Dave Plowman

Don’t have anything like the experience of such places as some of you in OBs – but one sticks in the mind.

‘Twas while doing a location game show with Freddie Star for Sky. Locations were shopping centres, social clubs etc.

One of the places the PM found for crew accommodation was a religious retreat. Long way from the location, and down some very narrow and dark country lanes.

Large signs everywhere inside it – including the rooms (more like cells) – ‘No smoking, no alcohol, no radios or noise’ and so on. And no catering of any sort – not even a kettle to make a cup of tea. And no hot water – the place was obviously closed for the season.

Despite being tired after a late rig, we all drove off to find somewhere normal to stay. Actually a Holiday Inn a few minutes from the site. The production staff and artists were in a more expensive hotel close by.

Pat Heigham

Project: "Fiddler on the Roof" 1970 ish
Location: Yugoslavia (as was)
Town: Daruvar

Hotel was pleasant enough, rooms OK – discovered that it was a spa of some description that offered hot tubs, slightly radioactive apparently.

We traipsed down to the basement in our overcoats – no-one, including the Director, had packed dressing gowns – to find individual cubicles each with a huge stone tub, almost big enough to swim from end to end, fed with a huge 6" faucet – molto hot water!

Lovely!

We learnt later that it was a spa, offered as a fertility treatment for  ladies hoping to conceive! Funny, I thought there was another way……….

Peter Cook

Munich 1972, BBC crew hotel, basement swimming pool and sauna. Yes and as a  novice I was truly surprised that the pool (and of course the sauna) was  birthday suit territory. I was unmarried anyway.

Spool forward a few years to conference season in Brighton. Private Sauna with similar rules. Now married, I discovered that these rules were not popular chez moi. I never really understood as clothes or no clothes, a sauna really is not conducive to any bad behaviour!

Albert Barber

I went into a Sauna with Jeremy Swan at an international conference. We were all without kit and true to Jeremy’s style he looked around and said “it’s like Belsen in here”. Being an international event it was only received with muted chuckles.

Roger Bunce

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Bernie Newnham

My only trip to St Andrews had a shed like that – not for living in, but for the overseas commentators. The acoustics were as you would expect, and even with lip mics it wasn’t right at all, at all. So I went into town to a carpet shop and asked for offcuts. I got – for free – a large pile of samples about 1m square each. We stapled them all over the inside of the shed. It still wasn’t great, but it was a bit better – and terribly colourful! Don’t know who got the shed next, but I hope they appreciated it.

We lived, as others have, in the uni dorms, where they fed the unwary with salted porridge.

Pat Heigham

Lovely cartoon!

But who remembers the Cabot’s quilt training at Wood Norton!

Another accommodation recall….

The job was a profile film for the BBC following champion jockey Josh Gifford. Cheltenham Gold Cup day – as usual the BBC had not booked film crew accommodation. We had to find our own (at the end of the day!)

Try finding something nearby during the Cheltenham Festival!

Eventually, some great distance away, a pub offered rooms – the camera assistant and I shared a twin – not normal, but we didn’t mind as we got on OK. In the morning the landlady appeared with a breakfast in bed! Clad in very tight jhodpurs, bending down to deposit our trays, she was verrry tasty……afterwards, we both agreed that had the other one not been
there, she could have been pounced on!

Gordon Blockley

This topic certainly brings back memories.

I well recall working on the “Royal Variety Performance” at the London Palladium in the 1960s. For three days we worked from 08:00 until midnight – or shortly after – and therefore accommodation was needed within reasonable distance of the site.

The best I could find at short notice was St Georges Hotel, very close to BH. whose rates were rather more than those allowed at the time. When I submitted my expenses claim, I was told that if management had known of my difficulties, they would have arranged a camp bed in BH reception!

I was unimpressed with this response,and left them in no doubt.