What was the AP Shift pattern? A question from Graeme Wall.
See also: More Stories of Pres A and Pres B
John Howell
Week 1: Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday
Week 2: Monday, Wednesday
Ian Hillson
And if you took the Monday, Wednesday off you got a complete week between Friday night and Saturday morning.
The shift came about (I’m told) so the same crew could do the repeat of the big weekend show on the next Friday night.
Film Recording did an AP shift with different two days together (might have been Monday/Tuesday)
Gary Critcher
After working numerous shift patterns and various companies since I left the Beeb in 1989, I still say the AP shift was the best of the lot.
Mike Jordan
It was a brilliant shift pattern because it meant getting the scheduled hours done in less days at 12 hours a time, requiring less travel cost (30/- per week on Central line from Redbridge to Oxford Circus).
Also having extra meal "on duty" one week in two gave a meal allowance.
Hugh Sheppard
And all 12 hour days, noon to midnight.
But best of all, at AP we usually arrived for 1300 or 1330 ‘having had’ (lunch). Then most of us went home after the BBC TV “9 O’clock News”. ie. soon after 21:30, leaving 2 or 3 studio crew on duty until closedown 23:00 – 23:30, in case of a breaking news bulletin.
Living an hour away from AP by Vespa, or on the back of Mike Pontin’s Scott Squirrel, I was effectively at home every morning and all day every other day. Neighbours didn’t believe I worked at all!
Rex Palmer
It was a 12 hour shift, so seven days a fortnight averaged out at the BBC standard then of a 42 hour week. The time of starting and finishing also, of course, depended on where you were working.
John Howell
The Presentation AP shift that I remember was split into early and late so if you took leave on, say, Thursday and Friday you could be off from Tuesday tea-time until the following Monday lunch time.
Mike Cotton
I spent a long time in Pres B doing "Late Night Line Up" and I spent my free time excavating Roman Brentford with the Museum of London.
A 16:00 start in meant a long day with the trowel followed by a quick shower (I only lived about 15 minutes away). I also did a lot of pottery drawing especially for the publication "2000 Years of Brentford". Great fun as we also did "Rescue" digs wherever needed including one on the Strand where I was offered the chance to descend in a "Bucket" 60 feet down into the London Clay – a job that had to be done by the contractors to inspect the hole for the foundation piles. Naturally I declined! It was on the site of a tavern frequented by the diarist Pepys and we also found an otherwise undiscovered fragment of the "Elgin Marbles"
Perhaps its why my knees now give me hell ! Still there were quite a number of nubile girls involved.
It also worked out well as Pete Hales was on the opposite shift and played cricket on a Saturday, so I would do an extra day for him and take advantage of more consecutive days off in return.
Alasdair Lawrance
Agreed, it was a great system.
In Wales, they brought in a current affairs programme at 22:30 to compete with “Newsnight”, I think. After the News opt-out at 18:30 , we adjourned to the Club to while away the time until 22:30. Can you see where this is going?
Fortunately, it was only a presenter topping and tailing TK, but it was a close run thing – in those days, the Club was a house on the Newport Road, a smart trot from the studio.
It made Alan Protheroe laugh, anyway.
Tony Carter
I worked a variant of AP shift at AP from 1966 until News moved to TC Spur in 1969. It was "Group" rota which the studio crews did. There were 3 Groups, X, Y and Z under the leadership of George Bailey, Ken Oxley and Paddy Rigg. We did 2 weeks of AP shift in Studio A followed by a week of days in Studio B. I think the week of days in Studio B was 14:30 to 22:30. Studio A was generally not manned at the weekend as the programme requirements were lower.
We did “Town and Around” and the” 9 o’clock News” in Studio B, followed by the "Postscript" recording 2 or 3 nights a week.
Later on, when BBC 2 went to colour and Studio A was colourised (Marconi Mk. 7s) we did the “6 o’clock News” in Studio B as well, as Studio A was rehearsing for "Newsroom" on BBC 2 at 1930.
If you were vision mixing in that era, as I often did, you would get to the end of the “6 o’clock News”, fade to black for 2 seconds and then cut up the opening titles of “Town and Around” which were on film. As this had a 10 second run-up the “Town and Around” director stood behind the News director and ran the T & A titles whilst the Six was still on air! Simultaneously during the two second fade to black, the production team swapped chairs (though not the studio crew) and you were handed a pile of scripts that you’d never seen before! They usually had a filmed report as the first item to give a minute or so to sort everything out. Amazingly, it always seemed to work!
Tony Crake
I never had the pleasure of such luxury as the AP shift pattern… I was brought up on External services transmitter shift system:
4 evening shifts then a day off.
4 day shifts and then a day off and then…
4 night shifts (23:00-09:00) and then 3 days off.
and then back to evenings.
These 3 days were known as the long break and effectively (if you felt up to it!) gave you 3 days together plus a travel day at either end (unofficially the night shift did get split into 2 parts)
AP shift sounded better!
Philip Tyler
I used to dream of working a shift pattern.
Irregular hours was my world and to be honest I quite enjoyed it.
About the nearest I got to any shift pattern was working on “Noel’s House Party”. 22 weeks of working Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
Pat Heigham
As a member of studio camera crews at TC, LG, TVT and Riverside, I only ever worked irregular hours as demanded by a production schedule.
Even when I was on the Gram Ops pool, Marion Gates, our secretary worked wonders to correlate hours against programmes that people preferred to work upon and satisfy directors who asked for certain staff.
If one exceeded the 42 hr week, any extra hours were ‘banked’ and when at least 8 were amassed, one could apply for a TOIL (Time Off In Lieu – of payment), i.e. a day off. If a requested particular day was refused three times, then one got the money, but frequently, one forgot to apply and the extra hours expired after 13 weeks, so the company got away with non-payment.
A late programme…several of us Gram Ops were in the TC club bar, after our respective programmes, and Sound Supervisor Johnny Holmes was bemoaning the fact that there wasn’t a Grams Op allocated to his Late Night Sports Round-Up to play the end music. We all volunteered, and piled into the Sound Control Room, fighting over who would press the button on the TR90! Don’t remember who won, or whether it was cued on time!!
Happy Daze!
Vernon Dyer
If I recall correctly, "ITN Shift" was similar, but moved the Tuesday into the first week, so you had 3 days off (and on, of course) together, thus:
Week 1: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday
Week 2: Saturday, Sunday, Thursday, Friday.
And what I dubbed "SkyTN Shift" put the 3 days at the weekend, thus:
Week 1:Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday
Week 2:Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday.
Not that I ever worked them, of course – irregular days/hours throughout, apart from a short period of actually working Monday –Friday, which seemed almost strange at the time (irregular hours still, naturally).
Dave Buckley
It should be noted that not everyone who worked at AP worked the AP shift.
The projection and dubbing crews came under TFS Ealing and we worked two on, two off.
The news editorial staff and news film editors worked 4 on, 4 off.
Roger Long
Film Department transfer/dubbing staff were day workers but 4 on 4 off. Day working paid 09:30 to 17:30.
When film night shooting Z Cars we were paid days and nights.
They never implemented irregular hours for mobile staff, it was too expensive. Was it a 15% lift ?
David Thompson
My first two years at the Beeb was spent at Bush House. The shift pattern there was based on a sixteen day rota.
It ran as follows:
We had 4 shift groups – A, B,C, and D shifts, and we worked the following pattern throughout the year.
4 evenings – 16:00-22:00
4 days – 09:00-16:00
4 nights – 22:00-09:00
4 days off.
The night shift was only staffed by half the team, so the other half worked 12.00 – 22.00, nominally, to provide meal reliefs. This was worked alternately so that only 4 shifts a month were nights.
As I single kid it worked fine for me. I used to go home to Birmingham to my parents for the off days, on the ‘Midland Red’ M1 express coach from the Victoria Bus station, and I could return on day one of the new shift, which didn’t start until 4pm. I usually ‘volunteered’ a swap with someone to do the meal relief shift because between the lunchtime and evening meal duties I could nip off to Lisle Street and browse through the radio junk shops for Government Surplus bits. Of course I missed out on the night shift pay, but my colleagues with families to support gladly accepted the offer of the extra money.
Night shifts were not too onerous, manning the various continuity suites such as LA Spanish and LA Portuguese, Voice of America re-broadcast, the African services, and, of course, not forgetting the General Overseas Service, for the ‘Empire’ – sorry, the Commonwealth.
Many hours were spent making tape copies using the two CTRs – Central Tape Rooms. These were large rooms containing rows of BTR2s (EMI tape machines the size, and weight, of an Aga cooker). At other times the edit suites, each with two machines, would be daisy chained together to speed up the process. You had to run from room to room to start and stop the process, but nobody seemed to complain about the long periods of silence on the copies.
By illicitly copying at double speed a whole night’s booking could be compressed, thus allowing some unauthorised sleeping. Happy Days!
Maurice Fleisher
Some coincidences here except my initiation into the Beeb, also starting at Bush House, was for only eighteen months before transferring to TV. and some of that time I had a spell in radio OBs.
I well remember the shift patterns and the strange atmosphere in the canteen in the early hours with comparatively few people around. It’s a different world at nights! During long breaks between transmissions at night I would bring in a whole load of my brother’s classical 78’s, pop into one of the empty continuity suite control rooms and spend happy hours listening, albeit with frequent record changes……no 33’s at that time.
When I was there the control room was downstairs in the basement (ex-Radio Luxembourg studio) but I see that it was later moved and updated. I remember an enormous mains-frequency clock high up on an end wall. If it ever registered the slightest variation of 50Hz it was a major cause of concern to the repeater radio transmitters all over the world. Best job was working in the continuity suites, identified by colours. As I recall ‘orange’ was the South American (Latin) countries but I can’t really remember which countries/areas were covered by the ‘blue’ ‘yellow’ and ‘green’ suites.
During my short sojourn in radio OBs I was sent up to AP one day to man a small insert studio at the other end of the building to the TV studios (not many people know that!). It was used to send possible locally-sourced interviews down to BH. I found the light switch and that was the only switch I knew how to operate. The room was full of equipment but no instructions. I was trembling with anxiety in case someone rang to say there was an interview on the way. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I figured I would have to call BH and get them to talk me through it but fortunately the interview never happened. Talk about being thrown in at the deep end.
John Howell
That reminds me of my excursions to Lisle Street having drooled over the ads by Smiths, Gee Radio, and Service Trading from the far off reaches of Shropshire. Mind you on one occasion I announced my intentions to visit and got some very wry smiles… I was not aware of the other reason that Lisle Street was famous!
Back to shifts: when we staffed the early editions of “Breakfasttime” in Lime Grove, we worked a night shift and it used to amuse me to get a ‘Cheap Day Return’ on the Underground to go home!
Maurice Fleischer
Lisle Street was certainly a fascinating street for browsing the various second-hand electronics shops there (like kids going wild in a candy store) although there were more such stores around the corner in Tottenham Court Road and further west in Edgware Road… and there are still many there.
That whole area of Soho was, of course, the area of ‘wry smiles’. Living close by I knew it well as a partner running a photographic studio in Wardour Street right opposite Lisle street.
Bernie Newnham
And talking of coincidences…
Sunday morning I was eating my croissant and perusing “The Sunday Times” when the tablet beeped. It was Graeme Wall asking about the AP shift. I was first to reply – “Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday.”
Today, Tuesday (14th July 2015), I was at Exeter University, 150 miles from home, for my son’s graduation (Classics 2:1 since you ask. Anyone need a quality copywriter/scriptwriter?) Anyway, it was being recorded for the souvenir DVD, and having pointed a camera on a few of these, I looked around for the cameras. Up to my right was one of the crew, downing a Costa coffee before the event started. He was operating a Sony something, a lot like the Z1 I used a few years ago.
I did my bit as a parent, clapping a lot and taking photos. Afterwards Exeter were offering champagne and canapes so I did my bit there too. The same cameraman was working the crowd and I said “hello”. One thing led to another, and he said he’d been a cameraman at TC from 1969 to 1970 something. I said "So was I, we must know each other, what’s your name?"
"Graeme Wall".
We haven’t met since 1970 something, when we both had red hair and no beards – apart from on here, when two days ago I answered his question.
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world. ……
