Television Centre in the 1970s and 1980s – a child’s perspective.
My father – sound supervisor Dave Thompson – worked for the BBC for 41 years. The vast majority of his time was spent at Television Centre. I used to go to work with him quite regularly and sit quietly and observe the comings and goings of television crew life. To me, it was a great treat to be allowed to go to work with him, starting with the first time when my brother and I were taken to have lunch in Broadcasting House and subsequently fleeting visits after a long holiday abroad in order to pick up the work schedule from “Maria” for the coming week. Later on, once we could be trusted to be seen and not heard, we spent some time 
simply waiting for him while he was working and were perhaps even sent on the odd errand. Sometimes my mum would take us shopping in London, but the beginning and the ends of the day would be in TVC so that we could go in one car as a family.
The day would start with the early morning journey into London, past certain landmarks on the way including another part of the BBC at one set of crossroads, “Mecca Leisure” (the name of which I couldn’t decode) and the Hoover Building, still being used by Hoover when I first went to the BBC. The journey was always early because otherwise the traffic would be too bad. Similarly, we would never leave until late at night, even if it had been a programme like Blue Peter which was over quite early because it just was not worth sitting in a traffic jam. I cannot remember a time when the BBC didn’t have a multi storey car park but I also knew that it was quite new and also that there was a Blue Peter time capsule buried in it. In the later years, there was a security gate which operated by a key fob, but before that a man would let us through and we would walk importantly up the link road to the main part of TVC. Occasionally we would have to blag our way through the main entrance, perhaps if our mother was there too, and we would say something convincing and perhaps make a phone call and then amble in past the unnaturally heavy doors of the reception area where we might see a familiar face in one of the leather chairs watching one of the many monitors. I never did find out where that escalator went down to, but often we would go up the steps behind the doors and find our way about from there.
Once in the circular part of the building it was hard to get lost because ultimately we would come back to where you started. I made it my business to walk confidently about the place because I did not want to come across as a visitor! There would invariably be an area outside one of the control room suites where someone had run some cabling across the corridor and covered it with one of those ubiquitous orange and white plastic bridges which made such a satisfying noise if you stepped on them. In our early visits, we would tentatively be shown the Observation gallery of one or two of the studios which had something going on, and in general there wasn’t much to observe because the lighting rig usually obscured the view. Blue Peter was quite good for this because there was no audience so they were more in the centre of the studio, I suppose. We would usually settle down and sit in front of the sound desk where we were a bit cold but out of the way. Sometimes we would go and explore and walk around the red, blue and green tea areas, but as far as we were concerned, only the green one was any good. Often you could see a famous person or two in the green tea area because it linked right to the entrance of one of the studios. I largely disdained anyone famous, though, because we were not part of the celebrity culture, we were on the technical side and they were merely the “luvvies”, here today, gone tomorrow. A cup of tea was 5p, coffee 9p or something silly like that (not that I drank either).
When it came to lunchtime or tea time, it was exciting because I knew that there would be something which I would like to eat when we went to the canteen. In those days, eating out was an unhappy experience for me because there was never anything on offer which I wanted to eat and I would be likely to get into trouble for not eating whatever it was I thought I would loathe least. However, there was no danger of that in the staff canteen at the BBC. Firstly, there was the walk to to get there, which had several interesting landmarks. There was the World Service room with a union jack over the window. I remember going up the vintage 1960s stairs to get up to the level with the link bridge. One of the hospital buildings I sometimes work in must have been built at the same time as Television Centre because the stairs are just the same and it makes me think of the BBC every time. Then, I would look out for the huge Blue Peter painting on the wall which had been a gift from a developing country they had visited. (I wonder where that is now.) In the link corridor there were sky lights. We always used to look up through each one at as we walked under it – I don’t know why now. Later on there was a Ceefax monitor by the dung painting but it never said anything of great interest to me. The self service staff restaurant was up one level at least. I cannot imagine there ever being time for the waitress service one which was on the same level as the link corridor. Having got a tray, I would be sure to be able to find something delectable like sausages, chips and beans, (and by an even greater miracle was permitted to have it.) In my memory we always sat quite near to the entrance but near the windows and I wonder whether this was because it was a non-smoking area at that time. I do seem to remember a lot of smoking going on in control room suites, editing suites etc. It was part of the culture of the times, I suppose. Again, you might see someone famous in the restaurant, but usually someone who was doing quite a normal job like reading the news or doing the weather forecast.
The BBC had a kind of a hum to it. An exciting kind of 24 hour feel which I cannot now find anywhere else, even though I am a hospital doctor. (Perhaps I have become immune to it!). It was also filled with useful, quirky people who could most likely give you advice about unusual hobbies or technical tips. If something broke, someone got a screwdriver out of his pocket and fixed it. If something couldn’t be done, they eventually figured out a way of doing it. The control rooms had a hot electrical ozone smell (mixed with an element of Def Leppard t-shirt body odour!) which I can re-live any time I like by going into the TV and electrical shop in our local town. The men would talk in a technical language which I could half understand, being unwittingly trained from birth, and would tell each other incomprehensible anecdotes about technical failures ending in uproarious laughter only for those who knew the equipment involved. There were very few women, apart from the vision mixers. Much of the equipment was very old e.g. the record players under wooden lids which still remained by the reel-to-reel tape players for the gram op. I always felt affronted when I saw the highchairs with a tiny table on the right arm so you could make notes, because both my father and I are left handed.
During breaks we might have to get something from stores or check a communication link with another studio, or OB. There were sundry phonecalls to on-call engineers and people at the post office, I think. The gram op might go off to find an FX disc from the library, although he should probably already have done this before the day. Once, I remember a Blue Peter where they had an article about frogs and my dad and the gram op had got all the frog noises from the library and systematically tried each one in the rehearsal. The director didn’t like any of them and then in desperation either my dad or the gram op made a cod frog noise himself down the communication system and the director said “that’s it, that’s the one!” so then they had to record themselves making the noise and make a loop tape by running it around something on the floor, or so it seemed to me anyway.
One time when my dad was working on Children in Need day he took my brother’s Pudsey bear in so the crew would make a collection for Children in need. For some reason, in the green tea bar most likely, he met someone from another studio who was about to shoot an interview with Joanna Lumley, and who wished he had a Pudsey bear available as a prop. “Oh, I’ve got one in my sound control room if you like”, my dad said, as if it was the usual sort of thing you might have kicking around. Anyway, the upshot of it was that my brother got to see (and video) a mid morning interview in which his own Pudsey bear appeared to be somewhat overawed by the prospect of sitting so close to Joanna Lumley. (It fell over).
Some shows were fun to watch being made, others were relatively dull. Anything to do with sport was interminable and it felt as though the crew agreed with me. Even though the view from the monitors in the sound control room was very little different from being at home, I would not have swapped to being in the audience if I had been offered the chance, because, to me, they were luvvies too. In any case, much of the time I knew I wasn’t old enough. I liked to see the bits on the monitor where a shot had been completed by the camera in question and then it was allowed to slide off drunkenly to one side or the other before re-setting for a re-take. If there was a gap in the audience which looked bad then I would agree to go and sit there, because of course, this made it a technical role. Sometimes, the celebrities would come up to the control suite and speak. It was often to keep up good feeling both sides of the double glass, I think.
Many of the shows I saw were live, and then there was an additional buzz in the control room. Sure, the red light was on for a recording, but that was nothing compared with being counted down to live transmission. There would then be very little talking, a loud mix of sound from the monitor speakers and a level of nervous tension. Worst of all would be a technical slip which might be spotted by eagle eyed colleagues at home. Nowadays, the eagle eyed and eared people are all still there wincing having largely lost the chance to hand down their skills to the next generations due to the lack of training since the 1990s. I wonder if they all phone in and complain any more. I don’t think there is anyone there to take their calls, or not someone who can understand the lingo anyway.
At the end of the show, there would be a swift de-rig. I would be allowed to pull out all of the jack plugs from the jack field and hang them over the pegs provided, in order of their lengths (a self imposed constraint). It was good if there were no other programmes due in that week because the rig could stay but this was rare. Sometimes there would be “hostility” where we would drink tiny cans of orange juice and eat crisps, and then we would walk out of the building, usually via a studio where a man would be painting a floor white again and then out past “scenery”.
My goodness, how painful it must be for the true affiliates of TVC to see it sold and stripped, when even I feel grief for it. Apart from anything, what a tremendous waste to go through with all those different phases of development and then just leave the whole lot to developers. It reminds me of the NHS. The BBC was a place where people had a secure career with the prospect of some progression and becoming an expert in their field. I worry that the same thing will happen to the NHS and we will be touting for business as freelancers while nobody learns how to do anything properly, or why things were done in a certain way (because it had been handed down by those who had learned the hard way!). I was a child who could navigate my way safely around TVC, buy myself some lunch and perhaps take a (rude) message to a colleague working on the show next door. At University I mortally offended a friend who was a HiFi enthusiast by rating his new speakers as “ok”, tainted as I was by the quality of equipment surrounding me in TVC. Even now, with my secondhand knowledge I could probably mix a musical in the local theatre production, edit quarter inch tape (limited use for that now…), select an appropriate microphone for a job (provided it was made before 1990) and only last week used my patchy but better-than-anyone-else-here knowledge to set up the audio visual links between a control suite and a mock operating theatre used for critical incident training.
Now have my own children who confidently navigate their way along hospital corridors to the meeting room where we sometimes have to hand them over after an unexpected call out and I wonder how much of an influence this will be on them in later life.
