Blue Peter from 1963Crew IdentifiersKevin WhiteDave Buckley – Life StoryElstree Open Days (Up Dates)
More!From Tech Ops Conversations during March 2024 Technical Operators Course Attendees Appreciation – Bill Jenkin Appreciation – Stuart Lindley Appreciation – John Dailley BBC Club Application Form Hand Held Camera -Oulton Park 1967 BBC Tech Ops Starting Salaries
More!From Tech Ops Conversations during Feb 2024 BBC 2 comes to Southend Elstree Open Days Lime Grove, May 1950 Long distance radio links Loss of signal on an OB Pictures of BBC Television Theatre through the years Ralph Parrot Shooting … Continue reading
More!Forsyte Saga (First Month, follow links for later month) Evolution of microphones within the BBC Geoff Feld Joan Williams Mystery Studio Picture Final Footage from Lime Grove Tony Milton Glastonbury BBC Four: Henry V Exhibition: 6 decades of Dr Who … Continue reading
More!Pauline Langfield It is with great sadness that I share with you that Bernie died [on the 17th August 2023]. He had been ill for some time, but was able to spend his last few months at home where he wanted … Continue reading
More!Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee What a joyous delight to see Paddington Bear at tea with the Queen – and eating marmalade sandwiches. There was a rumour that the Queen herself was to be nominated for Best Supporting Actress … Continue reading
More!A Mole in Daylight The Motion Picture Research Council Camera Crane, manufactured by Mole-Richardson under licence, known as the MPRC Crane in official documents but universally known as the Mole Crane, was generally confined to the studios and never saw … Continue reading
More!“Dr Who” Pilots and Titles Mike Jordan noted that the BBC Motion Graphics Archive had opened at Ravensbourne College. The Archive shows development of graphics across the BBC and includes examples of opening titles and promotion trailers. The “Dr Who” … Continue reading
More!Here is another issue of the e-zine that YOU write! Topics 4 comes to you in the midst of the latest English four-week “lockdown” for Covid-19, as this second wave of the Covid-19 infection has hit: Wales has already had … Continue reading
More!On 23rd March 2020, the United Kingdom – as had happened with many other European countries and other countries Worldwide – was put into lockdown in an unprecedented step to attempt to limit the spread of CoronaVirus and the disease … Continue reading
More!This collection of “Topics” – composed of emails written by BBC Technical Operators – was inspired by the comments of the Tech Ops group following the release of the film “1917”. This film tells the story of the day, 6th … Continue reading
More!This collection was created in response to a “crie de coeur” from Tony Nuttall – in the wilds of Cumbria – who wrote: “… superb explanations of Operational Techniques [for Sound Synchronisation]… and how to achieve them. I do hope that … Continue reading
More!David Newbitt drew attention to a 2013 Google tour of Television Centre, before an incompetent management sold it off. Go here – https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5099449,-0.2265976,18.5z?hl=en-GB for the tour, they’re the fainter lines inside the building. I’ve done the tour and lifted some stills. … Continue reading
More!This section allows you to see some of the paperwork produced by and for the BBC during the “GOLDEN YEARS” of BBC Television production, when studio crews worked with actors and directors to produce world-class, world beating, theatrical-style multi-camera live … Continue reading
More!A sudden rush of photos not seen before. Roger Bunce sent the first four, and says “Some rather wonderful photos, from the Golden Age of monochrome, when cameramen wore jackets and ties, have been forwarded to me by George Auckland. … Continue reading
More!In a leading article on Thursday 10th August 2017, the “Guardian” noted that this August was a month of anniversaries: a hundred years since the start of the battle of Passchendaele in the First World War, and seventy years since … Continue reading
More!Grumble grumble grumble … A Game of Moans … Old practitioners of the “Game of Tones” – sound supervisors, gram ops, boom ops, and all the myriad people in the old sound transmission chain – continue with discussions about poor … Continue reading
More!In the 1950s – when many of us were young and investigating everything around us – the world was mechanical. Railway signalling was mechanical, the interlocking between points and signals being achieved by, at times, a baroque arrangement of sliding … Continue reading
More!It is a lively bunch who gather round the virtual table in the virtual (tea) bar to chew the fat, and who offer items interest, opinions and information over a wide range of topics. Things that we discussed but have … Continue reading
More!BBC Tech Ops people have, over the years, become very interested in lots of “ologies” (cf Maureen Lipman’s adverts for BT from some time ago!). Some topics that have featured in the Tech Ops mailing list include Cloacopapyrology Ferroequinology Planeology … Continue reading
More!Tech Ops people have been emailing about any and all aspects of BBC programming – current sound and picture quality, quality of content and comparisons with BBC reality and the spoof “W1A” – it is sometimes difficult to tell the … Continue reading
More!Here is a third collection of threads from the Tech Ops mailing list. There’s a lot of sound stories in this collection! Many of the conversations in this set covered a number of topics, and some segued into new topic … Continue reading
More!Here is a second collection of threads from the Tech Ops mailing list, once again many of them telling stories of how life really was for those who worked for the BBC. The conversations have been edited – hopefully to … Continue reading
More!One of the ‘Objectives’ at my last Annual Appraisal was to stay in the BBC longer than John Birt. (Oddly, my Line Manager would not accept it as an ‘Agreed Objective’.) John Birt left the BBC in 2000. I attended … Continue reading
More!You start off doing one thing, and somehow other stuff just comes along…… When I started the tech-ops site, it was meant to be a home for picture and stories that might not otherwise ever be shown or told. A … Continue reading
More!Dave Mundy visited the Wood Norton Hotel and took some pictures….. ” order_by=”sortorder” order_direction=”ASC” returns=”included” maximum_entity_count=”500″]
More!In BBC tech-ops it’s always been thought that the BBC’s first studio camerawoman was Barbara Franc, in 1974. After many years, it turns out that this was wrong. Barbara (Bimbi) Harris, who died in 2013 aged 95, was actually the … Continue reading
More!During the time that I worked in BBC TV Technical Operations, there was one piece of equipment that had many, many more tales told about it than anything else – this was the Mole Richardson Crane, or Mole Crane as … Continue reading
More!Nick Lake sent the course picture for TO26 (click for big) – …and Mike du Boulay sent TO16 – Nick also sent a Softly Softly Task Force group picture from 1974 – Nick says that “…. this is TC4 and, as … Continue reading
More!It’s a Square World Some programs were a joy and a privilege to work on – and one such program was “It’s a Square World”. It was the only comedy program where I ever saw anyone from the Technical Operations … Continue reading
More!Alec Bray was in tech-ops from Jan 1963 – May 1967 on Crews 7 and 13 (and occasionally others) . Here are some stories and a card…. The Vinten Heron In the mid to late 1960’s there were very few zoom … Continue reading
More!Somehow these pictures got left in a temp folder for two years, for which I have to apologise to Simon Vaughan of the Alexandra Palace Television Society who sent them to me in July 2011. The Emitron belonged to the late … Continue reading
More!If you wanted to work in television back in what turned out to be the golden age of British TV, you generally had to get trained at the BBC. If you wanted to be a cameraman – the sixties equivalent … Continue reading
More!Lots and lots more from Geoff – Click for big –
More!Geoff passed his precious photos to me at a Disorganised Lunch. Very trusting of him! There are lots, so I’m not going to caption them. Enjoy! Click an image to get the gallery going….
More!Roger remembers……. Remember the T.M.’s Dispute of 1979? I’ve forgotten what the issues were, but the Union backed the T.M.s, so we all became involved. I recall producing cardboard lapel badges with logos like, “Support Your Local T.M.”, etc. It … Continue reading
More!I recently read the article here “Clive Leighton – his working life” and was absolutely fascinated by the similarities in our respective BBC backgrounds…..although it actually goes back even further in that we were both born the same year and … Continue reading
More!PREFACE. Once upon a time I read somewhere that if you start a story “Once upon a time” it has to have a happy ending. I’ve no idea if this is true and as I haven’t written this story yet I have … Continue reading
More!Paul Ewing has kindly given me some pages of BBC Engineering Information Dept material explaining Test Card C. I know that out in the world there used to be a whole cult (is that the right word?) of test card … Continue reading
More!Roger Bunce has been looking after this Christmas card from the Production Design department since the early nineties. It was the very end of the era of the confident BBC culture at Television Centre, when the BBC was still (almost) … Continue reading
More!To the Dorking Book Fair….. where a man wanted £40 for a huge pile of ancient Practical Television and Practical Radio magazines. I couldn’t quite get interested in articles on how to service the Ferguson 922T receiver and similar stuff … Continue reading
More!At lunch the other day Gerry Tivers gave me these for safe keeping. He thinks they should be in a museum, and so do I, but experience has shown that big museums aren’t that interested. They are probably deluged with … Continue reading
More!Ian sent very large copies of these, too big for WordPress, but if anyone wants an original size version, I’m sure he won’t mind me sending one. Ian says – The Oresteia – These five photographs were taken of Crew … Continue reading
More!Here’s a picture taken on That Was The Week That Was, probably in 1963 – Robin Sutherland found it on the Museum of the Broadcast Television Camera website, and it turns out to have been taken by cameraman Michael Barrett. … Continue reading
More!Dave Howell was one of the first people to work on EastEnders, as one of the two Gram Ops This is a reprint of an article that appeared in “The Walford Gazette” in November 2004, (twenty years after the start … Continue reading
More!Diaries by Bernard Newnham All cameramen keep diaries, because it’s the only way they know when they are working in a very irregular lifestyle. I stopped being a cameraman in 1977 – 25 years ago as I write – but … Continue reading
More!A few memories of Riverside Studios by Peter Ward I was hoping that recent trawls for missing BBC programmes would unearth 35mm copies of ‘Troubleshooters’, the BBC drama series about the oil industry. In the mid-sixties I took part in … Continue reading
More!Here are two not-tech-ops stories about Pres B These are re-prints from stuff I’ve written elsewhere…….. Pres B was a small studio on the fourth-and-a-half floor of Television Centre. It isn’t there now, as it was destroyed for some network … Continue reading
More!Dick Hibberd is Honorary President of the Guild of Television Cameramen. Here’s a short biog, written by him for the GTC website. I’m hoping that Dick will write up some more…… “I started my career in this industry as a … Continue reading
More!I’m trying (12/11/2010) to reorganise my older site, which is now going on for a decade old. A lot has changed on the internet since then, and things that were difficult have become much easier to do, as people have … Continue reading
More!Dave is a sound man, and like all BBC tech-ops staff, spent some time at BBC Evesham Technical Training Department…… Click pictures for large version, click again to remove. Dave says – I have racked my brains and this is … Continue reading
More!From Patrick Heigham Memories of Gram operating in the sixties I became a Gram Op in order to be able to park. No kidding! In the days before the BBC multi-story, (and I left before the builders’ cleavage had reached … Continue reading
More!Some of my personal stories The Young Generation were Stewart Morris’s dance group. They backed anybody who happened to be the featured artist for this months series (I wonder why?), and even had a series of their own. Nigel Lithgow … Continue reading
More!From Me 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, … Continue reading
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