Alan Taylor
[I was] phoned to ask … if I would be prepared to do an OB covering boxing from …York Halls in Bethnal Green, London….Pat Heigham
Many’s the shoot I’ve done for “Sportsview”’s Boxing from York Hall.2x Auricons, lip ribbon for commentator and FX mic over the ring.
Those cameras were frightful as regards sound – the first time I used them I ran a test, wound back a bit to check and was appalled at the hum. To check if it was recorded hum, I played it back on the second camera – just the same, so had to check with Sammies that it was a function of the playback and not the recording.
The worst boxing venue was the Albert Hall – no problem with the lip ribbon, but arriving with not a lot of time to rig, it wasn’t possible to get a mic slung over the ring, so had to resort to taping a stick mic to a neutral corner post. The brief was to capture (clearly) the smack of leather against flesh, so don’t think I did too well on that occasion!
John Nottage
Boxing at the Albert Hall…did loads of those. We BBC types did sling a mic over the ring. It took a very long length of mic cable. I’d climb all the way into the top of the roof with one of the riggers, then walk out on to that vast cast iron cartwheel and lower the mic down. It probably a 4035 to start with, and a 416 later.I do remember that when you looked up from the floor, those mushrooms looked like they were on the ceiling. When you looked down on them from the cartwheel, they looked like they were on the floor!
Later we too started using a couple of c451s on the neutral corners, sometimes as well as the slung mic, sometimes instead.
Alan Taylor
Actually you can sling an Fx mic over the ring at the Royal Albert Hall, but it needs special permission and a very long cable, but it’s worth doing once, just for the experience.You can arrange for escorted access to the very top of the nipple at the peak of the hemispherical roof, where there is a gap to lower a cable through. The view over the Kensington rooftops is pretty amazing, but peeping down into the RAH itself is something else.
The first thing I noticed was the updraught of hot air from umpteen kW of TV lights. It gets concentrated into an increasingly smaller area as it rises and blows through the gap like a hair drier. The real roof is another layer above what we see from the interior and the space between the two roofs is like a sauna.
Then the view downwards is breathtaking in a different way. The acoustic mushrooms which look so high up in the auditorium look like dots on the floor when viewed from up there. The mushrooms contained a number of faded and yellowing paper darts, each one probably triggered a celebratory cheer when it landed there.
Returning to the more mundane York Halls, slinging Fx mics from the roof involved a convoluted route over multiple rooftops including climbing a vertical ladder with the top rung broken at the weld, which means that the rung is only supported at the other side ( reported many times to Karen, who was the Manager at York Halls in those days ). The Fx mics were usually rigged before Mike Goodall had arrived to build the ring. That left a difficult choice, one is to wait and waste time that could be spent in the pub, the other was to find a way to pre set the mics to exactly the right height without the ring being in place. People had tried leaving marked cables at the venue, but other people used them and changed the marks for their purposes, or simply made off with our cables so it proved to be unreliable.
One day after a match, the ring was dismantled very rapidly and I took the opportunity to extend a fish pole to the exact height from the floor to the Fx mic. That length was then measured and also replicated with tape on the roof of the tender. On subsequent shows, we extended a fish pole to match the marks on the tender roof, carried it inside, adjusted the height of the microphone accordingly and went off to the pub while the ring was being built. On our return, the microphones were hanging at exactly the correct height above the ring.
