Albert Barber
Booking a room in NBH is nearly impossible there are too few places that a private meeting can be held. I was told about a case where a meeting was being held in Salford in the hot desking area and that everything that was being said was pretty confidential and could be heard at the other end of the room because of the reflected sound. From someone else, when I said you might have to wait for a desk at NBH, I was told the desking coordinator might make you wait for nearly an hour at times. We all know that hot desking was invented by accountants who did a check, on average, how many desks were being used at a given time. Quite when they did this who knows but at NBH it’s pretty bad and they don’t like the red paint either.
Roger Bunce
But at least they only squandered £1.6 billion to get it so wrong! I had a peer down that vast atrium at NBH yesterday evening. I couldn’t help wondering how many full-sized LE Studios they could have got into that space if they hadn’t decided to waste it on a pointless empty void.
Peter Neill, Pat Heigham
It has been pointed out that Television Centre had a huge void in the middle too. It just didn’t have a roof over it.
Roger Bunce, Pat Heigham
Yes, but that was an aesthetically pleasing void. It was often used to put a presenter in shot, and they actually shot programmes there – I mean real programmes – not just News!
Geoff Fletcher
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For example – this triffid sequence for a Michael Bentine show in August 1964.
(Listen to Michael Bentine’s reminiscences.)
Roger Bunce
Ah, Archeologists discover TV Centre as an abandoned, overgrown temple. "And on these steps we see the kneel marks of the kneelers, and the crawl marks of the crawlers." But it was the red-indian attack with burning arrows that led to Tom Sloan’s classic memo – "Under no circumstances is BBC Television Centre to be used for purposes of entertainment!"
Good job ‘Record Breakers’ ignored him.
Ian Hillson
I can think of more important "pointless empty voids" to get riled about – the voids in place of the brains of said "suits" who were responsible for flogging off TVC.
Pat Heigham
Who remembers the raid on the cash office opposite the original entrance. Apparently the commissionaires thought it was a filming stunt for Bentine and took no notice. (that is what I heard!).
The walkie-talkie firm (Audiolink) who rented radios to productions, had a client who said it was for a ‘fishing’ event, and required for ‘bank to bank’ communication. Turns out that they were bank robbers! (I knew John Morgan, who ran Audiolink, he told me that the police wanted him to identify the guys who turned up to collect the hired radios).
Alex Thomas
Probably apocryphal, but I heard that in the aftermath of the raid, the cashier ran out of the cash office and shouted to the gate commissionaire to shut the gate.
The commissionaire saluted the getaway car containing the thieves with their loot and shut the gate behind them!
Roger Bunce
I think there were two raids on the cashiers (?). One of them was when the cashiers was situated beside TC1. We were in TC1 at the time, doing “Z Cars”. I’ve often wondered what might have happened if some of the extras from “Z Cars”, wearing their police uniforms, had popped out for a smoke and encountered some people dressed as bank robbers. Who would have been the first to realise that A): the policemen were pretend, and B): the robbers were genuine? And what mayhem might have arisen before that realisation.
