“What are all these people doing here?”

Albert Barber

I never thought the selling off of BT was a good idea, as all the rhetoric about us owning our own shares was false. We all thought, well some of us, that ultimately the shares would end up in large corporate banks.

The thing that grieved me most was the innovation of the boffins that were working in BT. They were in the forefront as they developed the first transmission of pictures by telephone wire and the fibre optic cable.

On the programme I was working on, we went to an exhibition in Birmingham, and BT had the most development in this area. The BBC Research Dept, too, was an innovator by the way – all of which ultimately was almost given away to larger corporations.

We went the next year and saw the BT stand had been transformed into selling handsets and domestic products like multiple wireless sets in plastic packaging. All very glossy but no R and D.  We were shocked.

All this was nearly 30 years ago.  So much for Thatcher’s naivety in thinking like a grocers daughter!

Perhaps someone would explain her statement, when she asked in a studio: "What are all these people doing?"   – And then changed Broadcasting history.

Pat Heigham

As I was in and out of Thames Euston as a freelance for the film unit base, the story I heard that she was interviewed in a studio there.  Some of the office staff wanted to get a look at the first lady PM,  and stood quietly at the back – noticing them, she asked that question.

The Management, ever wishing to dilute the power of the union (ACTT) told her that it was union regulations or some such, whereupon she then made up her mind to destroy the unions.  Thus ACTT dwindled and became the largely ineffective BECTU, itself an unhappy amalgamation of ABS and ACTT.

The one powerful outfit was NATKE – if those members withdrew their labour – couldn’t shoot.

Bob Auger

The ACTT certainly had a lot of power at Granada TV. I arrived there from Tech Ops just as negotiations were taking place on the switch to colour. The shop steward (Roland Seal – a good Sound man) was claiming, among other things, that boom operators deserved more money because they were exposed to brighter lights and had to deal with more shadows from frontal keys.

After hours of argument, Roland proposed a compromise. "…Agree to our proposals and we are ready to go into colour in stages…", he said eventually. Sighs of relief from management.

"We will start with sepia…"

Chris Wickham

When Mrs Thatcher or any other leading politician came to the studios or party conference studios, it often seemed that the whole Current Affairs Dept was present giving rise to the comments of "…What do all these people do?…" The production staffing levels at party conferences in particular was always extremely extravagant.

The other side of the coin was that on programmes that licence payers likes to watch such as the “Morecambe & Wise Show” or “Jackanory”, both very good programmes of their type, the studio production team could be counted on the fingers of one hand and still have a couple of fingers spare to wave at politicians. Politicians, with one exception, did not watch or care about TV. The exception was Dennis Healy who enjoyed coming to recordings of “Morecambe & Wise”.

Nick Ware

I once, during the Thatcher era, had to drive down to Bristol to film an interview with a cinema manager. The three of us (cameraman, director, me) arrived on time, but found a Thames crew all set up ready to interview the same guy. They were supposed to have finished and left before our appointed time, but were sitting around waiting for a house electrician to turn up to plug a 13A plug in the wall plughole. Their spark wouldn’t do it without him there. The Thames crew numbered eleven people, and they had travelled down the previous day and overnighted in Bristol.

We did virtually the same interview as them and were back in Wandsworth all within a ten hour day.

About the same time I occasionally got paid to sit in the sound area of the old ITN Wells Street building, often doing nothing – simply to make up the numbers. There was a brand new Audiofile dubbing room that I was fully familiar with, but it couldn’t be used because there was no Union agreement for non-linear editing/dubbing. That, apparently, needed more sound people. I soon got bored with that and never went back.

Go figure!

Of course, I deplore the way the Industry has gone, but it couldn’t go on like that!

Dave Plowman

No idea about ITN since I never worked there, but can assure you we  grabbed Audiofile with both hands at Thames Teddington, with no involvement from the union. It was initially use for dubbing “The Bill”. One man operation. But then the older dubbing suites were busy anyway.

I seem to remember being told it was just initially a gram op’s tool at the BBC, as part of Sypher?

One question Margaret Thatcher asked was why a BBC news crew turning up to interview her on a location had more people than a CBS etc one.

It would be interesting to know how many on a CBS crew interviewing their president on location? And how many on a BBC one doing the same?

The bit about ‘…what do all these people do…’ was the most frequent one asked by members of the public of me on location (usually when everyone was thrown out to the street for an artist rehearsal). But they very rarely wanted an answer.

Dave Buckley

When the BBC bought Elstree, TV Training was the first department to move there (1984).

We were ‘given’ studio D to get up and run for three years as the training studio. In the lighting control/camera control area, there was the ‘Union Wall’, an actual wall which divided the two operations. The ‘wall’ was made of tatty hardboard and 2" x 2" wood battens, with a window in it so that the operators could see each other. The monitor stacks were duplicated for each section.

The first thing we did was to remove this ‘wall’ and found that there was an actual gap in the desks and that there was an intercom link between the two areas, even though they were side by side and the wall wasn’t full height so you could have shouted between the two sections!

While we were getting the studio up and running, a piece of equipment had to be repaired by the company which made it, who sent one of their engineers. While he was working on the gear, he commented that when he had to come in for ATV, he nearly caused a strike as he plugged in his own soldering iron into a socket on the maintenance bench! What a way to work.

Alasdair Lawrance

It’s often worth thinking about apparent Trade Union obstructivism as poor management.  Do people think most of us enjoy a strike/work to rule/ confrontation?

And now the abysmal way freelances are treated?

Roger Bunce

Hear Hear! Only one thing causes a strike, and that is Bad Management! Management is paid to show leadership, to motivate and inspire the workforce. A strike vote is clear evidence of lack of leadership; the workforce have not been motivated or inspired. The Management have not been doing the job they are paid to do – so they should be sacked – and replaced by Managers who are actually capable of Managing. That way there would never be any strikes.

When Management wish to make contractual changes, it shouldn’t be the Union who have to conduct a ballot for strike action. It should be the Management who a required to conduct a secret ballot of staff, to show that they have majority support for those changes. No support, no changes, and therefore no strike. A contract is supposed to be an agreement between two parties. It should never be changed by one side without the full agreement of the other.

Terry Meadowcroft

The freelance-based wreckage which is now news and doco working could not have happened if we had been protected by responsible unions. Bad management structures and the Commissioning process for programmes ever demanding cheaper productions automatically produced the downward spiral that happened in production and technical values – and still is happening.

Hugh Sheppard

Both management and unions can find themselves saddled with unprincipled demagogues or ideologues who deserve each other. Then when they drag their camp followers in with them it leads to strikes.

Albert Barber

In very simplistic terms if you don’t have a good management team you don’t get a good team of workers.  Often the workers only get half the story from the management.  If the workers are involved then they will work well and it’s a total team. Not just them and us. Leadership is often the reason things work.

We at the BBC worked well as a strong expert team, the members of this site are testament to joint cooperation and respect one to another. There are always differences but the common professional cause is why we often did it with less pay.

Research shows that pay isn’t the key.

Once Checkland came in, one strike that happened on his watch kept the staff in the dark. The BBC reserved a contingency fund to cover the disputes and screwed Bristol who were sent to a Maundy ceremony to get them to join the strike in London.

I went into see Checkland and said I thought my team at Bristol were excellent, didn’t want to strike and should be told what was going on at a group meeting. Checkland didn’t want to know and said to me that there was more than I knew over the dispute. I was shocked and felt that it was a way of breaking the union influence which was, as I remember it, good in trying to help solve the dispute.

I feel as someone said that Leyland failed because of the management and the workers, who didn’t know the whole story, were not involved and rebelled.  This is, I know, a simplistic view.

Dave Plowman

The master slave relationship seems always to have been the accepted thing in the UK. Even by many of the slaves. Until, of course, they have a poor master.

Lest it be forgot, I (and many others) left the BBC in the 1970s because the pay rates had fallen so far behind as to be a bad joke. Years of ‘pay policies’ which the BBC were happy to follow to the letter while others found ways round them. Of course not long after that, they were forced into doing something about it.

So I was happy to go to the ‘dark side’ with much stronger trades unions.  But I was surprised to find at the particular branch of Thames TV I ended up in, there were fewer ‘restrictive practices’ than I’d come to accept as the norm at the Beeb.

One thing I would say about the ACTT. If you had a ‘ticket’ for a job, it meant you were at least half competent at it, as that ticket had to be approved by those you worked with.

Bit different from these days.

Alan Bayley

I really wish I had a copy of a program made years ago by, I think the “Money Program”?,  that followed Norman Tebbit around German business’s to see how they ran companies.

He was horrified to see shop floor workers present at board meeting and totally dismissed the German way of running a company. He said managing by consensus slows up decision making and that if the staff find the managements decisions unacceptable, they should seek employment elsewhere. It is one of the Thatcher/Reagan legacies we have not been able to shrug off and whenever the stupid “Right to Manage” v the “Right to Strike” argument kicks off, it’s back to Scargill and couldn’t bury the dead etc. etc etc.  Eventually, I hope, people will grow up and realise that working together has always been the best option.

The Tebbitt goes to Germany programme  was particularly sad, because the program contrasted VW and British Leyland. In VW, the assembly workers, engineers and management had weekly meetings to resolve assembly and reliability problems. In  British Leyland the management blamed the workers and the workers blamed the management and that finally destroyed the company. The engineers and designers got it from both directions of course. A friend of mine was an engineer at the Cowley Plant and he told me it was The Chairman’s wife who had the final say on whether a car was ready for sale.
She loved the Allegro!