Early days at Ally Pally

Bernie Newnham

There’s a 1937 picture of a crew setting up an OB outside AP, and the cameramen are both wearing white lab coats.

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Dave Plowman

Didn’t there used to be a lab coat hierarchy in the studios too?

Paul Kay

Cyril Wilkins was a Cameraman at that time. He told us that they were “Requested” to wear these garments virtually as uniform, all hated it and protested to no avail. Then they all switched these overall around, little lads wearing huge outfits and the big lads (like Wilkie) wearing the smallest. They soon had this stupid uniform given the boot. They were told to look tidy. Wilkie told us that someone was reprimanded for not wearing a Tie. The mind boggles!! I believe that Frank Creswell was also there at the time.

Patrick Heigham

I think brown “lab coats” were for props and/or stagehands (I remember them at TVT, but also from “Morecambe and Wise” for the Shirley Bassey ‘boot’ gag).

Geoff Fletcher

When I joined Anglia from BBC Tech Ops in 1970 the OB rigger-drivers wore white company issue overalls! Not a good colour for OBs. They were still wearing them in 1972, when they were finally replaced with orange ones. At least you could find the boys when you needed them!

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Mike Jordan

I re-discovered my scan of the booklet called “BBC Television – A British Engineering Achievement” and includes some really nice old photos of kit and places.

It is about 5M download.

It is available here:

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Also, here are mp3 copies of 4 LPs I was given of a lecture by Cpt Eckersley (First Head of Engineering) about Broadcasting in the early days.