Pat Heigham
"Strictly Come Dancing" is the only hi-gloss LE show currently offered by our alma mater BBC TV.
It has Hi-key lighting – brilliantly executed – and the whole pizzazz of a Saturday night show.
But a better recognition could be extended to the band sound balance and crew. Dave Arch has assembled a great ensemble from the best session players, who can execute all sorts of disciplines excellently.
But Tony Revell only gets a flash of a credit lasting milliseconds. Sound on this programme is surely highly important. I would hate to be on the desk if the lead trumpet/vocal mike went down on the live broadcast (or any other mic for that matter).
Let’s hear it for sound!
Geoff Fletcher
Here here (not a pun!)! Couldn’t’ agree more!
Colin Hassell
Tony Revell and Andy Tapley are credited for "Strictly Come Dancing" and it’s Andy, I’m told, who does the band part of the mix – and does a fantastic job of it.
Pat Heigham
Our brilliant training encompassed both cameras and sound, and later we were asked to specialise in one or the other.
I chose Sound – why?
Because the productions were more focussed on pictures – sound just happened. What was under the envelope was that we, on sound, beavered away to produce the best possible sound, in some cases, largely ignored by the producers who accepted the plaudits for a ‘brilliant’ TV production, where sound had played a significant part.
Sound has always had a bad press.
My work in the film industry accentuated the denigration of sound by the camera dept. Was this a revenge on the historical story of the noisy camera being shut in a soundproof box, in order to record a useable track?
An awful lot of people do not understand the physics of light and sound. Sadly, they are the producers and accountants.
Dave Plowman
And they have won as regards sound. Hence the now near universal use of personal lapel mics.
Geoff Fletcher
I’ve never understood the cameras v sound thing. I joined the BBC with the express intention of becoming a cameraman, so I didn’t choose sound despite being encouraged to do so at my post TO19 interview with the management. This didn’t mean I couldn’t appreciate the skill and dedication of my sound department colleagues.
There were aspects of my sound training which I enjoyed – gram op work and oddly enough, boom tracking for example, but I found boom operating very difficult so it was a non starter for me anyway.
Good television and film is always the result of good teamwork – cameras and sound are like two sides of a coin – both essential aspects of production. The longer I worked in the media the more convinced I became of this – it isn’t rocket science, it should be obvious to all.
I might also add that this teamwork maxim applies to everyone on a production – weak links in any aspect will always be detrimental to the end product. Another group that always seem to be undervalued are rigger-drivers. I’ve never understood this either – no trucks on site equals no shoot!
Alec Bray
I just have to echo that. It always was, and has been, pictures for me. My elder daughter (now 37) recently asked why I was always taking photographs – I had to say to her that I just see pictures wherever I look: a boat framed by weeping willows on the Thames, for example, or a rotten tree- trunk catching the autumn sunlight. (On a recent trip to the Welsh Highland Railway, I took 588 photos – digital camera of course…).
I guess that there is something similar happening for the persons of sound – certainly that is the impression that I get from the Tech Ops people.
The great thing about the BBC training was having the opportunity to sample "the other side": boom operation and tracking, microphone placement, grams and tape, an appreciation of sound mixing (never did any of that, of course). It made us all realise the skill sets needed, the problems to be faced and addressed and how to work effectively as a team.
I can’t say I was any good at boom operation but I really enjoyed the challenge of trying to get the correct sound perspective as the vision mixer cut between shots. But for me, it was cameras (and a bit of Vision Control, which I also liked). I was always on crews that did general work but with a regular series – such as "Softly Softly". Not for me the glamour of the shiny floor shows from the Theatre or the serious artistic work on the drama crews: but we all knew that those people who liked LE tended to gravitate towards those crews, and those who liked working on drama tended on the whole to get to crews 2 and 5 (this in the late 1960s).
In my last 10 years of work, I was an IT consultant specialising in Software Configuration Management, and travelled extensively round Europe to various types of Software teams – one, actually, was finally based in the TV Centre, so I got to visit the Centre before it was destroyed. Some teams were allowed full reign: the managers said "We trust our developers. They know what they have got to do. They know how to do it. As long as they produce working code on time and in budget, we let them get on with it with a light control." At the other extreme, there were managers who said: "We don’t trust our developers one inch. Give an inch and they will run riot. We have to screw everything down…" (and so on). They meant it, too: functionality was removed from Windows , access was barred etc. What was more significant was that it was clear that these groups were "self-selecting". Teams which worked independently tended to recruit developers who were like them: Tightly controlled teams recruited developers who were content to work in that way. It was a very striking pattern over the years. So perhaps that was what was working with the crews, way back when. After initial training and experience, you tended to go to for pictures or sound – and welcome the people who made the opposite choice. Perhaps it was different in Film!
Geoff Fletcher, Graeme Wall
To the listing of Crews 2 and 5 as Drama Crews – may I add Crew 4 (Reg Poulter and Pete Ware Senior and No.2). Also Crew 3, Rod Taylor – he of the exquisite handwriting.
Pat Heigham
There was a comment about Cameras versus Sound.
I never found this to be prevalent in BBC TV, as everyone had been trained similarly and each understood the various problems that either side experienced – also, programmes were tightly planned to accommodate sound booms, regarding lighting and lens sizes. Proper team work.
I found that this was different in film making.
The picture usually came first, but I did work with a lovely DoP who said to me (when we used dolly booms), "Put the boom in as soon as you can, I’ll light round it" .
The other end of the scale happened when I overheard a very young, green, camera assistant trainee say "Bloody sound!" I pulled him over and demanded to know from where he had picked that up – common knowledge, he said. I put him right! (I’d like to say that when he returned from First Aid, he was more respectful, but I had restrained from decking him!)
Some film crews I worked with were splendid – we ate together, drank together, hit the town together, but never really in the same spirit of BBC TV crews. I’ve kept in touch with a number of guys, both camera and sound from the 1960s, but never realised that the TVC was akin to an industrial factory, but it was, albeit a bit cleaner and more glamorous, maybe!
