-winning overture using NATLOCK tones. (2)

1. a. Using the attached Ordnance Survey Map, describe the operation of the following parts of a Video Tape Recorder:
   1. Amtec
   2. Colortec
   3. StarTrec
   4. Claw assembly

b. Explain why a Video Tape Recorder produces excellent pictures under low light conditions. (20)

1. a. Without using your hands, explain the operation of a Dansette Line Store standards converter. (10)

b. Explain the meaning of the following terms:

1. Camera cable stretching (2)
2. Lens crushing (2)
3. Gammon correction (2)
4. Moreover – OK? (2)
5. Veal and hame Turnover (2)
6. a. What is Elsan Runaway, and why is it more noticeable on Wednesday night? (4)

b. Explain the requirement for different pan heights in the ground floor

toilets in Ashbridge. Make particular reference to Whitbread DPA in your answer. (6)

c. Why is it necessary to keep involuntary bowel movements to an absolute minimum during programme transmission in the studio? Suggest methods by which these can be overcome using a few corks and a bit of string. Illustrate your diagram with detailed anatomical diagrams.(10)

1. a. Choose one of the following: i)CSO (6)
2. What is colour subcarrier? Is it
   1. A red transporter for underwater vessels
   2. An African machine-gunner
   3. A Hoover keymatic programme unit
   4. All of the above? (6)
3. How fast will a Designs Department vectorscope go? Verify your answer with some form of irrelevant complicated calculation using sums. (6)
4. What type of fault in a vision mixer gives rise to Nationwide? (4)
5. a. Which of the following items of studio equipment require a safety harness?
   1. Heron camera crane
   2. Fisher microphone boom
   3. Jack Warner (6)

b. Spell the following technical terms:

1. Chromaticity
2. Intermodulation
3. Synchronisation
4. Film (4)

c. Explain the meaning of the following broadcasting terms if they occurred in the script of a documentary programme dealing with family planning:

1. Tip projection
2. Insertion loss
3. Reproducing head
4. Wobbulator
5. Peaking
6. Dropout (10)
7. a. What is more annoying to the standard 1931 CIE man?
   1. Hanover bars
   2. Moire patterning
   3. Premature ejaculation (4)

b. A colour is matched by 2 tins Brilliant White, 1 tin Magnolia and 2.5 tins Signal Red. Plot the resultant colour on the attached D.U.L.U.X. colour chart. Suggest a near match in Magicote. Will this go with orange flowered curtains? (16)

c. Are you sure this is the May 1977 Exam paper? (0)

The BBC has always had some kind of induction course – orientation and familarisation for the troops. When many of us joined it was the middle of the cold war, with London and the BBC a prime target…..

Peter Fox

Colonel Chilvers was the resident BBC expert on nuclear defence and he gave us an induction course lecture on the effects of atomic warfare, He told us enthusiastically about the “foul dust” that would rain down for a mile or two around “ground zero” which was going to be Charing Cross station. He was fairly certain of that. (Also conveniently, the hub of Late Night Transport although we didn’t know about that yet).

BBC Induction Course.

The greatest danger was, we were told, the ensuing firestorm. Dresden and Cologne may have been mentioned but his demonstration involved a dummy birthday cake adorned with about twenty Prices’ standard candles (each, no doubt radiating one lumen, but we didn’t know about those either, yet.) These were lit and allowed to burn for a while. Convincingly the smoke and flame from each candle was deflected inwards towards an increasingly concentrated burning area above the centre of the cake. The cool air drawn in from the sides fed the flames until the candles went into overdrive and started melting and collapsing inwards.

Brilliant.

I can’t recall how it was put out or, come to think of it, anything else on that two week induction course except my first BBC meal. At 1.15pm on the 2nd of October 1962 in the Broadcasting House canteen, I had Spam Fritters. They were absolutely awful and I can tell you that I never in the following 42 years had spam fritters ever again anywhere. It may have been a BBC psychological ploy though, because however awful any future canteen meal might be I could always somehow manage to eat it, telling myself : “At least this isn’t as bad as spam fritters.”

Peter Fox TO 14

Bernie Newnham

… I thought of trying to write an intro to this next piece to explain what “Pres A and B” were and other relevant stuff to help visitors, but I’ve decided not to – if you weren’t there you won’t understand what this is all about – you just need to understand that once upon a time, making TV was such fun….

Mike Cotton

I’m sure you remember the procession of Sound people sent to mix in Pres, I did my share and also volunteered to stay in Pres B for quite a while. It was the only chance we had of mixing music then.

It was hard work on one’s own but great fun. I even chatted to Paul McCartney when he was in the gallery sitting next to me watching his then girl friend Jane Asher being interviewed. My daughter was disgusted I didn’t get his autograph! Then there was Kiri Te Kanawa in her early days – couldn’t get the microphone far enough away to avoid overload – no such things as attenuators then.

Fanny Craddock standing on her BK6 (lanyard mic) and the mic falling onto the floor and all the standby stand mic picked up was her thumping hell out of a chicken. Being accused of racism (jokingly I hope) by Larry Adler. I’d recorded a backing track with the musicians without him being there and on transmission played the last section in after his solo in the wrong place! I was given signed copies of two “Hollies” albums after a 1/2 hour show directed by Steve Turner – I hoped this would not be counted as Payola.

All those times down in Hospitality – Tom Corcoran had a wheeze of pouring the sherry away and filling it up with Whisky as they only replaced empty bottles. Unfortunately after a couple of such escapades they gave us a different trolley so some poor sherry drinking person had a shock. One evening I was asked to entertain a pop group in B205 until the studio was ready. The group didn’t turn up but I had to check the contents to see they were potable. I only ever got stopped once on the journey home, I was driving a Land Rover at the time, for one of the side lights not working. How ever did we survive unscathed in those days before the breathaliser and how do you explain getting home at 5 in the morning having spent the night in VT watching “City Varieties 100th edition”, at least that’s what it was labelled!

The only sour note came when **** [if you were there, you can insert appropriate name. B.] heard that “Humph” was going to play and insisted on mixing it. I don’t think he had ever worked so hard with the primitive facilities we had available – no limiters and echo room 2 if we were lucky and what microphones weren’t in use down below.

I still think Joan Bakewell had great legs

Pres A

I think the scariest bit was down to Pat Hubbard. In order to release the “Voice” he got us to record the VT sound and then add the OOV to it and then VT would record in sound only the composite sound track. It involved getting the pip at -4 synced up. The only item I missed in the years I was up there was when “Daniel Christianson” [Ray Moore under an assumed name so that he could be paid as freelance whilst still having a BBC staff job. B] and I were sent off the bar. We returned to see the transmission lights going out and Pat Hubbard saying ” don’t worry, I’ve done the sound before.” It was Christmas time after all.

I never could work out how one camerman did the late weather. They threatened to make me do it one night. One night we recorded the sound of the late weather on the tape machine and got Jack Scott to review the VT (“Was it OK? Jack”) and played the sound in with a slight delay. He didn’t even notice it. He towed a huge caravan round Scotland with a Morris 1100. Bert Food used to amuse us with his days on weather ships in the Atlantic and how they nearly claimed salvage on an abandoned ship.

Dick Graham, another regular OOV voice, could speak backwards and on replaying forwards it sounded quite reasonable. He even managed to carry on when we put his own sound from the replay head of the recording tape machine back to his headphones. He used to regale us with tales of “Dwoil Flunking” (don’t ask) at village fetes. Putting network sound onto the studio speakers took some getting use to and a degree of trust on both sides so that the weather man didn’t jump the gun and cause a late fade and we didn’t fade up before the hand over had finished. Deaf aids, what are they?

Who was the director who started his trail for the forthcoming attactions with a close up of the word “TURD” and came out in series of zooms to reveal the full SaTURDday. I think he got sent to Manchester as them upstairs didn’t appreciate it. He also insisted on having the series “British Empire” called “Brutish Empire”. Pehaps he came from the antipodes. Film ‘xx and “call me Chuck” Heston.

Some people resented having to work in Pres, but I thoroughly enjoyed my time up there, apart from Christmas time. I still have some of the (audio) tapes after, heaven forbid, 35 years (and it don’t seem a day too long. Sorry, wrong song) The AP shift pattern meant I could “dig” with the Museum of London all over Roman Brentford on days off , and on those days when “B” wasn’t wanted until 1600, were spent digging and then a quick shower and off to work. I did this for about 7 years off and on.

The enforced STO course I went on was spent drawing Roman Pottery and small finds for publication and I even managed to pass with 66% without any work at all which was more than some of those who sweated over the exam (We SA1s were incumbents whose posts had been uprgaded and didn’t need to pass but had to go to satisfy the requirements) The vision lads did tell me to answer the vision questions with “PAL corrects errors in hue at the expense of saturation” and “Second shelf operation cures moire patterning”, what ever that means.

The other memory is of Graham Wilkinson only exceeding 100mph going uphill on the M40 and passing cups of coffee between vehicles going at high speeds.

Don’t tell the grandchildren!

Mic Weaver

Gordon Mackie swears this never happened, but I’m here to tell you it did.

It was in Studio E, on a very early Blue Peter, before Biddy took it over, when John Hunter-Blair directed it. A lovely man who, in moments of stress was liable to lose the thread somewhat, with the result he once was heard to say as the red lights steadied ‘Er, cut, no mix, no fade… Oh, cut to whatever it is and cue it!’

In those days children’s television was all innocent fun and very much in the mould of Educate, Inform and Entertain – very much in that order – of the BBC’s original remit. Whatever happened to that? Accordingly John liked to introduce culture into the programme – that’s Culture with a capital C – Yoof Kulture was very much out of sight over the horizon. So this particular programme featured an orchestra which played a suitable piece of music of a light classical nature and the conductor was interviewed and the various sections were featured. All very educational, informative and entertaining!

The final shot of the programme was of the conductor in close-up, baton poised, developing, outwards and upwards, to a high long shot as the orchestra started to play the Blue Peter theme under the roller caption. What could possibly go wrong?

Gordon Mackie was tracking me on the boom. Gordon had two speeds of tracking; Fast – very, and woe betide any obstructions like cable eights and floor managers – and Stop, dead. He could swap from one speed to the other instantaneously – or faster! I covered the presenters’ goodbyes and then hung on with teeth and toenails as Gordon dragged me backwards smartish to stay out of the final shot development. Where things started to go wrong I’m unsure, I was too busy hanging on, but I became aware that things were going awry when the shouts went up ‘Boom in shot!’ and we stopped dead.

Trying to raise the boom arm an inch or two to get it out of shot proved impossible, and on looking round to find out why, I caught sight of a floor monitor. Oh yes, the boom was in shot all right, but not just denting a line or few at the top; from pulley wheels at the back – rather out of focus due to being inextricably jammed into the lens- hood – to the mic at the front and from wheels on the floor to the top of my head, in a panoramic perspective that, if I may say so, made a tasteful silhouette under the roller caption as it crawled, oh so slowly, upward!

Another fine mess I was gotten into by a boom and a camera attempting to occupy the same place in the space- time continuum happened next door in studio D during an adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel. This was rather a large production for a studio that was only of modest dimensions, and would have benefitted enormously if it could have transferred to say Studio 3 at the Centre. Alas, that was still only a large muddy hole in the ground. So the designer had perforce to compromise and many of the less important locations were hinted at.

The action called for a masked ball. The ballroom was hinted at, rather cleverly, by means of a plaster pillar foreground, some black drape backing and a chandelier suspended above. Sir Percy Blakeney, or whoever, and companion, leaned on the pillar, in BCU, deep in conspiratorial plot. Many extras in the background, danced a gavotte, to music played in by grams. At the crucial point in the dialogue, to avoid giving away too much plot too soon, the mole crane pulls out and up, the boom pulls away and the music swells to a fade-out. Easy-peasy!

All was going well until that crucial point in the dialogue. The mole started its move, I matched it with the boom. Whether the mole’s arm swinger was a little too enthusiastic in pulling down the bucket or whether the driver wasn’t enthusiastic enough in pulling back, I don’t know but the outcome was that the camera smote my boom arm mightily from below and drove the microphone deep into the innermost fastness of the chandelier, which promptly parted company from its supporting hook. Fortunately, the sound supervisor, Les Wilkins, was half-way into the fade out, so the noise was not as excruciating as it might have been, and all might have been well if the mole had stopped there. Alas, it was not yet on its marks and so pulled inexorably back and I was unable to follow it because of an adjacent set. There came the inevitable moment when the camera slid from beneath the boom arm leaving me trying to support many pounds of extra weight at the extreme end of the arm; sorry, can’t be done! So the shot ended as the chandelier, with my microphone entombed therein, flashed swiftly from ceiling to ground to disintegrate into its component crystal droplets. Sorry Del boy, in the chandelier smashing game I was years ahead of you!

Under the opening credits of that same ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ was to have been a scene-setting shot of the hindquarters of a large shire horse towing a wooden tumbril loaded with shaven headed ‘aristos’ to their fate at the blade of Mme. Guillotine, imagined to be beyond the the suitably disguised doorway leading to the scene dock lift. At the start of the final run-through however, as the horse was being backed between the shafts of the tumbril, it raised its tail, expelled the most ear-splitting fart and disgorged the entire contents of its bowels in a seemingly never ending stream of foetid fluid, the stench of which swiftly rendered the studio uninhabitable. A tea-break was hastily called and the studio attendant – now a long extinct breed – was equipped with a large bucket, mop and clothes-peg and left to cope on his own. The lingering smell lent a certain piquant je ne sais quoi to the studio atmosphere for weeks!

Peter Wiltshire, (in his cameraman days), becoming exasperated trying to line up a shot to the director’s satisfaction while trying to keep out of shot a length of scaffolding: “I can’t get the shot you want without this great scaffold-pole in foreground.”

Director (gently): “Peter dear, try not to think of it as a scaffold-pole. Think of it as Art!”

Peter Hales

I read with interest the two contributions by the two Mikes, Cotton and Weaver. Both bought back memories, Gordon Mackie was my SS for a time and was always game for a practical joke, I remember he jumbled up my running order just before we went on air with Tonight in studio H Lime Grove.

I worked the “opposite” AP shift to Mike Cotton in Pres B I was also happy to carry on there indefinitely because as Mike says “It was the only chance we had of mixing music then.” Albeit under less than ideal conditions on a rather primitive sound desk with limited facilities and very few microphones. The “experts” didn’t want to know!!!!

I remember having three full size drum kits in Studio B and that was loud, the weather man next door in Studio A didn’t like it at all!!!!

The series I seem to remember was “Colour me Pop” The programmes were I think directed by either Steve Turner or Tom Corcoran and possibly Granville Jenkins. They were transmitted LIVE late on a Saturday Evening on BBC 2 I believe.

I had a similar experience to Mike after a late night hospitality session with Tom Corcoran and guests. I was stopped about ½ mile from home by the law and all they wanted to talk about was the Basil D’Olivera affair. Cricketers may remember it.

The BK6 lanyard mic mentioned by Mike was a moving coil mic and could also therefore be used as a small loudspeaker so if a wearer kept tapping the mic then this little disembodied voice would ask him/her to stop!!!!!!

Yes Mike, Joan Bakewell did have great legs!!!!!

So far no one has mentioned the early days at Lime Grove when we used to do an afternoons’ Womans programme, finishing around 15.00/15.30 after which the whole crew would be coached up Alexandra Palace for News and Newsreel.

Also the original TV Theatre – The Shepherds Bush Empire, the Kings Theatre Hammersmith, where incidentally I mixed my first LE Show – The Charlie Chester Show (with the golden voice of Marion Miller) – on a stack of MX18s an OBA 9 and a lot of faith. Under the guidance of Hugh Barker.

And of course we musn’t forget the Golders Green Hippodrome.

Finally what about Riverside Studios? Away from the prying eyes and ears of management. Dixon of Dock Green, Playschool and others from Studio 2.

Studio 1 was the home for sit com such as Sykes and a ………Six Five Special + many other LE Shows. We musn’t forget the most important studio, and that was Studio 3 across the road, otherwise known as the Saloon Bar of the Chancellors PH, Well known for its Watney Red Barrel(???????). The spare bod was always despatched early to lunch or evening meal to get the first round in.

Les Thorn

A story about legendary Senior Cameraman Jim Atkinson …

On 25th June 1975 Crew 5 plus many others, started working on Wagner’s opera “The Flying Dutchman” in TC1, directed by Brian Large. It was a fantastic set, which for part of the production contained what seemed like two full size ships. We used a Chapman Titan crane, with Jim Atkinson on the front, to shoot a lot of the action on deck. (We couldn’t get a ped up there!)

Frank Considine and I were the swingers, and we had a terrible time trying to maintain a deep two-shot as the actors paced up and down the decks, whilst at the same time, moving the arm up and down to simulate the ships’ movement.

Unfortunately we didn’t possess Jim’s incredible memory for the action and the shot went horribly wrong. There was a moment’s silence, and then Jim boomed from the far end of the arm, so that the whole studio could hear:

“I’m prepared to allow you one mistake and you’ve just made it”.

It’s not easy to make Frank and me look small, but we did that day. During a break in rehearsals, Jim, who was always striving to perfect his Hi-Fi system and victim of the odd malapropism, was heard to say that during the opera the “Flying Dutchman” was caught up in a “Vortexion”. I must confess that later we got a bit carried away, and were moving the arm 6 to 8 feet up and down on one scene, creating a very realistic swell. No one said anything at the time, and it was only when I watched it go out that I realised the boat was actually tied-up in port!

Bernie Newnham

This last is an email conversation. David Toumi works for a TV station in California, and has an engineer’s interest in old gear. I’ve published this here – with his permission – because I’d forgotten most of the stuff I told him, until I started writing…

David Tuomi wrote:

I was referred to your web site from a conversation on the Doctor Who Restoration web site (http:// www.restoration-team.co.uk/) technical forum. We had been discussing the restoration of the earliest of the BBC shows and it was mentioned by members of the team that the switcher (vision mixer) in use on these didn’t switch on the vertical interval. Although no one there could tell me why a switcher built as late as the early 60s wouldn’t have this capability, they did mention that the BBC custom built many of its desks.After being referred to your site, I was able to look at a picture of one of these machines. (View Picture.)
My question was I was wondering if you knew, or knew of someone you could refer who would have operational knowledge of how one of these types of switchers worked. I’ve worked in the television industry here in the States since about 1990, so I’ve never seen one like it and I’d really like to have more information on how they operated and why the BBC preferred using them over other commercial switchers.

Thanks in advance, David Tuomi

Bernie

Hello David

It’s always a pleasure to have someone write out of the blue about the site. I have to admit that I don’t know anyone who was that intimate with the innards of these mixers, though I might think of someone given time. But we all knew how to work them, as they weren’t very difficult.

First of all – yes, some of the early ones didn’t wait for the vertical interval to cut, but they were the very early ones. The BBC built its own gear because no-one else did – there weren’t any commercially available ones in those days, This was true of much TV equipment and the BBC had and still has, a strong R and D department. Though the look of the standard BBC mixer that you can see in the picture didn’t change much throughout it life, the innards did, and the one you can see was one of the last, a colour example. These were built in the mid- sixties, and lasted till the early eighties when they were replaced by Grass Valley 300 and 1600s.

Operationally, BBC staff liked these mixers over the eventually standard “row of buttons with a fader at the end” because each channel has its own fader. This meant that, like a sound desk, you could have several sources faded up at once and at different and varying levels. Once , during a scene crew strike, a vision mixer called Dick Pigg managed to get all six cameras faded up at once during an Englebert Humperdinck song on Top of the Pops. “Bingo” he shouted.

So – how did they work?

At the left hand end the two fader/cut buttons switched between the two banks of eight. The two banks had identical sources on them. Normally the A bank would be on air, as it is here. You could the cut between sources by pressing the buttons along the bottom. If you wanted to mix, you pushed the fader of the on-air channel to the top, and the bank would go into mix mode. You could then add as many sources as you wanted. You could still cut to any source just by pressing the cut button. Using both banks you could mix to a composite, or whatever.

The two faders on the right were for a 35 slide scanner. The buttons just above the right (B) bank were for colour separation overlay, later known as chromakey, available on the B bank and generally hated by the vision mixers as too complicated. The green switches above the left bank decided whether the source would be treated as sync or non-sync. You could only cut to a non-sync source. The large block of white buttons and other stuff at the top were for the preview monitors in the gallery and on the studio floor.

Ha! I’m quiet pleased that I can remember all that more than twenty years later, but I did live with them for 15 years or so.

Bernie

David Tuomi wrote:

Okay, I spent several days going over your email, and I have to admit that I’m still a little fuzzy on how the machine works. It could just be that I’m so used to how most switchers operate that I’m not able to get it.

So you basically have a switcher that is divided into two busses with 8 inputs. The sliders seem to be color coded, which would imply something like white for cameras. Red, Yellow, Blue, and Green must be for other input types like VTR, film chain, etc.

There is A which is the mix bus, and B which is an effect bus.

The A bus can either be in cuts only mode or in mix mode. When in mix mode the sync sources can be mixed either through dissolve or super. To effect a dissolve would be like a segue on an audio mixer, basically running one input up while moving another down.

To do a super just run more than one input up.

The effects bus can do all that plus chroma-key and wipes I guess.

And the big 35mm slide chain slider would be equivalent to a modern down stream key and would be used for graphics.

Is that at all right or am I completely wrong?

Also if this machine is capable of wipes, how many would it have had? How would a luminance-key be done?

Finally thanks for the story about the Tops of the Pops, that’s great. I love to hear stuff like that. It must have been neat to have worked on these shows. Plus, it gave some insight on what advantage this switcher might be. You don’t see much of the multi-camera super shot that used to be used all the time on music shows. I guess with editing and with macro setups on switchers everyone just cuts real fast. Or the ever popular dutch shot (turn the hand-held camera on its side).

Thanks, David

On Nov 25, 2005, at 6:44 AM (PST), Bernard Newnham wrote:

Not completely wrong, but you do have to forget about modern mixers.

There were two basically identical banks (busses), neither really for effects, as that was tagged on late. The two cut button / faders on the left select which bank was on the air. Back in the very early days of TV, monitors were very expensive, so the programme would be cut by switching between the two banks, and the off-air bank would be switched to have the next camera on it – the gallery would only need two monitors. Two button presses for every different camera – which didn’t matter much as they didn’t cut that often, and there weren’t many cameras.

As things progressed in the 1950s they got more monitors and this went away, unless you happened to be the famous *******, a well known vision mixer at the BBC, who insisted on cutting the old way even when you were doing a six camera 600 shot 50 minute as-live show. Oh how we loved to find out that ***** was mixing our show.

The cameras didn’t have zoom lenses but a turret of four fixed, so if ***** mis-cut, she’d probably hit someone in mid-change – so she’d cut back and hit the orginal camera doing the same. She could manage to have a whole chorus of lens changes. Although the particular show we were doing was recorded, you could only edit by physically cutting the tape, which was very expensive for the production – so **** could be very popular (not).

So – most cutting would be on the A bank, as would simple mixes. But if you wanted to cut or mix to a composite, you set it up on the other bank and used the main cut/mix to go between them.

As time went by, more bits and pieces were added. Wipes (when they were fashionable) were done between the two banks, with a switch next to the main pair deciding whether they would mix or wipe. A vertical row of square buttons on the left in the picture are the pattern selectors. When someone invented luminance keying, in the monchrome days before colour, it was done by a separate person at another desk. As time went on this seemed rather an expensive way of doing things, so coincident with colour in the mid-sixties they added vision mixer overlay which could work in luminance as well as chromakey. This was on the B bank as discussed, and did lead to a very angry vision mixer actually hitting the machine with his boot and breaking it. I think he went away for a long well earned rest shortly after. I have the faintest of memories of one of the studios having this on both banks – maybe that’s why he resorted to extreme measures.

The 35mm slide faders were mostly used for credits, though they could have real picture too, All that happened was the 35mm output was fed to a main bank channel and faded up. If you wanted them over something you’d push both up.

This may all sound a touch silly and over-complicated, and in the end it was, which was why the BBC bought Grass Valley stuff. But for most of the time they were used, the BBC mixers were far more flexible that US style mixers, and that’s why they stayed so long. The very large majority of TV transitions were and are cuts, and if nowadays you want more than one camera faded up at a time, it’s a whole lot more difficult than it was then.

cheers B

David Tuomi wrote:

Okay, I’m getting a better idea of this I think. So real transitions like wipes or dissolves would be going from bus a to b. I would think it would be possible to do one just by running one input up while moving the other down. For the most part it was a cuts system.

I find it strange that this system added things like luma key and wipes late. I have an RCA book from the mid 50’s (just after they introduced NTSC color in ‘54) and they have a switcher in there (complete with schematic, just in case you ever had a few dozen vacuum tubes around and wanted to built it yourself) which has everything except chroma-key. I’ve heard mixed stories as to how chroma-key came about, but mostly it seems like someone was being mean to a luma keyer and the red and green outputs of a color camera.

I could scan and send you copies of the relevant pages if interested.

Interesting about how they compensated for lack of monitors by just having the next camera at the ready. I think here in the States how they did it was by having the engineering crew that were shading the cameras sit close to the technical director (what they call a vision mixer person in the States). They would all share the same monitors.

As to Ms. *****, at the studio where I work, we have this one guy who does technical directing on some of the remotes we do for parades (4th of July, Christmas, that sort of thing). For some reason he can never hit a button straight. He always presses two buttons that are side-by-side on the switcher. Now one of the buttons was his intended target, but the other one wasn’t. You can guess which one always seems to end up on the air. We call it the finger fumble.

So you would do all your compositing on B bank, and you could select which kind it was. It being either luma or chroma key. So you could either cut or mix in the composites by going from a to b. I can definitely see why it might get crazy if you have that capability on both busses. You could put the switcher in a mode where it wouldn’t display anything you wanted until you find that one switch or button that you changed.

Okay, and so the 35mm slides could be brought up at any time. They could even have a test pattern or whatever was on a slide, so it wasn’t just for graphics, more like a still store on a single extra input that could only be mixed in but not cut to.

You didn’t mention whether I was right about the color coding of the sliders. I’d be interested in knowing if that’s what the colors mean.

I’ve heard that many shows would be done almost live to tape, even complex shows like Doctor Who or Blake 7. For a complex composite shot would they save it for post? Or would they just build up layers on this vision mixer and keep re-recording until all they layers of the final effect were together?

I’m not sure if they were a really silly way of doing it, but they were very different. I can see the appeal of being able to do everything without having to change a bus. Especially since my studio has a Grass 110 which is a m/e bus switcher. I can understand why they would be replaced though. You would have to in-house train everyone who came in before they could run it. Still its an interesting design idea. Are any of them still in use? Probably not if they started going out in the early 80’s.

David

On Nov 26, 2005, at 6:43 AM, Bernard Newnham wrote:

Yes, you have the idea, though the bit about “have to in-house train everyone who came in before they could run it” pre-supposes that there would be an everyone and that they would have been trained on something else.

There wasn’t. In the UK there was only one channel – BBC – till 1955, then two with ITV till 1964, the third one being another BBC sourced from the same place, then three till 1980 something. Two thirds of British TV came from the BBC and all studios had pretty much the same equipment, all purpose designed to do what we wanted.

The bigger studios had something called the overlay desk in a corner which could do luma common and separate (matte) keys, then chromakey too. One of the crew would set it up, and it would be a source on the mixer. BTW the colour coding on the mixer faders was as you say, though there were often six studio cameras which meant that the coding was fairing meaningless.

As far as vision mixing was concerned it all got difficult at the time when effects became popular and editing was slow and expensive – which was only a few years till all the fancy stuff went to post-production, or to a graphics area if live. This was of course at the time when Dr Who and Blakes 7 were happening. They decided that it was all getting too complicated for the average vision mixing person to do all the effects too, apart from the odd bit of bank overlay now and then, and employed Dave Jervis and Mitch Mitchell amongst other to specialise.

You’ve probably seen their names on the end of things. Mitch and I trained together in 1966. He was the man who “invented” green chromakey at the BBC when the engineers said it wouldn’t work, just by cross-plugging the colour outputs of the camera. Mitch did all the transporter effects for Blakes 7, he was only allowed one per episode though, because it was done in studio record time which was limited.

As you say, most shows were done in live order, though once it was possible to do simple edits we normally worked scene by scene with multiple cameras.

Sometimes there was budget on Dr Who for special effects days. If you seen the series with the giant robot, all the shots where it picks up Liz Sladen and carries her around like King Kong were composited in the studio. The backgrounds were shot some weeks before on location, then in studio 3 at Television Centre they put up a lot of blue and matched – more or less – Liz and the robot into it. I know because I was the cameraman moving Liz around the screen.

Sometimes we would do “roll back and mix” – a mulitlayer composite in the studio. They always had two VT machines to record a show for safety, and one would play back the material just recorded whilst the other recorded the mix. This did mean multi-generation analogue 2” recording – and going past three generations did tend to get noisy. I once made a trailer for a series about the nature of reality by having the presenter argue with himself about who was real. Then I had a third version come on over the top and say that none of them were. I was quite proud of that, but it did get through the generations by the time it transmitted.

Till I started answering you, I had forgotten all this stuff, which why I want to put the result on the website. Thanks for letting me.

Cheers B

David Tuomi wrote:

You know it didn’t occur to me, but yeah you guys were rather limited on the number of channels available. Here in the States for a time there was a big gold rush for T.V. Stations, so every place had its own with its own production facility. That’s all gone now of course. T.V. Stations in this country are now automated affairs that just pump out whatever they’re connected to. I was lucky to get into a place that still does a lot of its own shows.

Would the ITV studios also be using this same equipment? I suppose if they taped in a BBC facility they would, but I do know they had some studios of their own (the other 1/3 of output that you mentioned).

You know the desk in the corner for effects isn’t that unreasonable. I know even today at where I work there are a lot of outboard effects boxes and still stores that we have to contend with. I’ve noticed that recently all these digital goodies are starting to migrate into the new switchers. So once again you don’t need anything extra. I think it might depend on the technologies or the fads of the day as to how they’re interfaced (and used for that matter). Sooner or later they all end up back in the switcher though.

That’s neat that you actually worked on Doctor Who. I’ll look for your name in the credits. I think I taped the episode with the robot off of BBC America some years ago. Doctor Who really influenced me to go into television production. I know I wanted to get into it in some way, but when I was 12 I watched my first episode of Who and I knew I wanted to do video rather than film. When I was a video/film student at California State University Northridge I actually tried some of the old Doctor Who effects on some projects I did there. I know its been fashionable to make fun of them over the years, but trying to reproduce them myself in a studio, I know they can be really hard to do, especially in the almost live situation.

On the that promo that you did with the multi versions. Did you use the switcher to cause a cut out part of the scene so that the other VTR could roll in? One of the projects at the University I did was to produce a Sherlock Holmes play where his nemesis was also played by the same actor. When I did that I rolled back one VTR while having the actor perform live against it. I used an m/e bank on the switcher to set up a cut out area of the scene where the videotape would be, while the rest of the shot was live. Would the procedure have been similar for your vision mixer, or did it do its magic by some other means? How would it have been setup on the desk itself?

Also, a little off topic, but I found it unusual that you could only go 3 generations on 2” tape before you had generation loss problems. I had always heard that quad was a very clean format, especially compared to 1” which replaced it. And that it wasn’t really matched until everyone started using digital tape formats. I must warn you though, I was the geek on the Who Restoration site who asked which model of VTR they used to play back the old tapes (it was the Ampex VR2000). I was annoyed when they couldn’t tell me if it was the B model or not. The B model had better audio heads. So talking tape might take us off in yet another direction.

Thanks, David

Bernie Newnham

Hi David

I suppose one has to remember that the UK is only very small compared to the US, and when tv started in 1936 we already had very respected public service radio , so extending this to TV was the natural thing to do.

There wasn’t the will to set up lots of commercial stations. When ITV started in 1955 after much lobbying by people who wanted what was later called “a licence to print money” they took a lot of their staff from the BBC, so they may have copied the equipment too. After that first big move, ITV and BBC didn’t mix too much. They were very separate empires, and if you left the BBC for ITV you never came back. The BBC always tried to promote its own staff, and train people from school. This meant that people could spend their whole careers in the BBC, as I did for 35 years. Though that is all long gone, the BBC was and is in the position of being the peak of many peoples ambitions – “I work for the BBC” opens many doors all over the world. All of which is a long and obscure way of saying I don’t know what ITV had in the way of vision mixers.

I worked on a number of Dr Who episodes. I was in the camera department from 1966 to 1977 and Dr Who was just another day’s work to us as it was for the fellows in VT.

The first I worked on was a Pat Troughton – I think one of the Abominable Snowman episodes. I remember black cycs in Studio E at Lime Grove, and Wendy Padbury in a black zip front leather cat suit a la Mrs Peel. Troughton kept unzipping it. Being in Studio E was a liitle odd, as it was used for a current affairs show all week, and Grandstand, an all afternoon sports show on Saturday. It was unusual to use it on Sunday.

Sometime after that I worked on a purely experimental session where they were trying out the look of the lifeform inside a Dalek. The session – in monochrome – involved various coloured paint and balloons in Studio D Lime Grove.

I worked on at least one Pertwee – I remember that Katy Manning wore heavy spectacles for the rehearsals but not for the recording, which meant she didn’t hit her marks because she couldn’t see them. Jon Pertwee was a real pro actor. Actually they all were, but somehow he stood out.

I worked on the episode where Dr Who became Tom Baker with all the costume changes edited together later, and I worked on a series called something like “The Colonists”. I remember that one partly for an actress called Helen Worth, and partly for a gunfight in the colonists spaceship. They all had current model sub-machine guns which were extremely loud in TC3. Right in front of me a very camp extra’s gun jammed on fire and he dropped it (”oooh!”). Although they were obviously just loaded with half power blanks, the hot spend shell cases came out just the same – all over me and my camera.

And I worked on the big effects day on Robot as mentioned earlier. You won’t find my name anywhere, though, as cameramen didn’t get credits.

Something that doesn’t seem to be passed around the Dr Who fans is the fact that the Daleks didn’t belong to the BBC, but to Terry Nation – one of those contractual strangenesses. Though the Tardis tended to be left in the scenery ring road when not in use, the Daleks were delivered when required on a truck. The BBC scene hands, back in those unionised days, wouldn’t touch them, so when one was forgotten it sat for months outside Studio 8 in the scenery ring road. We used to get inside and trundle it around in spare moments, once imprisoning a colleague inside whilst we pushed him a long way from where he was supposed to be.

Some years later the Daleks were revived – about 1982. I was a producer on BBC Breakfast and we decided to get a Dalek and have it threaten the TV preview presenter. The place we were prerecording was up four floors from where it was delivered, and the BBC scene crew said that it was nothing to do with them. So the presenter and I took it apart – it splits in the middle – and carried the bits up the stairs as it wouldn’t fit in the lift. The top went up fine, though heavy, but the bottom half, much heavier, wouldn’t go through the narrow door at the top, so had to come all the way back down and up a different flight of stairs and through a different door. The result was worth it. We used to record the segment in front of a pair of 1” VT machines in the VT area, one of which was recording, the other playing back clips. When the Dalek interfered – driven by the office secretary – it was a great moment.

In 1977 I moved to BBC Presentation, the department that put programmes on the air, and made the trails (promos). I was mostly in promos for a long time, which meant that I spent a huge amount of time in the VT area. This is where one finds out about generation loss, as we were the end of the chain and always added two generations. So if a show had been edited then re-edited, you were already three down, and beginning to look a touch furry. By the time we’d finished….

2” was better than 1” in many ways, though of course the technology was older and much more expensive – you could certainly see the difference in the early days when there was a mixture of formats, and first gen 2” was always much sharper. When you talk about which machine they used for playback, I assume you mean the Dr Who restorers, as the shows got edited and played back generally on whatever was around. The BBC had a good number of record and edit areas at Television Centre – maybe a hundred machines in all in various places. Concurrently operating were VR1200, VR2000, RCA (something – the dreaded “rip scratch” edit suite), AVR2 and one AVR1. I have to say that the pictures and sound mostly were the same whatever the machine – what we cared in trails about were spool speeds. In a tape change a programme on 2” had to be spooled down to the very end and then back when it was taken off the machine in order to avoid top edge damage where the soundtrack is – a very real possibilty.

As on a Sunday 12 hour edit we’d get through a significant number of tape changes a lot of time would be lost if you were in an area equipped with VR1200s, as they were very slow, and a 90’ tape wound end to end was a long a unproductive time.

On the “nature of reality” trail, I put James Burke against black for the first two passes, and did a soft-edged vertical wipe between the playback and live on the second pass. On the desk, you just select a source on each bank, and push the main faders half way. For the third pass, the man on top, I used chromakey – yellow, I think it was, but I don’t remember why – avoiding blue fringing I think – on the B bank.

If you want serious tech talk about 2” VT, visit the vtoldboys site http://www.vtoldboys.com/ and email Chris Booth. He is in touch with lots of the career editors who were at the BBC from when editing began – http:// www.vtoldboys.com/curlunch.htm . I’m sure at least one of them would be happy to share any VT geekiness you want.

There you are – another load of stuff I thought I’d forgotten. B

…almost a little book in this page. Some proper history, and thanks to all.