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We all know of Stewart Morris at Eurovision:
– and on YouTube – [Ed: usually with adverts …]
Tony Crake
That 1977 Euro Vision from The Wembley Conference was bl**dy hard work. …..
The “Revolve” was a circular job which went round and round with the live orch in the middle (driven by hydraulic power it had off or FULL SPEED as its settings!).
I was one of the army of microphone setters (John Caulfield, Les Mowbray, Scott Talbot, Terry Foote and led by Barrie Hawes).
A lot of extra instruments came in on the Revolve including. the Mike Moran and Lynsey de Paul Piano. The scene man driving it overshot his marks and ‘shot it’ into reverse as I stepped up bringing the Piano Mikes, hurling me and the mikes onto the floor (I think they were 4 x VR1 mikes with heavy bases…hell of a crash when I dropped them….The audience thought it quite amusing!
And believe it or not a recording exists (Courtesy of NORWAY ):
– and on YouTube (Courtesy of NORWAY ) – [Ed: usually with adverts …]
Ian Dow
I was the engineer on maintenance duty during that song contest. One of the brass players, rocking back and forward on his chair inside the revolve, had cut through a lighting cable on the floor and plunged the music lights into darkness – with the danger that they would all play a different tune.
I was sent to investigate and was on my knees out of shot on the back of the revolve, head first into the “pit” with an AVO trying to find what had happened. At which point the song ended and the revolve began to rotate. I had to grab my tool kit and run round the revolve in the opposite direction to keep out of shot – passing the startled Israeli entry on her way in!
Managed to replace the cable during her song but nearly became a backing singer for a worrying moment!
Mike Felton, (Mike Cotton, Mike Giles)
During a “Summertime Special” there was a recording made of Michael Hurll’s talkback which was quite illuminating.
“Seaside Special” was a hoot with plenty of opportunity to snoop TB and prog. I kept an ear out for likely phrases and chopped them out and gave them a number. These clips of 1/4’’ I placed between the respective numbered pages of a paperback and wrote the phrase in a numbered list.
After gathering hundreds of bits I worked out a virtual funny sequence of clips on paper and it was then simply a matter of assembling all the numbered clips just like a VT EDL (only I’m not sure if off line VT editing had arrived back in the 1970s?)
Talking of PEGs I flew in Michael Hurl’s individual phrases off PEG cassettes in time over the backing track of the end song. More ingenuity went into goofing around than the programmes…
Janis Goldring
Peter Goldring has one for you: towards the end of TOTP, a group of girls in skimpy outfits dancing on podia. Peter started to zoom in to one girl’s crotch, finally focusing on her white panties, whereupon Stewart Morris shouted, “Bloody Hell, you’ve just cost me £80 – now I have to edit the tape !”
Patrick Heigham
He must have got a discount, I always thought that a physical edit (cut) of a 2″ Ampex cost the production £90!
Did he get the trophy knickers?
My story:
On one of the Christmas tapes there is a sequence of Stewart on talkback, when VT had a problem recording an insert for Englebert Humperdink.
Stewart was a good LE producer though – there is no-one around now, who could deliver the goods.
Alan Stokes
I remember hearing that for some programme in TVT Stewart Morris had been getting at the Sound Supervisor on talkback. It had been going on all day. After many repeats of said comments from Stewart, the Sound Supervisor had had enough. I’m not sure where he got a rotary main fader module from – but possibly removed from the desk at Television Theatre. As I heard it, he roared into the production gallery, threw it along the production desk at Stewart and said words to the effect, “Well you mix the bloody programme then….!”
Peter Hider
I was a casual observer, in essence a refugee from shooting a drama in TC1, of Stewart directing Englebert (“Enge” as he called him) in TC3 or 4. He’d asked him to start his first number, “Please Release Me”, at the back of the audience rostra in TC4 and walk down to the stage at the front. Enge used giant Jumbo prompt cards so that he could read them from the back of the audience. Because of their size they could contain only 2 or 3 words of the song on each card.
Stewart “Run VT”. “Cue the band.” “Cue Enge.”. Enge takes one step down on the rostra and his trousers, of the painted-on variety, split. A series of expletive charged exchanges follow between Stewart and the floor manager. Enge’s trousers repaired, cue cards reordered, studio ready to record.
Stewart “Run VT.” “Cue the band.” “Cue Enge.” Trousers make successful negotiation of three rostra steps and the third cue card is revealed upside down by the AFM. Enge’s million seller hadn’t been committed to memory so he stops, the band stops and Stewart was not the happiest of bunnies.
Ian Dow
Three memories of Stewart in TV Theatre in B&W days where I had been allocated direct from DE18.
Second week I was there the “Rolf Harris Show” was scheduled 5 minutes earlier than usual, but Stewart had forgotten this. Audience in, Stewart on the floor, and with 2 minutes to go panic begins to ensue in the Gallery. FM told to get Stewart back urgently, but he had a love hate relationship with the FM, and thought he was having him on. Cue dot comes up and Julia cues the band, dancers begin their number, Frank (Horse?) is nearly in tears pleading over talkback for Stewart to come – by now Julia is directing and at last Stewart realises this is for real and arrives out of breath!
He couldn’t stand idiots, but if you were in the right you were OK. At coffee break he had a habit of putting his poly cup of coffee on top of Camera 1 on the Mole. Studio Engineer Reg Wragg kept asking him not to do that, and eventually gave up and one day simply switched off the camera.
Rehearsal restarted – “Racks, racks, where’s camera 1 for Gods sake?”.
Reg boldly replied, “If you can assure me that your coffee isn’t still on of the camera Stewart, I’ll switch it back on”.
Silence – then actually got a “Sorry racks”.
Reg then really pushed his luck and sent me, as the most junior, down with a line-up chart and went through the whole switch on procedure. Never put his coffee on the camera again!
We did stop him in his tracks once. VAR was alongside the PCR with a window between us. We were repairing our spare camera during the rehearsal and it happened to be pointing through the window – too good a chance to miss. As he leant forward and did one of his typical hand dramatically in the air and shout of “Cue Rolf” we took local control of the mixer and cut up a shot of himself with arm raised. Completely stopped him – he couldn’t work out what had happened, moved his arm and the arm on the monitor moved, then we cut back to normal and sat back looking quite innocent…….
Dick Blencowe
I remember Chris Breeze FM on Shirley Bassey. Stewart was constantly asking Chris questions about what was going on and as he didn’t have radio reverse TB Chris had to run up to the boom to talk to Stewart where we had an apple and biscuit mic on an edystone box with a switch for Reverse TB.
On one occasion Shirley was having trouble remembering the words to one of her numbers so an AFM with idiot cards was positioned next to the Mole. Another camera got between her and the cards and she stopped singing.
Stewart, “Chris, what’s gone wrong?”
Chris rushes over to the boom to explain and Stewart shouts something along the lines of doubting the parentage of the AFM and he better get it right next time.
We check that Shirley can see the cards and how to avoid being blocked by the other camera. Cue music and we go again, after a couple of minutes she once again stops singing saying that the spot light has prevented her from seeing the cards and she walks off the stage with Chris trying to placate her. Stewart meanwhile is having apoplexy demanding to know what is going on. Chris rushes up to the boom and breathlessly explains what has happened.
Meanwhile the warm up man (can’t remember who) tries to explain to the audience the state of play. Stewart becomes almost incoherent with rage at what the warm up man is saying and demands that Chris gets him off the stage. He also wants to know where Shirley is. “In her dressing room” says Chris. “Go and get her back” says Stewart. “I can’t do that and remove the warm up man and talk to the audience, you go to her dressing room,” says Chris. At this point TB is switched off until about 10 mins later when Shirley reappears on stage.
We learnt later that Stewart didn’t go to Shirley’s dressing room but to a male guest artist who was due to do a duet with her later in the show. The guest (it may have been Les Dawson, I can’t remember) was
asked by Stewart to go to Shirley to persuade her to come back!
Never a dull moment with Stewart eh!
Louis Barfe
That would make sense. Lydia told me that Shirley loved Les and would let him take the rise in a way that would have got anyone else sacked or shot. If anyone could talk her down, he’d be the one.
Dave Plowman
I never really had much to do with Stewart Morris, being a floor person – but remember often feeling sorry for Chris, who, in my opinion, was bullied by Stewart.
Chris appeared on “The Bill” as an extra many years later and I had a good chat to him over lunch on location. But he didn’t much want to talk about those times.
Philip Tyler
On one occasion I was tracking fold back on a Shirley Bassey in TVT. The song started well up stage with Ron Green on the Mole and me alongside him with the tracking foldback speaker. Stewart was directing from the floor as usual, and although we had rehearsed it a couple of times with nothing untoward happening, Stewart decides to question whether I will make the track back before we have another go. Now admittedly Ron was travelling quite fast but I just turned to Stewart and said, “I will definitely make the track!” Stewart said, “You seem very sure of yourself”, to which I replied, “I have to make it Stewart or else I will get hit on the head by the weight box of the Mole, so plenty of motivation!” He never mentioned it again and I also earned a wink from Ron Green.
Alan Machin
Stewart famously directed the Opening Ceremony of the 1986 Commonwealth Games from Edinburgh. In those days the budget wasn’t big enough to bankrupt a small country as it is now, but Stewart was certainly ambitious. I was in TC1 and I remember getting a feed of the OB talkback from CAR so that the crew, many of whom had felt the sharp end of Stewart’s tongue in the past, could enjoy a schadenfreude moment during our break.
Actually it went pretty well and there is a clip of the opening, with talkback on YouTube, but unfortunately it doesn’t include the bit I remember, the giant ‘Loch Ness Monster’ appearing over the rim of the stadium.
– and on YouTube – [Ed: usually with adverts …]
– and on YouTube – [Ed: usually with adverts …]
Happy days!
Jeff Baker
I had a hand in several of these shows. The Opening Ceremony was a possible ‘first’ unless someone knows otherwise.
The problem was to cover a thousand or so dancing kids with music for them to dance to. But the coverage would have been well beyond equipment available at the time, and the acoustic time delay far too difficult to handle, as Stewart wanted them all to dance in sync wherever he looked. So we (the sound team) suggested that the programme should buy a thousand small cheap transistor radios and give them out to the dancers as a ‘thank-you’ for taking part. Buying so many, they cost little, and OB Comms set up a local FM transmitter (legally, of course,) which radiated the dance music. As I recall, it worked well.
This reminds me of another Stuart Morris incident at the same Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh. It was the final day and I had been mixing the main output to network all day, alternating with Chris Holcombe or Barry Hawes, but I was in the seat at the end of the live broadcast. There was to be a party that evening. The closing music failed to start, and I waited for the inevitable explosion to my right, but all was quiet. I said something like: “Sorry about that Stuart”. He got up from his chair slapped me on the shoulder and said: ”Eh, lad, never mind. Think of all the things you did right” and strode off! The incident was so unusual that when I arrived at the party afterwards, the sound gathering of 30 or so all rose to their feet and saluted. That was another career first!
Bernie Newnham
In the famous song contest recording of Stewart Morris on TB, “that cow in network” was Isobel McDonald
see also Big Ben Model).
At the time I was her network director trainee and was sitting behind her in NC1. She was doing her job properly – it was someone out there who set up an unswitched feed of her talkback in the OB truck that had got it just a touch wrong. Her talkback wasn’t there just to please Stewart, she had hordes of other people to talk to. Isobel wasn’t phased by Stewart, she’d spend years as a sports producers assistant, but she had no way of cutting him out of the feed.
Dave Mundy, Tony Grant
Chris Breeze, not the most attractive male on the planet, told me that he took a certain Blue Peter lady presenter home once and was invited in or coffee, she went away and re-appeared starkers! I don’t know what happened next! Surely she didn’t mistake him for Stewart?
