Big Ben Model

Doug Puddifoot

It’s interesting what you can find to do to fill time. During one stint as a cameraman in Pres A, I was the lone cameraman on duty to cover the unexpected on a New Years Eve.

In those days when OBs and lines could be problematic, the Beeb had made a highly detailed model of Big Ben’s clock face, about three feet tall. It was my job to provide the shot of the clock against a black background, just in case they could not cut to the real thing at midnight. But since the model was only of one face, it had to be shot absolutely square on. So I spent the boring hours up to midnight lining up a shot with two cameras and a split screen to provide a more realistic, off centre shot. Needless to say, all went well so the shot was not used. However it was an extremely realistic model, no one would have noticed if it had been used, so I wonder if it ever was, and what happened to it.

Dave Buckley

This link http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/bigben/7513.shtml?page=10
is worth a look!

Bernie Newnham

I had never seen it in its original place.

When I was in Pres it always lived in the Pres Manager’s office in a glass case. It used to come out down to Pres A on New Year’s Eve to be the standby that was never used.

I got irritated one year when I was in charge on that evening that it never looked real, so stuck it up on a rostrum high enough to shoot up at it, and had the S Tel E light it with a lot of yellow to give that sodium street light feel. Another year we had one of the first video games, a dogfight thing. We keyed the aeroplanes over the face of Big Ben, to the annoyance of Isobel McDonald, our network director next door.

Geoff Hawkes

I remember the model of Big Ben’s clock face well from my days in Pres A and lining up a shot of it on New Year’s Eve,

Warwick Cross

The model of Big Ben walked down the road from TC to the Broadcast Centre when ‘Pres’ was expelled from the Corporation and sat proudly on display in the Red Bee boardroom alongside the remaining examples of mechanical models of the BBC 1 globe and a BBC 2 symbol. All three were still powered and worked!

(Click on the pictures below to see a larger version:
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A couple of years or so ago, the boardroom moved from the BC to new offices in Ealing. The three models did not move with it and received folklore is that they were donated back to the BBC – current location unknown, I’m afraid. I just hope whoever received them remotely understood their cultural significance.

Hugh Sheppard

My recollection of the big ‘2’, and the reversed-out globule of BBC-1 was that both were designed by John Aston. However, both were built as 12 x 9 electro-mechanical masterpieces by Murray Andrews to fit into ‘Noddy’. Murray disappeared off to Bristol in the 1980s.