Background
… accountants decided to charge programmes for the technical facilities…
Alec Bray
I thought that this had actually started in the 1960s: programmes were charged for use of TK and VT for example – or rather, these facilities were a cost against the programme. At the time, I believe that these were called “phantom costs”.
Bernie Newnham
Cost were once "above the line" and "below the line". So a roll of 2" tape cost – say – £90, though I think only if you cut it. A roll of 16mm cost £100 including processing and a rush print.
A studio, though, was below the line, and if TC4 was free and a crew available you could have it for the cost of a project number. After all, it was there and it had been paid for. It all went a bit pear shaped when Producer Choice came along. Producer Choice had some good parts. but a lot more bad parts. There was no compulsion to use a TC studio, nor were there any good deals to be had for in house productions. On top of that, that accountants took the whole outgoings of the BBC and allocated a proportion to the cost of facilities. it didn’t matter that some obscure department in Henry Wood House had no bearing on your show, you were going to pay for it. There was no offer to adjust production costs if you stayed inside and used the facilities a few floors down, and other places, like Teddington, had much lower overheads and were eager for BBC work (surprise). And so it all went wrong……
Patrick Heigham
I was aware of VT costs in the 60’s, largely for the 2" tapes. If they had to be edited, on a cut and splice system, then the spool was charged to the production at £90 I think. Expensive in those days.
I recall a session down in VTR, for the Christmas panto with Norman Wisdom. There was a lot of video editing (cut and splice) needed, and I had a TR90 deck with the audio, with which I was matching and adjusting the audio edits off a copy tape. TIM for sync later.
Alex Thomas
I was doing the main camera in TC2 on a Barry Bucknell programme.
The programme was recorded on 2” VT and the director, the late Don Sayer, emphasised to the whole crew the importance of treating it as live so that he would not incur editing costs.
We rehearsed and all went well.
On the take we got as far as the final shot on my camera. It was Barry’s closing remarks and was a mid-shot of him with the project, a sort of canopy, immediately behind him.
As he got into his stride I saw the canopy quiver and then gently sag to the floor behind him. Barry was unaware of what was happening but I burst out laughing.
Don Sayer ran through the lighting room, appeared on the steps just inside the studio and screamed at me “You have just cost me £90.00”.
By this time everybody was laughing and I rather rashly said “I’ll happily pay the £90.00 if you transmit that last shot as it is”.
I never worked on one of Don Sayer’s programmes again as a cameraman but I don’t think that he recognised me when I became a floor manager in OBs and I did a few shows for him.
Roger Bunce
I never objected to carrying obscure units at Henry Wood House – provided they were doing something useful. It was the top-heavy bl**dy Management I objected to carrying. When the Producer Choice paperwork first appeared, I knew we were doomed when I read the sentence, “Corporate Governance will be exempted”. While every other part of the Beeb was forced to recover their costs from someone else, the central Management were going to give themselves a free ride! There would be no constraints to stop their numbers, and salaries, expanding exponentially – which they did – carried on the backs of the rest of us.
But you’ve started me thinking about BBC costing policies.
One of the great myths about Producer Choice is that, before it was introduced, BBC programmes never knew their true costs. Yet, I remember at least two earlier accounting systems, both of which claimed to identify the true costs of programmes.
In the good old days, as Bernie has said, no one worried about internal costs. If the BBC already owned it, you could use it. Johnny Ball recalls that, when he was lacking in inspiration, he’d wander round the scene docks and see what was around. Finding, say, a Victorian chemist’s shop, he’d write a sketch set in a Victorian chemist’s shop, knowing that the scenery would cost him nothing, and the costumes that went with it were available in the wardrobe store. Once a BBC programme had paid for something, it was the BBC’s property, and other BBC programmes could use it at minimal cost. There was no point in paying for the same thing twice. Money going out of the BBC mattered. Money circulating internally didn’t.
But by the mid-Seventies, a new accounting system had come it. (Did it have a name?) It allocated costs for internal services, which were supposed to equal the cost of the same service on the outside market. It was claimed that the new system could account for everything, down to the last paper clip, and would abolish the distinction between internal and external costing. I only really became involved with it during an attachment to “Jackanory” in 1976. The budget for each programme was itemised in fine detail. It was broken down into sub-budgets for each of the various services: Wardrobe, Make-Up, Design, etc., both internal and external. (There wasn’t actually a column for paper clips!) And it was completely inflexible. The Jackanory budget included a sum for Scenic Projection. But we never used Scenic Projection. When my Designer asked if he could take some money from the Scenic Projection budget to spend on extra scenery, it seemed a sensible idea. But I was told that moving money from one column to another was utterly verboten!
Children’s programmes prided themselves on never overspending. So, when I was getting close to the limit in one column, I thought I’d better report it. The Producer, seeing that it was only an internal spend, laughed and said, “That’s just Mickey Mouse money. You don’t have so worry about that.” The accountants may have believed that their system had equalised internal and external money, but no one else believed that.
Then about 1979 yet another accounting system came in, called “Total Internal Costing”. It was announced with a great fanfare, and caused industrial action. Michael Bett was the BBC’s Director of Personnel at the time. He seemed to be the prime mover. He was also good at causing industrial action. I was sent on a seminar at about the time it was being introduced, and had to sit through lectures about how wonderful it was going to be. I think I stayed awake. Once again, it was claimed that the new system would account for everything, down to the last paper clip, and would abolish the distinction between internal and external spends. I remember quoting the “Mickey Mouse Money” line to some bureaucrats who were there. They assured me no Producer could ever take that attitude. I doubt that they’d ever met a Producer.
In the good old days, it had been the overall cost to the BBC that mattered. The new systems only cared about individual production budgets, and often failed to spot the whole cost to the licence payer. Talking to two Producers in the tea bar – they were miserable because their budgets had been cut. Last year they had made a series of twelve programmes. This year they could only afford to make ten. Clearly, this would show as a saving on their individual production budget, but for the BBC as a whole, unless they were planning to show blank screens, someone would have to pay for two extra programmes! And, obviously, once a series is up and running, it would be cheaper to make two more episodes than to mount entirely new programmes from scratch.
Another story. The weather charts, in Pres. A, were sheets of steel, to which magnetic symbols could be attached. They had been made on the cheap. For the largest chart, the Atlantic chart, they couldn’t afford a large enough single sheet, so two smaller sheets had been joined together, with an ugly weld down the middle. It used to irritate the Weather Men. Then “The Two Ronnies” (I think) did a spoof Weather Forecast sketch. Having a larger budget for a two minute sketch than Pres had for N years of Weather Forecasts, they made their chart properly: a single sheet, no weld. Enquiries were made as to whether Pres. A could use it once the Two Ronnies had finished with it. In the old days this could have been done with the flash of a project number. But now, despite being an obviously sensible thing to do, and no one having any objections, the costing system made it impossible!
Then came Producer Choice, which claimed to do the same things as the previous two systems, but also pretended to be the first one ever to do so. And, it was so successful that, at the end of its first year, millions of pounds had gone missing, and the system couldn’t account for them!
When Producer Choice was finally abandoned, there was a long article in Ariel, explaining all the reasons why it didn’t work. I wrote back, pointing out that all these reasons had been self-evident since the outset, and asking why anyone had ever thought it was a good idea.
In reality, of course, Producer Choice was scrapped for a completely different reason. If Producers had still been allowed to Choose where they made their programmes, none of them would have Chosen to go to Salford!
Hugh Sheppard
One thing Roger has got right was on the welded steel sheets for the magnetic weather symbols for which I was mother and father at the time. But the welding of the Atlantic chart was on-site as I recall, as it was otherwise too big to negotiate the access to Pres. A. He’s also right that Pres. had no money, so that the £100 to Mark Allen for designing the symbols before he joined Sid Sutton in Graphics dept, where he finalised them, nearly broke the departmental bank. And 40 years later, they still grace the Beeb weather website and the New BH Newsroom.
The penchant for monetising everything at that time turned me into the fall-guy for negotiating the first payment to the Met. Office for weather services. Hitherto, we’d argued that the benefit of publicity to the Met. Office more than outweighed the cost of 3 part-time weathermen who divided their time between TVC and being ‘on the bench’ at the London Weather Centre in Holborn. I spelt out the case to Rex Moorfoot, H. Pres. Tel. and Robin Scott, then in transition between being C.BBC-2 and Deputy M.D. Television. Both nodded in the right places, so I went in to bat against a mandarin from Treasury Dept, with Robin in the chair. After about half-an-hour, and winning the case as I’d thought, Robin stepped in with a ‘Sorry. Hugh, I don’t think we’re going to win this one’. Yes, it was a stitch-up! Both the Treasury and BBC management wanted numbers in front of them and the idea of a balanced mutual interest held no appeal. Of course, the sums were small to begin with, £2k I think had been pre-agreed, but what a slippery slope that turned out to be!
Bernie Newnham
One of the costing systems involved using some new computer software – I think it was called SAP, introduced by a wizzo incoming finance chap who left a year or two later, as they do. Though all supposedly on a computer, it involved printing contracts and signing them for absolutely everything. I was producing PoV at the time, and Jeaane my PA delighted in giving me piles of paper and telling me to sign them all so that she could send them to VT etc.
After a while, there came a week when I was doing other stuff, and I told her to fake my signature, which she then did for a while. Then I thought – are we actually doing anything useful here? And told her to stop printing the stuff. I rather expected a rude call from VT or studio planning, but absolutely nothing happened. We didn’t send any more, and the programme happily wandered on till Producer Choice got in the way.
Dave Plowman
I remember getting sheaves of paperwork when signing out a reel of camera tape (or 1/4" tape) from stores.
Patrick Heigham
I worked for quite a few years in the 1960s on the “Black and White Minstrels”, and loved all the music.
I kept in touch with George Mitchell, who lived not far away, and also the Production Office at TVC, as I had made an unofficial 8mm colour film of the show and borrowed the tapes for the soundtrack and to make cassettes for George.
Later, Len Mitchell, the floor manager, attempted to return the tapes to stores, but since they originated from Lansdowne Studios (another story in itself), there was no BBC originated paperwork and so they were junked. Pity, they could have disappeared into my car boot and no-one would have known, cared or been any the wiser. A bit of audio history lost.
I’m also still in touch with Adrian Kerridge the balance engineer, who tells me that the tapes the BBC received for transmission were copies – no splices, as the show was live and could not risk joins coming apart. The copies were also done backwards to preserve the transients – had not heard that one before!
