Geoff Fletcher
Here is an amusing little story from some years ago when I was a cameraman at Anglia TV. We were working on a comedy series called “Backs To The Land” about land-girls in WW2. It was all shot on OB using our 3/4 camera OB Unit. Anglia had rented a farm near Heydon in North Norfolk for the duration and also took over the village, dressing it out as per WW2 – paper anti blast strips on windows etc. The pub was renamed the “Runtin’ Tun” and we all repaired there for lunch as often as not when out on location. There was a break in recording of three weeks or so to allow some crops to mature (Anglia had to plant the right sort of long stem wheat for reaping scenes or the vintage binder wouldn’t work properly), and when we resumed, we started out at the farm. Came lunchtime and off we all went to the pub (Ah – those were the days!). On arriving at the village green we found that the BBC had moved in and redressed it all as a Victorian village, and were busy shooting scenes for, I think, “The Peppermint Pig”, My old comrade Geoff Feld was involved (FM?) and we exchanged cordial greetings. We were due to shoot in the village a couple of days hence, and it was obvious that there had been some sort of cock-up with the dates. Cue conference among the high-ups. The rest of us engaged in a convivial beer or three with our opposite numbers and I espied a very pretty blonde Make-Up girl (name omitted to protect the innocent) whom I remembered from my TVC days. By some strange miracle she remembered me too, and it wasn’t long until we were sat on the grass under a shady tree catching up with things over a drink. She asked me how I liked Norfolk and I told her I was very happy living and working here. I asked her what she thought of the place. She too liked it a lot, and remarked that she couldn’t get over how quaint and old fashioned everywhere was, and how amazed she was that things obviously didn’t change for years out here in the boondocks. As an example, she said that she had found a little railway station up near the coast with steam trains and "…it still had all the adverts on the walls from the 1940s!…". It was obviously Weybourne on the North Norfolk Railway, another of our regular “Backs To The Land” locations, and permanently dressed out as per early WW2. She was such a sweetheart and was so delighted with her "find" that I just hadn’t the heart to explain, I just nodded my head and agreed that things did indeed move exceedingly slowly in Norfolk.
See photo below. That’s me with the hair and the flares and pocketed rigging gloves next to Nobby Noble’s camera 3.
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Pat Heigham
More trains and filming…
I worked on “Fiddler on the Roof” in the early stages of my freelance career.
Apart from Pinewood, the main locations were in the former Yugoslavia.
Having shot for five months there, we repaired to Pinewood and with the studio sets completed, there was just one sequence left to shoot – where Tevye’s daughter catches a train to join her reactionary boyfriend in Kiev.
Norman Jewison (Director) had visions of a great, wide, snowy scene, like “Dr. Zhivago”, but there was no snow anywhere that February. Location scouts were looking in Canada, Norway, Finland to no avail. Thus we returned to Yugoslavia, and shot on a branch loop of a railway to play on. Snow machines dressed the acting area, and great swathes of white polythene sheeting over the background fields, suitably soft focus.
Playing trains is always fun, and the tea/lunch breaks were organised with a little diesel shunter pushing a couple of flat trucks that the caterers had loaded with trestle tables, white table cloths fluttering gaily!
A moment that was straight out of a comedy sketch: the painters had prepared a stencil for the Russian eagle to be painted on the action engine’s tender. As the painter turned back from loading his brush and applied it to the stencil, the engine suddenly moved off! Nice black line along the tender!
Graeme Wall
Still more trains, filming at Swanage:
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Geoff Fletcher
I came out of the TV Theatre one day back in February 1964 and found this parked outside the Odeon!
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Pat Heigham
Many fond memories – I knew a chap years ago, who was the Bluebell’s line official photographer (his name was Chown) and he had a loft darkroom where he processed and printed his own colour stuff – this was in the late 1950s.
When I joined the BBC, he enlisted my aid in recording train noises to go with a slide show.
Much later, in my freelance career, I filmed on the railway and was able to place coins on the rails to be rolled flat! Used to do that in the I.O.W. where I originated.
