BBC 1 Network control rooms come and go much faster than studios.
This is the third generation at Television Centre and soon itself to be replaced. My wife Pauline is in charge just before she left the job of network director
In the late ’80’s I used to direct a kids morning sequence called Now on 2. One day they wanted me to fix it for Jim, or rather a little girl who wanted to be a tv presenter (she must be around 25 now). Anyway, the film had a lot more of me than her in it in the end, and this is a still from my VHS. The much younger me is sitting in Pres A at the Grass Valley 300 mixer, then the largest in the world.
I met the engineer who took the studio apart the other week, and he tells me that the Grass Valley went for spares for another in Manchester. Sad – I would have liked a chunk to keep, I spent a good number of years sat in front it.
A few years later – about 1993 – here I was as producer of Points of View, hanging around amongst the Autocues – hair going grey!
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Peter Woodley told me about this book, presumably long out of print, though who knows with modern print-on-demand.
Anyway it was easy to find by the magic of Amazon (£4.50).
It’s a huge compilation of stories and a few pictures which add up to an excellent insight into ’40s and ’50s television in the UK.
(Dennis Norden/Methuen)
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Here’s one story from someone we all knew and loved…
And that famous picture from my youth of Paddy Russell, and is it Peter Frieze-Green, on a Rudi Cartier play
This site gets a lot of admiring comments from new arrivals, which is very pleasing, but I’d love to see a whole pile of one liners like that one from Mother. People tell these short stories over lunch or a drink, but they’ll be gone forever if you don’t write them down.
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Where next…?
Inevitably when old friends get together, you talk about what you have in common, which is of course, the “good
old days”. Actually, for me there were very good, good, indifferent and really bad – when the only thing you’d done for three months was cable-bash, that was no fun at all. Still, I think it’s not just opinion but a truth that those of my age saw the best of television, just as earlier generations saw the best of radio, the music-hall, or Charles Dickens part-works.
Each form of entertainment has its moment, and then just becomes a part of something else. Anyone with 100 or so tv channels realises that when so much is on tap it loses its value – if you can see Fawlty Towers tomorrow, the next day and the next day, you don’t actually watch any of them. We all own videos of precious things that we never ever watch, its enough that it’s there if we ever wanted to. These days I have a huge amount of tv available, watch very little, and almost no BBC.
So where is it all going? What’s next? The answer has to be of course, that you’re using a part of what’s next right now. I now spend many more hours sitting right here these days than I do in front of a tv. This machine does my work – scriptwriting, editing, sending invoices and much more – and it’s a lot of my pleasure. Chatting with friends on email, discovering old school friends on FriendsReunited, listening to music from the other side of the world, playing Unreal Tournament 2004 or whatever with my nine-year-old and people around the world I will never ever meet. I belong to a number of list servers, and can ask a question about Final Cut Pro, or a DV camera or if necessary my Aqualisa shower unit, and back come the answers. If it can be done, someone out there has done it and will tell you about it. I can watch the sun rise over the Sydney Opera House and watch people in the rain in Times Square.
I think all this is only the beginning of the beginning. Though I was the first person I know with internet access (producer Points of Views 1993), I only got broadband a few weeks ago. I didn’t think I needed to go that fast, after all I have the time now. But since I started using it, I can do so very much more. And when the NTL people went down our street and put in the pipes, the outer one was about 10cm diameter, and they put a 1cm diameter cable inside – there’s an awful lot of space for more bandwidth, and one day we will use it.
March 2004
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A small thanks to the man at the bottom of the page. Every page on this site has the same graphic at the bottom. I only had a few pictures to fiddle with at the beginning, so this became part of the original graphics style, and I still like it enough to leave it there. It’s a cutout of Ian Ridley on the front of the Nike crane pictured on the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show which also starred Glenda Jackson. Alan Rixon and I were swinging, and Wayne Mottershead was driving – the full picture is on an early page, but I still don’t know who took it.
