Dave Buckley
Stereo editions of “Dick Barton” went out during the day for a week in the early 1970s on Radio 4. There was a two-week, 10 part revival for the BBC’s Jubilee, starting 6 November 1972. Noel Johnson and John Mann were back – in stereo! One of TV Training’s engineers had built a stereo decoder and rigged it in the maintenance room to a couple of powered speakers.
Mike Giles
Around about 1957/1958, experimental stereo was transmitted with one leg via radio and the other over TV sound. As an eleven year-old, I recall being totally unconvinced ~ probably because the TV sound was rather tinny and the radio was a good old-fashioned, rather woolly walnut veneered radiogram and they and the transmission paths were almost certainly not phase coherent. I can’t really remember what the material was ~ a string of sound effects I rather fancy. I believe the experiment was discontinued, for good reason.
John Howell
I seem to recall Musique Concrete or Electronic Music by Henk Badings (“Evolutions”?) I stood in our hallway to listen, the Television was in one room and the very definitely immovable Murphy console radio was in another. I don’t remember being impressed! But we had yet to buy a Stereogram so I had only read about Stereo, not actually heard it.
Mike Jordan
I too remember sitting in my parents’ hallway with Third Prog (medium wave) on in the kitchen and TV sound in the front room with planes going over and trains going past.
Even when I left BH in about 1970, there was still the boxed delay line (in a CH34 chassis!) lying around that tried to ensure that the channels coming out from Bookman’s Park and compared with CP were vaguely “in sync” due to different delays on the gippie joe analogue lines.
Bernie Newnham, John Howell, Hugh Sheppard
Sometime in the late 1970s there was an experimental stereo programme on Radio 3 (I think) that you had to listen to on headphones. There were circuits floating about in the 1970s for creating a stereo effect for headphone users. It was known as binaural sound – and very effective on headphones. These employed phase tinkering and cross-feeding, see ‘Bauer circuit’. Nothing much came of the idea because the raw left and right feed was more impressive (but not stereo of course).
Alan Stokes
That will probably be one of the Binaural experiments. They broadcast a play,"The Revenge", in Binaural without words, just FX. It ‘starred’ Andrew Sachs. Radio 3 also transmitted some Proms in Binaural, I believe.
See (hear) https://soundcloud.com/bronaanorb/andrew-sachs-the-revenge
I also remember a documentary in Binaural: the title was "Oil Rig".
There were also some experiments in surround sound. I didn’t hear any of the music transmissions but there was a late night/early morning given over to surround, on Radio 3. For that they used two FM networks. I can’t remember which but Radio 3 was one of them. Rather foolishly, with hindsight, I borrowed a Revox from a friend, then with mine across the other network, recorded the programme and tried to reconstruct it later. Total failure as we couldn’t keep the Revoxes in close enough sync. Had I retained the recordings it might just have been possible with computer software.
Alec Bray
After leaving the Beeb I went off to college. Amongst (many) other things, we did the play “Point of Departure” by Jean Anouilh, which is set in a railway station. We wanted the effect of a trian roaring into the station full speed (then to cut sound dead). Problem: mono tape recorder, mono LP of express train (Transaccord). The tape recorder was 4 track mono, so had two replay heads one above the other. Wired up the non-selected head to an idependent preamp then to an amp. Recorded on the two tracks independently from the mono record – but tried to get just a bit of delay between the tracks. Wired the output amps into the PA amps. Result – train sounded as if it came from the distance and thundered into the station. Good enough for a college production in the college hall.
Back to Barton …
Bill Jenkin
There was a great line in a one off TV play in 1982 called “The Combination” about a couple of lads from Shropshire in 1951 who try and get to London to see the Festival of Britain – on a go-kart.
The lads end up in front of a magistrate who is played by Noel Johnson. He blames the appalling behaviour of the boys on the influence of programmes such as “Dick Barton”. Noel Johnson was of course the first Dick Barton.
Patrick Heigham
I was Grams on a play with Noel Johnson – when at the first stagger-through rehearsal, the end music was called for, I had recc’d out “The Devil’s Galop” from the Gram Library and cued that in!
It got a laugh and I think that Noel was quite touched that we knew who he had been!
