from Peter Hider

Here’s a picture from long ago which Peter Hider brought to a lunch recently. It had been passed down to him by the late Jim Atkinson. It’s the camera crew all dressed up as school boys on the set of Bunter (or was it Whacko?)in about 1958. The key at the bottom gives the names, though the one who appears to be John Dixon, in the back row, isn’t – John is a ghostly figure standing at the back. We don’t know who the person sitting down is.

Sad Stuff

My wife over the past few months has had the sad task of emptying her late mother’s house. In a shed, under piles of old junk was part of a magazine. I don’t know which one because the title page is missing, but what there is, opposite an ad for a Hillman Super Minx for £743.13.9, is this –

I asked our VT friends about the VT engineer on the left, and Ron Bowman says –
“I cannot tell a lie – it’s me with hair! The occasion was the review of an early episode of Your Life in Their Hands. Do you remember them, blood and gore in black and white? At a guess I’d say VT7. It looks like we are having a matey chat but he barely spoke to me.If he was 36 I must have still been in short trousers! “

The article goes on for some pages, but the best bit is this –

“…Television Centre has developed into a highly disciplined, organic body with an unwritten but powerful code of rules, attitute, code and dogma…”

Still true? Discuss……

Caught in passing…

I was vaguely watching a documentary about Pink Floyd on my computer TV tuner, when a very short clip from behind the scenes at Top of the Pops in about 1966 was shown. I thought I’d seen all the old stuff at some point, but I hadn’t seen this before. As I hadn’t been recording, I needed to work out how to get hold of some stills. Luckily, there’s now the excellent BBC iPlayer, at the time of writing a few months old and very successful, apparently. In order to try to fiddle with the video, I had to download it, rather than just view it, which involved first downloading a download manager. After about an hour I had a complete copy of the doc, and also a whole set of current BBC idents, for some reason known only to the download manager.

I rolled in to 1215 on the show and tried to use Shift-Prt Scn to lift the stills. It didn’t work, for reasons obscure to do with Windows Media Player and my video card. I tried loading the video into VLC, but it can’t play it, owing to the iPlayer digital rights management system. I think also I only get a short time to watch before the video turns into a pumpkin.

I did go on to explain how a 61 year old amateur with no intended malice accidentally circumvented the iPlayer DRM in about five minutes. It’s been suggested, though not by the BBC, that it would be a good idea to take it away, so I have. All I’ll say is to repeat that which is said all over the internet – DRM is an expensive waste of money. I just read about how the latest most exotic SecuROM based game DRM was broken on the very first day. If I’d wanted the game, I’d just have bought it, because it just isn’t worth the effort – and I think people should get paid for their work. I think that’s the way it is for most of us . But – the world is changing, no matter what the big corporates think. No matter whether it’s called piracy, theft, fair use, or smerjalflip, if you put something on the internet it’s in the public domain whether you like it or not. New models of business have to be invented to accept the way things are, rather than the way big business want them to be.

The iPlayer download manager has taken up residence in my SysTray, which is quite a bit irritating….

Anyway….

Here is Bill Millar setting up some lighting

Alan Kerridge is on camera 2

Alan again

And again – with the very young John James in the foreground.

The original 1967 item comes from a Tomorrows World item about some lights that were tried out during rehearsals for Christmas TOTP. This would make it TC3. I have an
entry in my diary for 16th-17th December 1967 TOTP TC3, so this may have been it. Rolling the video back and forth in VirtualDub gives one frame of distinctly Ron Green
on camera 1.

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From Dudley Darby

Dudley found a jobspec from 1992. I wonder if such things still exist?