Mike Giles – Life at the BBC

A few reminiscences of life in the Beeb by Mike Giles (be warned ~ there are 31 pages!)

I left school in 1964 with a reasonable ‘A’ level in physics, plus indifferent ‘A’ levels in chemistry and biology. The BBC’s requirement was to have studied maths or physics to ‘A’ level, but it was not necessary to have passed! In practice, though, most of the successful applicants had succeeded to some degree. By the time I left school, I had already been for interview with the BBC at BH Bristol – an elegant row of Victorian houses in Whiteladies Road. On the ground floor, these buildings housed several radio studios, a small TV studio, the telecine area, quarter-inch editing suites, a comprehensive gram library, a recorded programmes library and a film dubbing theatre. Most of the upper floors were offices but one building had a switching centre on the first floor, which routed vision circuits from London to the West Country studios and transmitters, Cardiff and Birmingham, plus all the local routing, and contributions to London. Above that, the main Sound Control Room handled audio for radio and television and considered itself to be “top dog” – senior service, rather like the navy compared to army and airforce!

Besides handling all incoming and outgoing audio and communications circuits, the main control room housed the West of England Home Service continuity studio and control desk. WEHS and all the other regional home services opted out of the national program from time to time, for news, part of the Today programme and suchlike. There was an announcer, who had main and spare mics, with cough-cut key, and a turntable, which always had a standby disc on it in case of a programme breakdown or under-run. The operator had two quarter-inch tape machines for playing out regional pre-recorded programmes. All of this continuity function was superseded by the introduction of local radio. I recall that the old guard of senior staff in the main control room were horrified when an engineer from P & I D, Planning and Installation Department, turned up to install a Leak RSA (response selection amplifier) in the continuity announcer’s mic circuit. This was to reduce the amount of traffic rumble from Whiteladies Road, three floors below, allowing the ST&C 4038, a figure of eight ribbon mic, the absolute BBC standard of the time, to be placed closer to the announcer, by rolling off the bass tip-up which is a feature of close working with a ribbon mic. It worked perfectly well, but the old guard refused to use it for some time, as the BBC’s mainstay in all things was absolute fidelity, both from a technical and production standpoint. Microphones and loudspeakers were designed and manufactured to give almost completely flat frequency response across the audio range, within plus or minus one dB, and to affect the flat response thus achieved was to fly in the face of all they held dear! What they ignored was the fact that equalisation was creeping in to the main studios by stealth, so many programmes which passed through their hands already “suffered” from non-fidelity.

It speaks volumes, though, that at the outset a non-professional piece of kit was used, designed to account for the indifferent living room acoustics of most audiophiles. It was undoubtedly of good enough quality, but was impractical for serious studio installation, so, within a few years, BBC Research Department designed RSAs, made by BBC Equipment Department, began to appear as pluggable units in most studios, but only a few units per studio – not the current EQ per channel expectation of modern desks.

Behind the old Whiteladies Road houses, a medium sized television studio had been built and there was a cluster of wartime huts, housing the film-editing department, which was very busy, principally for the Natural History Unit and the local TV News programme.

The outside broadcast base was a new building on stilts, with staff parking beneath. This housed one TV OB Unit, several Radio OB vehicles, radio links vehicles and Bristol’s one videotape machine, two-inch Ampex, in a vehicle to provide flexibility, but it spent a lot of its time in base, usually recording from the local studios during the evening and editing by day. Travel time for this vehicle was expensive, as the absence of the VTR meant that recording had to be done in London, tying up expensive circuits in the process. It was often difficult to over-run on London recordings, as both the VT channels and the circuits would have bookings butting up to Bristol’s. When working to a single machine, the studio had to wait after recording for a comprehensive check of the tapes and although it was not frequent, I do recall having to go again because of a head clog!

So, that was all in existence when I joined the BBC in 1975, expecting to go to London at the end of three months training at Evesham, the BBC’s own training centre for operators like me, and for engineers. Wood Norton Hall was an Elizabethan manor, which had lost its top floor in a fire, and the whole area behind the “big house” was populated with a great many wartime huts, where most of the training took place, There were also some old radio studios from the wartime, as quite a few programmes were evacuated from London and Birmingham. There were purpose-built accommodation blocks for male trainees and Pear Tree Cottage for the relatively few ladies. Wood Norton also trained significant numbers of overseas staff, whose employers, or their government paid the BBC for the service. At the time, I believe it was one of the few revenue streams into the BBC apart from the licence fee and the grant-in-aid for BBC World Service, based at Bush House with transmitter stations all over the world.

Most of Evesham’s staff assumed that we knew nothing relevant and took us through all the basic theory we were likely to need. TO21 was one half of the biggest intake of Technical Operators ever, seventy in total because of the opening of BBC2, so, contrary to the usual three or four months on station at the outset, thirty five of us went straight to Evesham, and the remainder followed when we’d finished, as the training department could not take us all at once. We had classroom lectures on the basics of valves and amplifiers, how signals got from the microphone and camera to the transmitters, how the different types of mics worked, principles of disc recording and replay, tape recording theory, etc., etc., and touched on new-fangled transistors, which could not yet match the quality of valves.

We had operational instruction in microphone placing, use of gramophone turntables, quarter-inch tape editing on EMI BTR1 and BTR2 tape machines the size of Agas, plus lighting and camera work, as at that stage we were not assigned to any specific craft.

The Evesham lecturers were quite pleased to have us as absolutely raw recruits, because we know nothing of normal working practices, so were not argumentative as to how things were done in the real world. A few weeks before the end of the course, volunteers were requested for regional centres, whereas we had all expected to go to London, mostly Television Centre. We were told that if there weren’t enough volunteers, a number of individuals would be “selected”, so nineteen of us expressed preferences for specific regions, if necessary, and all were accepted, although we were then told that they’d only been looking for six volunteers! So that’s how I ended up in Bristol for nine years. More senior staff on other course at the time were outraged that new recruits were going to the regions, particularly the very popular Bristol, when many of them had been asking to be transferred for years.

In the regions, operators at my level worked across a range of radio and television roles, in studios and on Outside Broadcasts, but we did not fill the roles of radio Studio Managers, who were a breed above mere operators, so we were restricted to operating tape machines and editing the resulting recordings. Radio was a much more gentlemanly affair than TV and the producer or director sat next to the Studio Manager at the panel, as the sound desk was called. The Studio Manager basically ran the show, including cueing artistes with the green light. The SM at the panel maintained overall control of everything, including the contributions from tape and grams, even to the point of fading them out when no longer required, whereas in TV, the Sound Supervisor kept the tape and grams fader open on the desk and left the tape grams operator to control the level appropriately. Television also required boom operators and floor assistants to move microphones around as the show progressed.

Occasionally, we would get up close and personal with the artists, when lanyard mics were required. These were either black RCA BK6s, or the slighter smaller, silver AKG D109s – but both enormous by modern standards and wherever possible, they were cabled, as the BBC TM3 radio mic transmitters and receivers were notoriously difficult to manage.

Radio desks at that time had rotary faders, each with a green cue key next to it, so that fading up and cueing was a single handed operation. Amazingly, the cue lights were mains voltage and came in table-top and free-standing versions. Besides telling people to start talking, the cue light might be flashed during an item to indicate the need to speed up or slow down – slow flashes meant take your time, but it was “flicker for quicker”! I recall many years later, during planning for a TV studio refurbishment, suggesting to SCPD, Studios Capital Projects Department, as P & ID had then become, that the retention of mains powered cue lights was no longer necessary, as they had hardly ever been used in TV, where floor managers or talkback were used for cueing artists. I had to be quite persuasive and demonstrate that when such devices were necessary, we would use a box from the Special Projects department which operated on standard audio double-enders at low voltage

Other memories from Evesham’s Wood Norton Hall were that colour was in its infancy and the control room proudly displayed a colour monitor, showing just a still of a lady’s face, I believe. I don’t remember seeing moving pictures. That control room was on the ground floor of the old house and had been an important hub during the war – besides making programmes such as ITMA, Evesham was a distribution point for BBC services and was on standby as the continuity centre, in the event that BH in London was out of action. Near all the incoming and outgoing circuits rising from the ground, was an axe – in the event of invasion and the prospect of Evesham being overrun, the last man out had not only to put out the lights and the cat, but to sever all links with the outside world! I presume this contingency was similarly catered for elsewhere, but I only ever saw the axe at Wood Norton, which continued to be prepared for hostilities and whilst I was there on a later course, a huge concrete bunker was being built to withstand nuclear attack during the Cold War.

We learned quarter-inch tape operations and editing on great green EMI BTR1’s and BTR2’s and occasionally on the smaller EMI TR90 and Leevers Rich machines. Brass scissors were still in use by old practitioners of the editing art and some older staff decried the television habit of transferring discs to tape for use in the studio. The Marconi-Stille steel tape recording machine was still being described as a relatively recent invention! Indeed, disc recording had not been completely phased out, as I recall, and the EMI Midget Recorder (quarter-inch tape) was being hailed as a marvel. The small Ficord machine was also very popular, especially for making “illicit” recordings, whilst many sound aficionados had Brenel and later Revox tape machines at home. Loudspeaker design was very much in its infancy and the large LSU 10 speaker, was the de facto standard of the day. It had a beautifully made light wood case, housing a 15 inch speaker with an amplifier and all the appropriate ports to tune the response in its base, but it lacked HF as originally built and a Lorenz plastic tweeter was unceremoniously wired to the centre of the grill in front of the bass unit. During a later radio training lecture, the middle-aged Studio Manager waltzed in, took off his tweed jacket and draped it over the speaker, with one sleeve dangling in front of the tweeter – “We don’t want all that nasty shrill stuff hurting our ears, do we?” he declared!

Loudspeakers, microphones, sound desks, vision mixers and all manner of wizardry were developed by BBC Designs Department and once prototypes were approved, BBC Equipment Department took over production. There was very little by way of commercial manufacture of suitable equipment at that time, but gradually, companies began offering off-the-shelf items which the BBC could buy. For a very considerable period, most of my career in fact, with a BBC handle you could influence designers and manufacturers very significantly to produce equipment that worked the way we wanted it, so “off-the-shelf” often became modestly bespoke before being put back on the shelf for the benefit of others. One category that was handed over to commercial manufacture very early on was the microphone. After the huge and very heavy AXBT range of ribbon mics, the BBC had developed the much smaller PGS ribbon mics, and there were several examples of the Equipment Department prototypes around, but it was very logically concluded that a commercial company should undertake mass manufacture and based on the PGS, ST&C produced the 4033 figure of eight ribbon mic, which for years was the very doyen of sound quality. The Equipment Department has long since gone the way of all good things and if Designs Department still exists, it is almost certainly a mere shadow of its former greatness.

I’m not aware that the BBC ever built a quarter-inch tape machine, though, and one of the consequences of portable tape machines becoming increasingly available was that reporters could conduct interviews in the field without the need for an attendant vehicle and engineer with a mobile disc-cutting machine on board. I’m unsure of the time scales, but the EMI midget recorder was quite soon superseded by the Uher tape machine. Whereas the EMI machine had a maximum spool size of about three inches, as I recall, and had top mounted controls, the Uher could take five inch spools and was operated by piano key type levers which were accessible when the lid was closed, making it reasonably easy to use whilst it was slung over your shoulder, recording whilst on the move.

When I got to Bristol, my first duties were in the Main Sound Control Room, which was in what would probably have been the servants’ quarters at the top of the building. It spanned two houses, with rows of line receiving and line sending amplifiers in bays as you walked in, with the TOM’s office opposite, so that he could see everyone who came in or left. The Technical Operations Manager of the day was God and they were amongst the few people I have known in the BBC who expected to be addressed as Mr, certainly by sprogs like me. Older colleagues were allowed the privilege of familiarity, but everybody else was on first name terms, except for the really big white chief at Bristol, the EiC, Engineer in Charge, who was known as Mr Chalk by absolutely everyone. We all knew that his first name was Ken, but no-one ever heard him called that! Outside the TOM’s office, on a small, purpose built oak shelf, in itself a work of great craft, stood an upright plastic box rather like a modern shower radio, with vents at the front and a small loudspeaker, probably two and half inch diameter. On the side was a wheel type volume control as I recall and it was the responsibility of the shift leader to check from time to time that the unit was emitting a regular stream of pips, probably at five or ten second intervals – this was the early-warning network and if it ever went silent, it was time to start worrying, since the next sound was likely to be an announcement that Russian nuclear missiles were on their way – the absence of an announcement, would probably mean that London had already gone.

Beyond the amplifier bays, where Lines Department engineers could be hidden for days measuring frequency responses and adjusting line equaliser tappings to account for differing temperatures as the seasons changed, was a long row of operational desks, with a Formica style shelf for paperwork and a two foot upstand where the control and indicator functions for line routing were mounted. Much of the control function was over the Siemens uni-selectors, housed in their own cubicle, which routed incoming to outgoing circuits, and associated studios with recording booths or transmission suites, routing many functions at the flick of a sleeved Kellog Key. As well as the programme path, there would be control lines for telephone, red light signalling, cue programme feed, and so on, depending on the location of source and destination.

Much of the day’s work entailed making switches at predetermined times, all governed by an enormous booking sheet, which was distributed by London Control Room, via the BBC’s own Wells Fargo courier service. Every evening, after the busy news exchange period, it was one of the junior guys jobs to sit across a feed from London BH, which gave all the amendments for the following day and there were frequently many. At the end, the person at the other end gave their initials in word form – I particularly recall Apple Blossom, as London had many female TO’s, whereas Bristol was all male, except for one ageing TOF, (Technical Operator Female), who had joined the staff with a good many other young ladies during the war, most of whom seem to have left to bring up families with the husbands they had courted during the long dark nights, when much of the Bristol Control Room Operation had been moved to a tunnel in the cliffs of the Avon Gorge, near Brunel’s suspension bridge. The courier service mentioned above covered all BBC buildings, and there were many. It was possible, free of any charge, to send items by way of packages, equipment large and small, or mail from Plymouth to Kirk O’Shotts, for example, in remarkably short periods of time.

Bristol Main Control Room was normally only manned until shortly after BBC Television had gone off the air and the last function on leaving around midnight was to throw the UGH key. During Un-Guarded Hours, this allowed London BH Control Room to take control of feeds to some of the regional transmitters, in the event of circuit failure and was probably yet another of the cold war contingencies.

Main Control Room duties in Bristol, (as would have been the case in all regional centres), included manning the continuity desk when the West of England Home Service opted out of the national programme for news, weather and a regional slot in the Today programme. There were only about four, large, rotary faders – the national programme, diverted through a fader for the period of the opt-out, an announcer’s microphone and a spare, and the output of the adjacent tape machine room, which housed two EMI TR90’s, with remote start keys at the control desk. They were mostly used for trails for BBC radio and television programmes which had some relevance to the region. These trails were recorded during two sessions per week, fed from London BH by the same set of people who read the amendments to the lines booking sheet, and were followed by the obligatory exchange of initials. There was quite a blame culture in the BBC at that time, and everything had to be attributable to individuals, in case a problem arose. We had carbon copy EFR books, Engineering Fault Report, in which all technical faults were recorded and consequent repairs were described. London BH had OFR books as well, in which all operational misdeeds were supposed to be recorded for posterity, and I believe there were disciplinary consequences of totting up too many OFR’s, or even from making one big mistake. I think that OFR’s were placed in the individual’s personal file! We often used to get London staff on attachment to fill operational vacancies, and I believe that this was encouraged by the hierarchy in “the big smoke” because it injected London practices into the regions, but I recall one individual, who had a bit of a calamity at the Bristol continuity desk, being extremely relieved to learn that we didn’t have an OFR book, and the worst he could expect was a ticking off by the TOM and a request not to do it again!

The aforementioned trails were usually recorded by one of the Control Room juniors, such as me, in a recording suite on the same floor. This was well equipped for the time, with turntables and two quarter-inch machines, linked by a console which allowed comprehensive monitoring of each machine’s inputs and outputs. Once recorded, the twenty or so trails were topped and tailed with white yellow leader at the front to enable the tape to be laced up reliably on the playback machine, so as to place the beginning of the recording just before the playback head and enough red leader at the end so that the machine could be stopped and rewound without the tape becoming unlaced. These items were then put onto individual five-inch plastic spools. Red leader at the end indicated that there was nothing else on that spool and the title of the piece would be written on the white BBC printed leader at the front. When more than one item was placed on a spool, yellow leader was used between sections and this was the standard throughout BBC radio and television. Blue leader was also available, but I can’t recall what it indicated.

At that time, radio quarter-inch machines were usually full track, whereas some, if not all the machines in television tended to be twin track. When stereo arrived, the radio standard quarter-inch stereo machine differed from the television twin-track machines by having a specific width of guard track between the stereo tracks, which maintained separation between the legs and determined that when a stereo recording was replayed on a mono machine, the output level would be correct, and vice versa (i.e. a mono full track recording would peak appropriately when replayed on a stereo machine) – following the radio standard that M = (A + B) – 3dB. BBC stereo programmes were nominally modulated to PPM 5^1/4 (3db below peak) for central images, so that coincident signals on left and right legs achieved a mono PPM reading of 6, the accepted peak level, and maintained a comfortable subjective balance between peak signals on the extremes and more central sources. Lack of understanding by the remaining hierarchy when BBC craft heads were abolished eventually led to television adopting the commercial standard of M

• (A + B) – 6dB. A most aggravating departure from logic and strongly argued against by experienced practitioners, who I’m afraid were ignored by accountants and managers who seemed to think it was wasting signal not to peak to PPM 6 on both legs!

During my initial six month spell in the Bristol Main Control Room, I had my half-yearly interview for new recruits and commented that there was not always enough to keep young minds occupied. The aforementioned EiC, Mr Chalk, decided to act on this comment and initiated a weekly session for two young TO’s to take one or two amplifiers at a time from the bays of line sending and receiving amps for cleaning and testing. Each rack of amps included ten operational units, plus one spare amp and a switching unit, which put the spare amp in place of any of the ten main amps. So one of the London attachees and I duly started on this regime which involved a fan ventilated cabinet called a humidore, with a lance which sprayed the universal cleaning agent, Colclene into all the parts of the amplifiers which other cleaners could not reach. The valves were removed and tested on a comprehensive valve testing unit and any below par were replaced. Great fun, though probably not a very healthy occupation, as despite its energetic and noisy fan, significant volumes of Colclene spray escaped the humidore in the direction of our nostrils. During a morning, we managed five or six trips between the third floor Control Room and the testing area in the OB base building, so after two weeks, we had cleaned all the amps on one rack, including the spares. Before the third session, an edict was issued that all routine testing and cleaning of amplifiers was to stop, because more faults had occurred during our first fortnight than during the previous several years, including one particularly embarrassing loss of the Light Programme (now Radio 2) when the spare was switched in in place of the failed amp, only to prove faulty in itself! Proof early in my career, that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

One bit of first line maintenance that was actually required, quite frequently, was to clean dirty faders on the sound desk. The rotary faders on radio Type A and Type B desks had a spring clip at the side, which allowed them to be withdrawn from the desk one handed. A bayonet fitting metal rear cap then revealed the wipers and the circle of studs which provided the varying levels of attenuation, at a constant impedance of 600 ohms, in one or two dB steps. 600 ohms was the magic impedance which governed nearly everything audio and zero level was .775 volts into a 600 ohm load (and probably still is, although digital measurements often refer to the number of dB’s below peak).Two dB’s was reckoned to be the maximum step for a change in level which the average listener was unlikely to hear, so in the normal operating range of the pot, the steps were one dB

• almost undetectable by ear on programme material. The studs used to become slightly grimy and the recognised cleaning agent was Electrolube, applied with a finger and wiped vigorously over the studs, followed by a few rotations of the pot to clean the wipers. But many an operator preferred to use “nose grease”, obtained by wiping the finger up and down the side of the nose, (outside I hasten to emphasise), on the basis that it provided the required degree of cleaning and lubrication, but didn’t leave quite so much residue for dust and dirt to stick to. And, one always had a nose on hand, but not necessarily Electrolube, for it was not uncommon to have to clean a fader during transmission, after it had crackled its way up and down. It was quite a quick job and required no tools. When not on transmission, it was often sufficient to rotate the fader rapidly half a dozen times, but that was not advisable on air! Early television sound desks had quadrant faders which employed much the same arrangement of wipers and studs, but a screwdriver or a coin was required to release the fader from the desk and I recall that removing the covers to reveal the studs was less clinical than the bayonet covers of the radio faders. Later on, I became acquainted with BBC vision mixer quadrant faders, which looked to all intents and purposes just like their sound cousins, and these were notoriously prone to dirt, so in the regional news studio, it was standard practice to remove all the faders and clean them before transmission, which tended to make one’s nose rather sore!

The BBC used quarter-inch tape from a number of manufacturers and each had different characteristics, requiring different bias settings, so the standard line-up procedure involved replaying a precisely recorded line up tape of 1kHz tone and setting the machine output to peak PPM4. Then, with the chosen brand of tape on the machine, zero level tone was recorded whilst tweaking the bias setting to reach a maximum output level, then increasing the bias slightly more to achieve a one dB drop from the previous peak. Then the record gain was adjusted to make input and output levels equal. Despite setting the bias appropriately, different brands of tape produced different quality recordings, so it was essential to stick to the same brand of tape during any recording session.

Old hands had quite a few useful tricks up their sleeve when dealing with quarter-inch tape. For instance, we often recorded and edited The Living World during the morning and afternoon, for replay into Radio Four early the same evening. As there was not enough time for the tape to travel up to London on the “trunker”, as the BBC courier service was known, This meant replaying into Radio Four via one of the lines to London from Bristol, sometimes without enough timeto do a complete replay beforehand for timing and on more than one occasion, the producer revised her calculation of the running time after replay had started. If it was too short, London continuity would fill, but if it was too long, a judgement had to be made as to what point in the programme the tape operator would regain the excess time by feeding a short piece of jointing tape between the tape and the capstan, (sticky side away from the tape!) thus increasing the diameter of the capstan slightly and increasing the replay speed! Remarkably accurate adjustments were achieved, but in one instance a stand-in producer realised she was still over length by quite a margin and a second, slightly longer piece of jointing tape was added with about ten minutes to go and it always surprised me that nobody commented that the very familiar presenter’s voice was distinctly higher than usual towards the end of the transmission! But we came out on time!

During editing sessions, it was sometimes desirable to make a cut in a sentence, but the intonation might then seem wrong. Experienced hands would deal with this in an apparently cavalier manner by taking the section of tape between the thumb and finger of each hand and stretching it, possibly stretching the last syllable a little more. It worked every time, but I doubt that it would have been acceptable in stereo. When presented with the same problem, I was more cautious and copied the relevant phrase before stretching it, but it usually worked first time. I would also mark the relevant sections of the phrase with the ubiquitous yellow chinagraph pencil used in editing, so that I could see which bit to stretch, but the aforementioned old hands simply lifted the tape off the heads and judged what was required.

Quarter-inch tape came on 10.5 inch metal reels, with relatively open sides and a well wound tape was fairly dense and robust, but it was easy to wind the tape rather roughly, which meant a) that it didn’t pack tightly and could overfill the spool, and b) that the projecting spines would suffer damage in transit or storage. So before putting a tape to bed, it was always worth spooling to one end and then rewinding at modest speed in one fell swoop. Stopping part way often left an odd spine sticking out ready to be creased and such damage could often be ironed out for mono, but was less easily disguised in stereo, when the image would probably wobble.

One of the theories was that the spokes of the cheeks to the reels caused turbulence, causing the air to escape erratically from between the tape and the existing core and the faster the wind, the rougher the result. I usually put a twist in the tape before rewinding for storage and it was possible to wind at greater speed – a small matter, you might think, but one was often copying extracts from a number of sources on a pile of tapes, so saving half a minute on each of ten tapes allowed an earlier coffee break!

Some European broadcasters and record companies overcame this problem by using spools which had only one permanent side, usually an unperforated disc, with a removal top plate for storage and transportation. If you handled one of these, it was as well to get the spool up the right way before taking it out of the box, because it was not unknown for the removable plate to have become loose in transit, with predictable consequences once the spool was in free air! One hapless lady studio manager experienced an extension to the principle of one removable side plate, in that, presumably to save weight, a tape came from Germany with no sides at all and the first she realised this was when a high speed spiral of tape descended around her feet. In her confusion, she then dropped the whole reel and overbalanced, totally unable to avoid treading on the piles of tape on the floor. All was not lost however. A fair amount of tape remained on the core and a quick witted colleague, who I am too modest to mention, grabbed a razor blade and separated the remaining still wound tape from the now mangled remainder and slapped it on to a machine to wind it on to a BBC spool. Fortunately, only an extract from this programme was required, amounting to about ten minutes early on and it transpired that it had been sent tail out, so the piece we needed was still intact! Luck was with us, but whether the German broadcaster wanted the tape back I can’t recall – the certainty is that they never got it. One also had to be wary of external tapes which occasionally came oxide out ~ the audio was predictably muffled if you failed to put a twist in the tape to turn the oxide to the replay head, but one quite experienced colleague transmitted a half-hour music recording oxide out and despite comments on the quality from Third Programme continuity, was proud to announce that he had saved the day by using one of the new fangled RSA’s (Response Selection Amplifier) to wind in a bit of top. His pride was short-lived when a new recruit put a twist in the tape after transmission and demonstrated that it had in fact been a very good recording, though rather shrill until the equalization was taken out!

Other potential calamities with quarter-inch tape included discovering that if the Philips 2-track machines we used in the film dubbing suite were left in remote record-enabled mode, which meant they ran to record when the film was run, the erase head remained active even with the machine stopped. After recording a longish section of commentary, which then required a few nips and tucks, I did as usual and wound the tape back to find the end by hand. The Philips machines were particularly good for hand winding as the brakes relaxed after the spools had come to rest. I had been monitoring the commentary recording off tape as we went, so I knew it was OK and as I wound back, I heard the required end word in reverse and duly inserted red leader. The last section was fairly short, so I continued to wind back by hand, listening out for a cough to be removed. Cough located and marked, I popped in a yellow leader and checked that the section began as required, still winding by hand – absolute silence (well perhaps a bit of a whistle and some hiss, but definitely no speech). OK, perhaps I’ve joined up the wrong bits, though goodness only knows how, so I continued winding back, listening for the missing material, but this was definitely the bit before. My stuff must be on the floor, but no, silence there as well, plus a few grunts. So it must be after the red leader – no absolutely nothing there. So I wound back by hand again to identify the beginning of the next section – again fairly short – put in the yellow leader and took the machine out of remote so as to use the play button this time. As before, variable high pitched whistle and hiss, but no speech. Then realisation dawned. Because when rewinding the tape meets the replay head first, I was hearing what had been recorded, but as it went past the still active erase head, what I had just heard was being wiped and the whistle was down to the erase bias being shifted down in frequency as the tape was passing the head faster than normal speed whilst I was winding by hand!

I am mortified to have to say that the same thing happened to me again with a Nagra, which was the essence of high quality in a portable machine – the absolute standard for all professional recordists at the time and for many, many years until digital options became reliable. We were covering a gliding programme on a remote Cornish airfield, and our presenter, John Earle, had flown several times, complete with the notorious TM3 radio mics on him and his instructor. They worked like a charm over much greater distances than we could possibly have hoped for – absolute line of sight, of course, and a lack of buildings or other sources of interference at ground level. We were cock-a-hoop, except for that the fact that as the only sound assistant, I had to fit the radio mics at one end of the runway before take-off, which involved taping the wire aerials up and over the cockpit lid, once it was shut, then literally run down to the far end to be ready to take the aerials off again on landing, so that the cockpit could be opened! I was shattered and never more disappointed then to hear those immortal words on talkback – “That was absolutely fine, let’s do another take though, just to be sure!” I firmly advocated that the camera van should in future carry a folding bike and that a portaloo wouldn’t go amiss, particularly for the female production staff, but my pleas fell on deaf ears

In Bristol, I got a fairly good grounding at assistant level across the board in sound operations, for television studios and outside broadcasts, for radio studios, radio outside broadcasts and tape operations, for film dubbing and I even had a short attachment as floor manager for regional news in Plymouth. I was distinctly out of my comfort zone as FM – a very particular skill. Before I got my first promotion from Grade D to C minus, I also used to work on cameras fairly frequently, largely as tracker or tilt and swing operator on the Mole Richardson (un-motorised) dolly, but occasionally doing a pedestal mounted camera. It was extremely helpful to have dipped a toe in other people’s water, so to speak, as it improved the team spirit on a crew when you had appreciated at first hand the constraints of the other guy’s job. I say “guy”, because in my early days, there were no female technical staff in television. There were female studio managers in radio and film dubbing, and in the regions some of the SMs of both sexes also worked as vision mixers. Female staff were to be found in roles such as wardrobe, make-up, design and all the production secretaries, nowadays called PAs, were female.

As a sound assistant in television studios, one of the principal jobs was boom operation. Bristol had Mole Richardson booms, whose telescopic arms had the aggravating characteristic of being very front heavy at full extension and back heavy when fully racked in. Balance was attempted by a moving box full of lead weights, which travelled backwards and forwards on the shorter rear section of the arm as the microphone end moved in and out, but the designer’s maths had been at fault and decent balance was only achievable over about a third of the range. Weights were added or removed to compensate for the weight of the microphone in use, strictly speaking by unscrewing the lid of the counterweight box and securely mounting any additional weights before replacing the lid, but on programmes which required the full range, it was common to carry a couple of spare lead weights in a pocket, so that at full extension, one or two could be perched on top of the counterweight box, then removed again once racked in. What modern H & S staff would have said about this practice I dread to think, especially as there were audiences present for programmes such as the antiques show, Going for a Song, with the lovely Arthur Negus. Fortunately it was during rehearsal, but I once succeeded in hitting Arthur on the forehead with the very weighty ST & C 4033 which was our standard boom mic. To reduce rumble on the mic, it was held in the cradle by wrapping a piece of neoprene rubber around the neck of the mic before trapping it in a collar which was then tightened with wing nuts. Even so, it paid not to over-tighten the wing nuts, or the Sound Supervisor would soon be complaining about rumble every time the arm was racked in or out at speed. Going for a Song required quite rapid operation at times, so the 4033 was always clamped as loosely as possible, but on this occasion too loosely. The panel sat on chairs atop a flight of curved steps and Arthur would descend for one item to extol the virtues of a piece of furniture at floor level. As he stood up, they would cut to a wide shot, requiring a smart lift of the boom by several inches, but not too far as Arthur continued to speak throughout. I duly lifted the boom swiftly as the director called “cut” but momentum being what it is, the 4033 remained where it was and dropped to the extent of its cable, striking Arthur firmly mid-forehead. He had distinct indentations from the vanes on the mic and a pause in rehearsal was called, but there was no lasting harm and he would not hear me out for my fulsome apology, as he said I was only doing my job and he would introduce a slight pause in speech before standing up, so that I could clear the wide shot at a more leisurely pace and consummate broadcaster that he was, he was good to his word.

London and some other regions had Fisher booms, with about 3 feet more reach than the Moles and they were a joy to operate, with much better balance throughout the range, plus a platform which allowed the operator to swing over a much wider arc before falling off! The Mole platform had limited room for manoeuvre, so a tracker was required for anything significant by way of a swing, but I found that in London it was not uncommon for a Fisher boom operator to get down and track his own boom between scenes. The Mole also had a trap for unwitting operators, in that the tracking tiller doubled as the steps to the platform. So after a move, it was essential for the tracker to ensure that the tiller was firmly locked in the upright position – if not, when the boom op put weight on the top step as he climbed down, the tiller would flip outwards, striking the poor unfortunate firmly on the shin. Most of us developed a sixth sense of kicking the tiller before climbing down, to make sure it was locked.

The Mole boom was designed for efficient storage and transportation, so the platform sides folded down and the wheels could be pushed into the body to reduce width. This required two people, one to ease the weight of the dolly and the other to slacken the wing nut and slide the axle in or out, but one clever dick, (not me!) being a beefy sort of chap, arrived early one morning and decided to slide the axles out on his own. But he came to grief as the first axle he pulled out lacked its normal end stop and the wheel parted company from the boom. He was left holding the whole thing up, with no-one else on hand, and had almost given up when help arrived. Stern words were uttered as the consequences could have been dire, with personal injury and damage to the boom and adjacent cameras.

Later in my career I had one lucky equipment escape and a disaster. The lucky escape was at the gravel pits in South Cerney, Gloucestershire, where we were covering power boat racing. As usual for such events, we had Sennheiser 805 rifle mics mounted on each camera for FX coverage and, at the derig, I had gone out to collect the mic from a camera which was out on a little promontory, accessed via a narrow strip of gravel bank with water on either side. Being a cooperative sort of chap, I offered to help the cameraman take his camera back to the wagons. There was a cradle for carrying the camera with a handle at each corner, rather like a stretcher, and it stayed on that cradle when stowed in the camera van, to provide some vibration protection. The cameraman went in front and I carried the back end, with my 805 and cable sitting on top of the camera. As we moved along the narrow access path, I was relatively unsighted and did the classic trick of treading on one end of a bramble and then catching my other foot in the loop. I fell to one side, letting go of the handles and how that camera didn’t go in the drink I really don’t know. Even the mic stayed in place.

The second event was many years later, when as a TVC Sound Supervisor I was setting up the sound studio for a speech recording session. One of my colleagues had been playing the piano during his lunch hour and had left the piano just where I wanted to put the acoustic table (I haven’t mentioned them previously, but all radio studios had one and they were usually a beautifully crafted piece of oak furniture, with a robust woven script surface, which avoided the acoustic reflections a solid table would produce). So, I caught hold of one end of the upright piano to swing it around and immediately realised I was in trouble – one of the castors was missing and had been replaced by a heavy glass ashtray, which obviously stayed put. Fearful for my toes, I leapt back, leaving the piano to gravity. It fell backwards with an enormous thud and lots of the keys flopped out, like so many loose teeth – a colleague in the adjacent control room felt the concrete floor bounce! So I set up the acoustic table in another corner and shunted the monitors and microphones around, expecting an in-depth investigation to follow. But having reported the incident to the lady who supervised musical instruments at TVC, who promised to get the piano tuner to have a look, I heard nothing more! The piano disappeared and another arrived in its place, but I was always wary of missing castors after that. As I recall, the fellow SS who had put the ash tray in place of the castor, laughed like a drain and bought me a pint for my trouble! It occurred to me after the event that it was a great shame we had not been recording at the time, as the crash must have rivaled the Goons’ efforts at destroying a piano!

That same SS colleague was involved in quadraphonics experimentation, in conjunction with an SM from London BH. I was asked to help set up a monitoring position in the very same speech studio and we set about positioning four LS8’s, I rather fancy, quite powerful but not well liked. I sat in a chair and we measured the distance to each speaker with a piece of string, then he played me various bits off tape to check phase coherence. We started with the front pair and all was well. Likewise the back pair. Then he played the same track to all four speakers at rather higher level than before, but front and back proved to be anti-phase and the effect on my ears was devastating. It felt as though they had been sucked out of my head and I couldn’t make any judgement on sound for the rest of the day and even driving home seemed like an out of body experience.

For a very long period, Television Centre had a pair of “golden ears” in the shape of Sound Manager ‘D’. Whenever new speakers were brought in, or if anyone queried the performance of a speaker. Derek would turn up with his standard tape and spend a while listening whilst he made his assessment. Each Sound Control Room had two large loudspeakers and before the days of stereo, these were LS1 and LS2. LS1 was the programme output monitor whilst the other provided high quality prehear and most sources could find their way onto LS2. It also served as a spare in case LS1 failed. It never ceased to amaze me that because of room layout, spurious pillars, large areas of glass and what have you, the same source fed to both speakers could sound significantly different. Yet all these speakers had been through Equipment Department quality and comparison checks. Indeed, on one idle day, my gram op and I physically swapped the speakers in TC7 and the difference proved to be solely down to the room acoustic.

I once followed an esteemed SS on the current affairs late show – Midweek, in Lime Grove Studio D. He had done the previous couple of days and I was finishing off the week. On sitting at the sound desk, my suspicion was immediately aroused by seeing the huge amount of top wound into everything – particularly the studio mics. I got the crew to do a quick voice check but the mics didn’t sound over bright. So I swapped to the other speaker and cleaned out a month’s worth of ear wax in two seconds. The tweeter on LS1 had blown and my highly respected colleague, a first class music mixer who monitored at very high level, had compensated for what he heard by equalisation! He had probably blown the tweeter in the first place by listening to one of his music tapes at ear-piercing level. But it seems that no-one had queried the quality on the night.

Another greatly admired SS blotted his copy book by failing to rig a spare mic for a live transmission. It was absolutely standard practice to have a spare available for each location on any live programme. This particular Panorama involved only Richard Dimbleby and a whole studio’s worth of photo blow-ups, which Richard was to walk beside and discuss. The subject matter escapes me, but this programme involved no telecine or videotape – just Richard as the sole source of sound. Following the opening titles, the SS cross-faded to the boom and an eerie silence. Most would have had a second boom on standby, or at least a rifle mic or a hand-held, which the Floor Manager could have handed to Mr Dimbleby. But there was not a single other mic in the studio and Network had to take the programme off air. I have no idea how it panned out, but if they eventually returned to the studio, it would have taken some time for another mic to be obtained and rigged in the boom!

Not at the BBC, but for a former TVC SS, radio mics proved to be one guy’s undoing. Having got the job as Head of Sound forThe Big Breakfast, I believe it was, our former colleague had to take his turn at mixing the show. On one fateful morning, he had tested all the radio mics at the sound desk and thought they had all gone into the studio. When one interviewee’s mic did not work, he tried the others to see if the guest was wearing the wrong mic, swearing like a trooper throughout at his crew and unreliable equipment. Unfortunately, one of the mics that did work was still at the sound desk and his blue tirade was broadcast to the nation – or at least the early part, until continuity took them off the air! How the mic didn’t howl with the programme speaker is unexplained – he must have dimmed it – but there was no option but to resign with immediate effect.

One particular item of outboard kit which Bristol radio and television studios lacked during most of my nine years there was a limiter. Nowadays, it is difficult to imagine coping without a number of limiters and compressors, but at that stage the only devices were at the transmitters – transmitter protection limiters, because just a couple of dB’s over the top meant huge increases in voltage for the klystrons on the output to the aerial. I don’t know much detail of what Transmitter Department used, but when an SA1 from TVC was promoted as a Bristol Sound Supervisor, he managed to borrow a Gaumont-Kalee device, which was a large grey, trolley mounted unit with a fairly uninformative horizontal meter, which I understood at the time to have been designed for use at transmitters. It was not well received by the older supervisors but we sprogs were intrigued, although we failed to understand the limitations (pardon the pun) of over-reliance on the limiter to control modulation levels. One old hand, a very experienced chap, had a disastrous day when he let everything smash into the limiter and wondered why the studio was so noisy! Eventually, the Pye limiter appeared on the scene in portable racks and a former London Studio Manager who had become a Bristol ??? set about enlightening us all.

He had been a music specialist in London and continued in much the same vein, but soon made the limiter a fairly regularly used item in the television studio for all programme types, but his principle advice was that over-reliance on limiting and compression creates hearing fatigue for the listener, a fact which is borne out to this day by TV adverts and pop-music channels. It was often said that you could use Radio 1 as a line-up signal, because the PPM scarcely moved off its maximum! I find it difficult to stomach more than hour or so of pop radio, as everything is “optimised” and the ears become deadened, except to say that in a noisy environment, such as a moving car, or a factory, the constant noise background does the deadening and the music then seems to sit on top of it. In the early days of DAB, we had a demonstration by the guys at Kingswood Warren, the BBC’s research department in Surrey, and there seemed to be great promise of a compression function being embedded in the signal and receivers would allow the listeners to decide what ratio it operated at, or not at all, but I have two DAB radios at home which don’t seem to offer this facility and the one in the car has it as a menu item, which is scarcely convenient when driving. In the Bristol radio studios, I don’t think I ever saw a limiter, and that was up to the mid-seventies, but the film dubbing suite soon commandeered the Gaumont-Kalee.

The communications chain in the Bristol TV studio was fairly simple. The director had a normally open mic for talkback (TB) which was heard by most floor staff on wired headphones and was fed to speakers in lighting and sound control rooms, telecine (TK) and videotape (VT) when they were playing inserts to the programme. Only the floor manager had radio TB, and then no reply channel ~ he had to talk on the boom or go to a wall point to speak to the gallery. There was always a pair of long-lead cans standing by for the FM in case his radio receiver failed, and eventually somebody had the good idea of giving him a reverse TB facility on the back of the fold-back speaker. Cameras had no facility for talking back to the director at that time and had to call for the boom during rehearsal. On transmission or recording, the FM had to relay messages. Staggering really, because the camera headset could talk to the racks operator, but no-one had though of extending it to the director as was later the norm. PTB was also available in the maintenance areas, so they could respond quickly if things were failing. The Senior Television Engineer (STelE) (now called Resources Managers, or some such) was in overall charge of the studio and sat at one end of the Production Control Room (PCR), where he could also speak on PTB, with a non-locking key, as could the Lighting Director and the Sound Supervisor. The SS could also speak privately to his floor staff on Sound TB (STB), interrupting the director and the boom ops could reply to a small speaker on the sound desk. This same speaker had an adjacent Kellog key, which allowed the SS to listen to reverse TB (RTB) from TK or VT, but this was simply a passive switch, which joined the feeds together. The PCR also had the TK RTB on a speaker, and when the SS had thrown his Kellog key, Boom RTB would be heard in the PCR as well. This gave rise to several embarrassing moments, when boom ops were uncomplimentary to the director, unaware that their every word was reaching said director’s ears! Probably my first contribution to television communications was to take BRTB off this little speaker and feed it to a separate speaker and being in the region, we tended to undertake such minor modifications ourselves, although we were strictly speaking only “operators”.

Lighting also had a TB chain on which the lighting supervisor or the racks operator could talk, for follow spot operators and the like.

Many directors were inclined to lace their utterances with profanities, but a strict embargo on bad language had to be imposed in Bristol, when residents of Tyndalls Park Road complained that they were receiving Studio A’s radio TB on their TV sets and were appalled by the swearing!

Bristol TV OB’s were ahead of the studio in providing radio RTB for Stage Managers, as OB floor managers were known. Slight differences in title for apparently similar jobs often indicated that there had been a grading claim in one area which was not universal, so, for example the Studio Director in Sport was a Producer and the person who sat in the producer’s seat was called an Editor! London TV tape and gram ops became DSS’s, deputy sound supervisors, but that was not reflected in the regions.

On one memorable occasion, the Stage Manger’s radio TB was not working well and he came into the scanner to explain the problem. He was an experienced guy, having been a cameraman for many years, and as a biggish bloke ended up as one of the then fairly few hand-held camera operators before he became a Floor/Stage Manager. Having been in the scanner for a few minutes, when all seemed to be working well, he realised that the scanner’s air conditioning was switched off and he said, in all seriousness, that the reason his system wasn’t working ourside the scanner was because there was no air being blown out of the vehicle to carry the radio waves!

TV OBs had a particularly imaginative communications device for commentary positions – the Baron Box – named after its inventor. On a single 3-wire mic cable, it achieved TB, RTB and a phone circuit. I never did fathom out how it worked.

The Bristol TV studio sound desk was a BBC Equipment Department built DK4, which was basically a radio Type B mixer, with all the amps in a rack at the back of the SCR (Sound Control Room) but with quadrant faders, which enable more channels to be stacked in a given width than with rotary faders and make it easier to control a number of sources with one hand. It was possibly an error in design that in the radio version, which offered a whole two groups, switching a channel from group A to group B reversed the phase, and for simple radio programmes, this often sufficed when mics were out of phase, but I don’t recall any such foible on the DK4 – I rather think that the Bristol desk, at least, had a main fader in the middle, with a group fader on each side of it, which carried the output of the ten channels on each side of the desk, making a total of 20 channels in all and I think there may have been half a dozen “independent” channels, which went straight to output, for which clean feed outputs were provided. Not that I ever remember the Bristol studio needing clean feeds, this is the means by which a contributing source can hear the programme output, but excluding their own contribution. In that way, as long as speaker levels are reasonable, the clean feed can go on a speaker at the contributor’s end, without causing a howl-round. Radio in those days would simply use full programme sound, frequently off-air for live OB’s, and give headphones to those who needed to hear programme sound whilst their mics were open, but nowadays, with digital and satellite delays, even radio needs clean feeds, otherwise contributors hear themselves delayed on their speakers or earpieces – very difficult to be fluent when you are repeated in your own ear, sometimes seconds after you have uttered your pearls of wisdom. More of this later.

The Television OB truck, usually referred to as a Scanner, probably because of similarities with mobile radar units, had a rather more modern commercial sound desk, possibly Pye, but it was still relatively unsophisticated in terms of facilities. I don’t think it had any equalisation built in and certainly no compressors or limiters, but all the amps were housed in the foot of the desk. The philosophy perpetuated the old radio tradition that if what you heard didn’t sound right, then you moved the microphone, or possibly chose a different mic. Condenser mics, as they were then referred to, now capacitor, were popular for TV because they looked better in shot and some, notably the AKG C28 had a range of fittings which separated the capsule from the head amp on a slender, curved neck. The C29 was relatively short and well suited to seated interviews, or placing inside a grand piano, whilst the C30 was long enough to cater for a standing presenter or vocalist. A common combination was C30 on a singer, with a C29 on his or her guitar and a knuckle was also an option which allowed the capsule to be angled more accurately. Bristol TV OB unit had several Neumann KM54’s, which some said had a superior sound, but I was never in a position to compare. But as a Sound Assistant, the common most disliked feature of all capacitor mics was that the capsules suffered from damp and would periodically produce a constant “motor-boating”, which varied in pitch and rapidity, depending on the amount of damp. So wherever they were used, TV studios or OB’s, a supply of spare capsules was always on hand, usually sitting on top of the sound desk or a vision monitor – any source of heat – to dry them out. One other reason the Neumann found favour on the road was that the capsules were less fiddly. The C28 capsule had an extremely fine thread and it was very easy to cross-thread in careless hands. The trick was to rotate the capsule or extension backwards at first, ensuring that it was on squarely and as soon as a slight click was felt it was (usually) safe to reverse direction and tighten it.

Many TV programmes need a significant number of sources to be “ridden” simultaneously and with rotary faders, it needed one hand per fader, so quadrant faders were the obvious answer.

Because TV studios are much less dead than radio talks studios, even for a fairly simple multi-handed interview, it is rarely possible to simply fade up all the parties to their nominal level and leave them there. Particularly when working on personal mics, each speaker will be “coloured” to some extent by the fact that he or she is not only heard through his or her own mic, but also through each of the other contributors’ mics, which can lead to an unacceptably open sound. So, the current speaker’s fader must be at its nominal level, whilst the others are pushed back very slightly. The skill is to judge just how little to reduce the gain on the other mics, so that when someone else interjects, they are still clearly audible and can be brought up in level by a stop or two. The ability to recognise voices is obviously essential, often after only hearing a few words for level before the recording or transmission. And then, it’s no use relying on the answer to the standard question – “what did you have for breakfast” because experienced broadcasters will often be bored with that and mumble “toast”, whilst newcomers will answer at reasonable level and then suffer from red light syndrome by whispering when it comes to the real thing. Presenters often drop their voice level during interviews, sensitive to the topic, or not wishing to shout at a timid member of the public, perhaps. Then, as they introduce the next piece of VT with a prepared intro, up comes the voice level to normal and the mixer can often judge what level is coming from the intake of breath before speech. People like Frank Bough could present a problem, because his voice, in particular, was very loud and extremely intelligible, whereas he might be talking to a little mouse of a man two chairs away – Frank’s voice would often be as loud on the guest’s mic as the guest himself, but at a distance it would not match acoustically. So the mixers fingers would, (or should) be constantly on the move, controlling the discussion with one hand whilst turning over script, writing cue words or out words during a live show, using intercom to various people, speaking to sound floor staff, (for which there was often a foot switch), taking line-up from recently routed sources and turning round to give instruction to the tape and grams operator, amongst a dozen other things (including keeping an ear on the output and drinking a cup of tea, provided by the gram op!).

Similarly, in a situation comedy, one hand would be mixing the booms and what have you from the studio floor, whilst the other hand was riding the audience fader, to give maximum impact to laughter and applause, whilst minimising PA colouration during dialogue. A third hand would have been most useful! In fact, it’s difficult to think of a TV strand where it was not desirable to control multiple faders with a single hand – band balances need constant tweaking, whilst paying attention to the all-important vocalist and the audience.

For speech, auto-mixing devices became available, which would drop the gain by a dB or three on “quiet” channels and lift the gain for those who were talking, but they were not foolproof – when a group of British Olympic athletes were interviewed in the remotely controlled athletes’ village studio, the helpful British Olympics official who put their mics on failed to take account of the medals round their necks and every time a medal knocked a personal mic, it took precedence!

Other auto balance devices for single mic situations, such as the weather presenter, would set a level on peaks and then hold that level over a period, unlike a limiter or compressor, which constantly varied the gain according to the source level – the phrase “constantly moving gain platform” springs to mind. In practice, the fault with early versions of auto-level devices, was that although gain would set appropriately during rehearsal, there was invariably a period of quiet before going on air, long enough for the gain to recover to too high a level for the first few syllables on air. Obliging weather presenters would learn to cough during the last few seconds of the continuity link.

Commercially available radio mics also had quite sophisticated limiters, which were not always particularly evident in operation in quiet locations, but they could catch you out if loud sounds in the vicinity drove the limiter down. There was an overall fairly long term gain reduction which would respond to the average voice level, with a fairly fast limiter (attack and recovery) to catch excessive peaks. It was always wise to get the crew to check the input gain with the intended microphone, to ensure that the longer term reduction was not working very hard. If not, all may seem well at first, but after a period of quiet, the gain would recover, fairly slowly, so the next speech would begin rather healthily and in multi-handed situations, where only one person was speaking at a time, the gain on the other mics would be slowly recovering, presenting the mixer with varying colouration if the ad lib or fast moving nature of the programme required a number of mics to be open at once. I suffered a very uncomfortable ten minutes during a Playaway on my SS training course, when I had not got the crew to reduce the mic gains sufficiently and with four or five people contributing individual lines to a song with live accompaniment, the colouration on the band was all over the place!

But even if the mic gain was set up appropriately, sounds louder than speech would drive the gain down, so, once bitten, some time after I had got the job I was doing Nationwide and Ronnie Scott was coming in to be interviewed and play his saxophone. He and the interviewer would be standing and talking about items on display before he played, so it was an obvious situation for radio mics – at that time we did not use them as a matter of course – but I was determined not to be caught out again. When Ronnie was about to play, I would cross to the boom, which would sound better anyway, with a touch of echo from a plate in the basement. (There’s another topic!) Interview over, we enjoyed two or three minutes of sweet sax, before interviewer and Ronnie had a last few words. Back to the radio mics and the interviewer seemed rather quiet, but Ronnie was scarcely there at all, so I yelled to the boom operator and went back to that, still swamped in echo! A quick prehear on the radio mics proved that they were rather better than they had been, so I went back to them with everything flat out, then had to creep the gain back slowly as the radio mics recovered (Ronnie’s in particular, as you can imagine) over what seemed an eternity, but was probably no more than thirty second maximum. I realised my mistake immediately – I had worked on the basis that I would avoid problems by not using the radio mics during the musical bit, but of course, it makes no difference to the transmitter whether it’s faded up or not, it is still affected by ambient sound levels!

Being promoted from a region to TVC as a Sound Supervisor was something of an anomaly – most movement between London and the regions was distinctly away from the Big Smoke and those who arrived in Bristol expressed their disenchantment with what they’d left behind, so I was very surprised at the friendly and cooperative reception I’d received on the SS training course and this was continued when I got the job soon afterwards. The TVC I joined in 1974 was a throbbing hub of activity, with Lime Grove studios in full swing too, and a well-used Television Theatre on Shepherds Bush Green. But the studio sound installations were for the most part relatively unsophisticated by comparison with today’s equipment.

Some TVC studios still had the old DK4 desk that I was familiar with in Bristol, requiring an apparatus room at the back with bays of amplifiers. But there were other “more modern” desks in use. Several studios, had Pye desks, of the same vintage as the legendary compressor limiter, which found much favour at the Beeb as a rack mounted portable unit to supplement the desk’s installed units, if there were any. Pye limiters were often supplied as pairs in a rack, together with a couple of BBC RSA’s and were by far the best brick wall available for many years.

TC8, in particular, had one of the last, if not the last BBC built sound desk, whose title escapes me, which was a beast of a thing, but beautifully designed electronically. It maintained the philosophy that signal processing was not a universal requirement and provided a comparatively small number of limiters and equalisers – always one less than the minimum you required! It had the merit of an unbalanced insert jackfield, which allowed devices to be inserted in a particular chain whilst still in use, as long as you put the right end of the PO cord in first and I recall having to move equalisers from one channel or group to another during the course of a show.

Lime Grove TV studios had pale green EMI desks, with multi-splined Touchel insert jack fields.

One feature I recall of all the desks was that faults were quite common and it was unusual to pass a day without having to withdraw a module or two and swap them with others that the studio engineers had repaired.

There was also quite a rigid management philosophy that programmes fitted into categories and should be planned accordingly, because Studio Management might move a programme between studios at relatively short notice. Thus, Blue Peter or Tomorrow’s World might be scheduled into the enormous TC1, but due to other programmes over-running, for example, or a delay in setting and striking, it could on the day find itself in the very modestly sized TC7. So the available floor area would be restricted and it was expected that the technical facilities required would also not exceed what was possible in the lesser location. Rules were distinctly bent, particularly on the day once the show was definitely in the scheduled studio, but I do remember that Sound Manager A was adamant that even quite high profile shows should be made to fit the installed facilities and even well-established Sound Supervisors were nervous about being found with too much outboard gear, particularly in respect of channel capacity. Thus I found myself on the Sound Training course, in a DK4 equipped studio, given charge of the PA Fader, a stores bookable single rotary pot in a metal box with input and output jacks, which the ??? There was also quite a rigid management philosophy that programmes fitted into categories and should be planned accordingly, because Studio Management might move a programme between studios at relatively short notice. Thus, Blue Peter or Tomorrow’s World might be scheduled into the enormous TC1, but due to other programmes over-running, for example, or a delay in setting and striking, it could on the day find itself in the very modestly sized TC7. So the available floor area would be restricted and it was expected that the technical facilities required would also not exceed what was possible in the lesser location. Rules were distinctly bent, particularly on the day once the show was definitely in the scheduled studio, but I do remember that Sound Manager A was adamant that even quite high profile shows should be made to fit the installed facilities and even well-established Sound Supervisors were nervous about being found with too much outboard gear, particularly in respect of channel capacity. Thus I found myself on the Sound Training course, in a DK4 equipped studio, given charge of the PA Fader, a stores bookable single rotary pot in a metal box with input and output jacks, which the ??? There was also quite a rigid management philosophy that programmes fitted into categories and should be planned accordingly, because Studio Management might move a programme between studios at relatively short notice. Thus, Blue Peter or Tomorrow’s World might be scheduled into the enormous TC1, but due to other programmes over-running, for example, or a delay in setting and striking, it could on the day find itself in the very modestly sized TC7. So the available floor area would be restricted and it was expected that the technical facilities required would also not exceed what was possible in the lesser location. Rules were distinctly bent, particularly on the day once the show was definitely in the scheduled studio, but I do remember that Sound Manager A was adamant that even quite high profile shows should be made to fit the installed facilities and even well-established Sound Supervisors were nervous about being found with too much outboard gear, particularly in respect of channel capacity. Thus I found myself on the Sound Training course, in a DK4 equipped studio, given charge of the PA Fader, a stores bookable single rotary pot in a metal box with input and output jacks, which the ??? needed because the desk had too few channels for a Morecambe and Wise Show with a live band. I’ve forgotten what went through this fader – it was definitely not the PA, but I was charged with convincing Sound Manager A that it did, because he was sure to look in and query anything over and above the standard SCR installation!

Sound Management was most distinctly in control of even the big names amongst the hierarchy of Sound Supervisors. These were people whom junior floor staff trembled to address at busy times and they were quite rightly held in the highest esteem by their colleagues and production teams. It seems amazing nowadays that the SS has almost no management structure to back him up. On one occasion, I took over a series of discussion programmes in a small studio, TC5. The first half of the run had been planned and mixed by one of the “gods” of the sound art and I continued his exact formula. It involved eleven people sitting in a horse-shoe configuration, any of whom could speak at any time a bit like a Quaker meeting. Coverage was on two booms and I even took over the same crew that my esteemed colleague had used. TC5 had very noisy ventilation at that time and with two booms faded up most of the time, the ventilation noise was clearly audible. A sound manager came into the control just before we started recording and as the one minute VT clock was running, I faded up both booms in turn to check that they were OK, whereupon the sound manager commented “It’s noisy, isn’t it?” “Yes” I said. Then at 30 seconds to go he said “What are you going to do about it?” I racked my brains as to what obvious solution I had missed ~ I couldn’t think of an answer, certainly not one that I could implement at that late stage. At least he had the decency to go as I put the transmission lights on to cut the tone at minus ten seconds, but he left me worrying about what I had could have done differently. After the recording, I found him in the tea bar and posed the question ~ “Oh! You were quite right to stick with the ventilation noise” he said! “Your predecessor on this show has been complaining that it was dreadful and if you attempt to hide the problem by using anything other than the standard boom coverage which the show calls for, we’re never going to get the ventilation plant bearings and shock mountings replaced.” So my answer to him during the VT clock count-down should have been “Nothing!”, but I think he enjoyed making me sweat!

On first arrival, the Neve desk represented a massive change – it allowed great flexibility in arranging a desk layout as any channel could go to any group or groups, or none if a blind channel was going to control overall PA level, for example. It was an absolute rule in those days that before you could operate in a new installation, you must have been given the sound desk lecture by the SS who had overseen the latter stages of the project. Early planning and decisions on principle and choice of manufacturer were very much the realm of the Head of Television Sound and the Planning and Installation Department (P&ID), devolved to some extent to one of the four Sound Managers, with a Sound Supervisor getting involved after the decision making, to deal with the detail. Later, it became more common for SS’s to get in at ground level and the BBC had significant influence in desk design. For example, commercial studios, particularly the recording industry used faders which moved away from the operator to increase volume. But for broadcast and ‘as live’ recording, it was highly desirable to park all the unwanted faders away from you. This had several advantages. Firstly, if all the faders were near you when not wanted, it was quite easy to catch a fader with the edge of a script or a jacket sleeve and knock it off its back-stop. If there was tone on that channel, or a high level source, that would be quite noticeable on the output. Secondly, channel labelling was better away from the script ledge where it could be obscured by scripts, but with the fader knob at one end of the channel and the label at the other, there was always the risk of parallax error. Then there was the purely physical fact that it seemed more natural to pull sources towards you when you wanted to increase their audibility, particularly the audience fader on sitcoms, which needed to be pulled with great rapidity over a significant part of the fader travel. One well-known exponent of the audience reaction art was rumoured to use an elastic band to ensure that the audience fader would shut as quickly as possible after he had grabbed the required reaction.

Many other desk manufacturers came on the scene over the succeeding years and one in particular found benefit in cooperating with the BBC over desk design. TVOB’s were particularly influential in persuading them to make the modules as slim as possible in order to accommodate more channels in the restricted width of an OB vehicle. I was present at a later meeting where, ironically, a plea was made for less tightly packed desks, to allow a little extra width for the all important channel labelling, and simply to enable less agile fingers to manipulate one knob without disturbing its neighbour! Steve Jagger of Calrec was amusing in his reply and the modules stayed the same width!

The next great development in desk design was probably the advent of motorised faders and memory for fader settings. At TVC, the first of these desks appeared in Sypher – Synchronous Post dubbing with Helical scan VTR and Eight-track Recorder. For some considerable time, it had been possible to use the time-code recorded on the programme tape to trigger ‘events’, such as a sound effect being played, or an auto cross-fade happening, but there was no way of recalling the desk’s fader settings. But with motorised faders, this suddenly became a reality. As the dub progressed a time-code linked control system recorded the position and movement of all faders on the desk, so that subsequent passes of the same passage of the programme would replicate the balance achieved on the previous pass. Touch sensitive fader knobs were developed, so that the SS could take any fader out of motor control simply by putting a finger on it, and the new settings would then overwrite the original. Dropping into record now produced an almost guaranteed seamless join with the previously dubbed section, provided that any additional FX and music were also present at the right level and timing. Audiophile provided the tape and gram operator, the DSS, with the tools to achieve that, but Audiophile is another topic on its own, best described by others.

Next came digital control, which presented the option of controlling many more of the desk parameters automatically, including eq, PA and foldback levels, channel and group routing, insertion of limiter/compressors and so on, with the desk functions being stored and reproduced by a computer. Whole desk set-ups could be stored under individual file names, so that regular, complex shows could be set up quickly, but these were static configurations, so alternative balances for a music show, for example, could be recalled during the course of a programme, but the early versions of computer controlled desks still had analogue audio paths and there were pitfalls in automatic control, because the computer remembered everything, and whilst the band balance may have been stored as per the band-call, the computer will not have known at that time what you wanted to do with the boom and the audience faders later on, and you could find yourself resetting the band and fading out the presenter, because that fader hadn’t been open during the band call! So some faders had to be taken out of remote control, but if one had been forgotten, the computer was unforgiving. A few early embarrassments laid the ground rules for subsequent operational practice and continuing development of control systems.

Eventually, fully digitised desks appeared and the whole ball-game changed. Others will be better qualified to cover these and subsequent developments as it’s over twenty years since I bowed out, but not only major installations benefitted from this development – quite compact portable desks offered huge functionality compared to similar sized analogue desks. However, the absolute essential is operational familiarity, because multi-layered menus leave some functions relatively inaccessible during a busy mix, especially for the occasional user. For example, my son-in-law is a seasoned exponent of the art of digital audio handling, but when he and I became involved in providing a set-up at a junior school, we quite separately concluded that the mixer should be analogue with a button or knob per function, so that even untrained users stood a chance of using it with some understanding of what’s going where, and what eq has been introduced.

One of my own areas of speciality became communications. As I mentioned earlier, the basic point to point intercom functions between individuals in the programme making chain was largely the province of the studio engineers – Production TB, (PTB) distribution being the foremost requirement, with the ability for many stations to reply to the Director on a key, or foot-switch in the case of the SS – one foot-switch to the director and the other to Sound TB (STB). Not unknown though for people to use the wrong foot and direct a torrent of abuse at the wrong individual! There would be a dozen or so intercom stations in a standard studio, each able to talk to the others on individual keys. Thus sound to director, technical manager (under whatever title was flavour of the month) lighting, engineers, graphics desk and so on. The SS, TM, LD, Engineers and others would also be able to inject onto PTB – with discretion, of course, but I often felt sorry for presenters who used open TB on their deaf-aids at having to hear all the rubbish that went on during rehearsal, when all they wanted to hear was the director and occasionally the producer. But they would hear lighting talking to cameramen, sound talking to the floor manager (FM) the TM talking to Network, or anybody else he needed to address.

In the early days, talkback was not specified to a very high quality and the combination of indifferent microphones and headphones did not lend themselves to optimum intelligibility, especially when floor staff were working in high sound level environments, such as pop music shows involving live bands. When I first joined in 1965, it was not uncommon to find telephone operator style headsets used for the production staff, but even the stalk mics in use were not of the best. With a new generation of sound and communication systems came the realisation that PTB, in particular, should be generated at good quality, with the optimum separation between the wanted speech and background noise, such as the programme speaker. So in the late seventies, I would guess, it became quite common to find programme quality cardioid mics at every position with access to TB and the frequency response and distortion characteristics would be quite tightly specified.

David Coleman was possibly the first presenter to ask for open talkback to be fed to his deaf-aid, which, of course, would have been wired in the early days, along with his cabled personal mic, at first the large grey Electrovoice BK6, later the neater AKG D109 and eventually the generation of significantly smaller mics, starting with the Sony ECM50, aided and abetted by increasingly reliable wireless systems. Though even the ECM50 seems large nowadays by comparison with current options from a number of manufacturers.

And deaf-aids have also improved beyond recognition, from the uncomfortable standard devices, with the transducer in the ear, requiring much fiddling to hide the cable, to the individually moulded clear plastic devices, which form so much better a seal with the ear and connect to the transducer via an acoustic tube, which can be much less obvious, though the curly ones are often more evident than desirable. There is an amazing impedance through these connecting tubes and blowing through one to clear the inevitable ear-wax was no small task. Ear wax was the usual problem when a presenter complained that his or her deaf-aid had failed. Eventually, in Sports Department, we persuaded the Floor Managers, who were part of the production team, that they should be responsible for the presenters’ ear-pieces, including cleaning and bring the appropriate ones to the studio each time. Sound then merely had to provide a working transducer on the set and presenters would often arrive in the studio already wearing the acoustic bit. For guests and forgetful presenters though, we still had to keep a stock of “standard fit” in-ear pieces, in three sizes, with left and right options, which then needed thorough cleaning after use and keeping tabs on them took an inordinate amount of skilled operator time.

Nowadays, companies like Garmin produce a moulded device which includes the radio receiver and fits almost inconspicuously in the ear. (I’m not sure if this is the same Garmin as is well-known for satnavs.)

One well known problem for presenters who used deaf-aids was reduced sensitivity (deafness) of the ear they normally wore the deaf-aid in. Particularly for programmes like Grandstand, when, over the course of a day, the ear-piece may have been in for seven or eight hours. The likes of Des Lynam and Steve Ryder always wanted enormous levels of talkback, with their own mic and studio, or OB guest mics mixed in. For years, I tried to persuade them to try using two deaf-aids, because the increased intelligibility this offered meant that the audio level could be reduced significantly, but they didn’t like the acoustic isolation this created from their surroundings, even though we offered them prehear feeds and the ability for the Floor Manager (FM) to inject into their ear-piece feed.

When we designed the first generation of portable kit to handle overseas sports operations, we took into account the fact that the presenter did not need to hear everyone who was able to speak on Production Talkback (PTB) and fed the presenters from discrete feeds of the mics they did want to hear. This had the added bonus that the balance of director, editor and production secretary could be different for the deaf-aid feeds from the balance to everyone else, who invariably wanted less of the editor. We could probably have cobbled this up at TVC as well, but the inherent problem was that when PTB was cut, the feed to the presenter remained open and because sport was not always in the same studio, modifications of that sort were difficult to get done. But when sport moved permanently to TC5, we engineered the whole requirement into the Drake digital system, which allowed enormous flexibility through software control, but even so, needed significant customisation to achieve all that we wanted. The Drake system, and others of the same vintage and later, involved a single large matrix, with quite respectable audio quality. The TC5 system was installed in around 1997, and was based on the Drake system which had been specified for 1992 Winter and Summer Olympics, taking account of a few of the lessons learned on the overseas kit. Being the first major build of its type, most of the hardware for the Olympic kit was customised and there were two distinct levels of programming, which was not ideal. The basic structure was formatted by standard Drake software, which had been written for implementing fixed intercom/TB systems, which, once set up, rarely needed alteration. Re-writing, then loading the modified programme was not for the faint hearted and the system was irretrievably out of action, which could take some time once the load function was started. And chances were that some little pitfall had not been spotted off-line, so that a second re-write and load were needed. This meant that any mods were only likely to be tackled during long breaks, which were often unavailable when working back to the UK from a significantly different time zone, but for the Olympics we needed live control over many aspects of routing and level control. So, a second tier of software control was implemented, using customised screens on dedicated lap-top PC’s. These screens were largely based on the physical panels which the BBC Special Projects team had built for us after the Moscow Games, and provided visual indication of cross-point status and level control.

For Sport, over many years the studio installations had been supplemented with a variety of additional gear to provide additional switched talkbacks (SWTB) and production monitoring for incoming programme and communications circuits, but when TC5 became dedicated to Sport, we provided enough capacity to cope with the maximum number of sources the studio could accept. The standard number of Outside Sources catered for in most studios was 6, encompassing incoming lines from CAR, two-way talkback circuits, clean-feed outputs and telephone control lines. This had been increased to 12 over time for studios which accommodated sports programmes and there was still a tendency for Studio Management to shunt programmes around on occasions, so Studio E at Lime Grove and a couple of the small studios at TVC were also equipped on the studio floors with Special Projects multi-connectors for the “Grandstand Trunking”, which catered for the large number of sub-editors and graphics artists (Wurmsers), usually in shot behind the presenter. These were roughly six foot lengths of large section square electrical conduit, with mic points for the lip ribbons, main and spare, used by Len Martin and his successor, Tim Gudgin to read the racing and football results and despite the same man appearing in that role week after week for years on end, the standard direction from Grandstand’s long time director, Martin Hopkins, was “Cue the lip!” The Grandstand trunking also included telephone sockets, talkback outlets, reverse talkback points and probably something else I’ve forgotten. The originals were notorious for presenting faults and when it came time to replace it with a new version, I recall heated discussion about how it should be implemented and whether the wall connectors should be changed. The principal reason that it went faulty though, was that it was the most awkward kit to store and when Grandstand moved between studios, it was probably not handled all that gently.

But when Sport got their dedicated studio in the late nineties, we took a completely different approach and the Drake digital system, built on much the same hardware and software foundations that had provided our second generation mobile Olympics kit, served virtually every required function through the digital matrix. Unlike the Olympic system, most of the positions provided used standard rack mounted panels, but the Director ended up with a custom built panel of some twenty columns of knobs and push buttons, the SS’s had customised panels to fit into the space available in the sound desks and the old Grandstand Trunking functions were provided by a range of customised boxes based on standard panel electronics and software. Best of all, the Racing Hotline was finally a thing of the past – superseded by the mobile phone. And another archaic bit of kit was also dispensed with, in the shape of the “Bof-phone”. This had been devised by the Special Projects department to enable the programme editor to talk to the presenter without using TB, which everybody heard, and meant that whilst the editor talked to the presenter’s deaf-aid, the director could continue to speak on TB, relatively uninterrupted, as long as the editor remembered to move away from the TB mic whilst speaking to the presenter on a modified telephone, which interrupted the standing feed of TB and substituted the telephone mouthpiece. On the floor, the presenter’s mic and deaf-aid were fed via a box which used a phantom circuit to ring the editor’s phone. This ringing function had long been rendered redundant by the use of microphone prehear feeds to the production team, which meant that if the presenter spoke whilst not on air, he/she should still be heard by the director and editor. I say should, because there was a tendency for the production team to have presenter prehear so loud that the amount of colouration on TB made it difficult for the SS to judge what it sounded like on air. Good directors remembered to cut prehear, or wind it down appropriately, but the SS would often have to take the initiative by cutting the feed at the sound desk. Invariably, one or other would then forget to restore it once we were back on VT or an OB. Drawmer to the rescue, (other noise gates and duckers are available) and the practice was soon established that the presenter’s prehear was fed to the PCR via a ducker which had a post-fader feed of the presenter’s mic as key, so that if the presenter was live on air, the PCR prehear feed was cut. Fader back-stop functions could have been used, but they required engineering effort for every channel that might be used for the presenter from programme to programme. Using an outboard device meant that there was complete flexibility in desk layout and it would also work in other studios.

Drawmer duckers were pressed into service by the score – for the Dallas Football World Cup we devised a means of sending a single clean feed from London, destined for one or both matches being played in the states. Dallas BBC control room could then supplement that clean feed with its own sources, avoiding the double delay inherent in taking a complete clean feed from London, but we wanted a system whereby speaking to one match from London would not interrupt the clean feed to the other match, so in Dallas, a Drawmer ducker was set up for each match with the London talkback for that match as key. Thus, when the London production team spoke to Match A, it’s clean feed was dipped, but Match B’s clean feed was unaffected. This was one of the joys of using duckers as opposed to the traditional hard switches associated with switched talkbacks, because for the commentators at the far end, it was much less jarring for the clean feed of programme sound to be lowered subtly and recover subtly, than just to be switched on and off abruptly.

The principle was then employed en masse for the Saturday afternoon sound only reports from football grounds into Grandstand. The half-time and full-time match round-ups were high speed affairs, and with up to 20 match reports on occasions, the director could not cope with enabling and disabling the prehear feeds of the incoming reports, as well as pushing buttons to speak to people or enable their feed of cue programme (almost always a clean feed). So a Drawmer unit was inserted in each prehear feed to the PCR, keyed from the channel sep out for the report concerned, so when the reporter spoke on air, the PCR feed was cut. Many grey hairs were saved by Drawmer’s inexpensive, but very effective little units.

Mention of the sound only football reports into Grandstand opens another topic which demands a chapter on its own, to describe the various stages in the development of Commentator Operated Outside Broadcast Equipment, the COOBE, as it was first named. But I will simply touch on the fact that the dedicated analogue Post Office lines installed at each ground, which had served over many years, were superseded in the nineties by ISDN which solved many of the problems associated with analogue COOBEs, particularly the appropriate routing of the music and control circuit for each ground, but created the need for individual clean-feeds to be generated for each reporter, because the delay inherent in the digital system meant they could no longer be fed complete programme, as talking against your own voice delayed is very off-putting.

That had been one of the major considerations in handling overseas events too, where satellite delay was significant even in the analogue domain. Traditional two-way working over terrestrial circuits had allowed a loudspeaker on the studio floor at each end, fed with the other party’s clean-feed and as long as loudspeakers were sensibly positioned and controlled in level, all was sweetness and light. Neither party was concerned by even quite significant amounts of their own voice being picked up on the far end mics and thus coming back on the clean-feed and it always surprised me how little colouration was noticeable on the output for even quite high levels of spill. But as soon as there is delay in one of the routes, 250ms for one satellite hop, any spill is clearly audible and very off-putting for the “talent”. Obviously, putting everyone on deaf-aids is one solution, but that was awkward when whole athletics or football teams were involved and there was an understandable production reluctance to require non-broadcasters to wear ear-pieces, although that is less of an issue nowadays. So, it became common practice to put a noise gate in the outgoing clean-feed. This demanded even more careful control of floor loudspeaker position and volume, to ensure that whilst the presenter was not speaking, i.e. listening, the amount of spill from the loudspeaker was well below the threshold set on the noise-gate. It took many years to inculcate this as standard practice in all clean-feeds where delay might be expected, but there can be very few external contributions to modern broadcasts which are not fed via digital routes, or even by satellite over even short distances. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a “live” television broadcast nowadays as even the simplest mic/camera combination passes through several stages of digital delay, including the processing in the domestic receiver, as anyone with an analogue and a DAB radio in the house will have noticed. Even the Greenwich Time Signal can no longer be used to set a watch or clock accurately from a digital radio and if you have two digital receivers on the same channel, unless they are of exactly the same make and generation, the chances are that they will not be in time with each other. We have two Samsung Telvisions of similar age, but they are something like half a second out of sync eith each other.

By virtue of embedded audio, digits have largely overcome the likelihood of a major disparity in path length between vision and audio, but, as iPlayer proves only too often, sound and vision can easily slip slightly out of sync, requiring a moment in ‘pause’ to get them back together again. Indeed, ever since the days of Quantel, digital processing of the vision signal has introduced sufficient delay as to disturb lip sync and sound staff became well used to trying to determine by eye and ear whether speech and lip movement are coincident, although it’s common to have a variance of opinion. But during any significant length of speech in reasonably close shots, it’s fairly easy to decide whether lip sync is good enough to give confidence that sound and picture match, although for slight differences, many have difficulty deciding whether sound is early or late. The usually accepted mantra was that a frame’s delay of the audio was the maximum which might go unnoticed by the average viewer, consistent with the fact that in real life, sound travels more slowly than light, but if the sound is early, i.e. vision is delayed, then half a frame was enough to be disconcerting because it contradicts normal experience. In round figures, vision delay beyond 20 ms was worthy of correction, and digital audio delays were an easy and relatively cheap solution, but it was a long time before it was possible to delay vision if the sound was late.

Satellite delay was of a quite different order, 250ms per hop and in the early days of satellite contributions, particularly for sport, it was quite common to have a single vision output from the foreign location via satellite, with an accompanying audio, but several associated sound signals would be routed back to the home country by totally different routes, probably terrestrial. The standard provision of feeds from the Olympics, for example, involved a main BBC output, (as indeed for other broadcasters and countries) which would have an associated main audio for the mixed programme and probably a second circuit for clean effects/international sound. This was pre-stereo, of course. The distinction between clean effects (CFX) and international sound, was that CFX would not be expected to carry any speech, other than general crowd or athlete pick-up, whereas for international sound, the basic rule was that if you could see it, you should also hear it, so in-vision interviews would be included in the audio.

So, these audios would arrive in the home country, nominally in sync, but vision synchronisers would invariably put them out by a frame or two. In addition, for Europe, the EBU usually provided three outgoing feeds, each with an associated audio carrying international sound, to provide a selection from the principal events taking place at any one time. The BBC usually supplemented the three EBU feeds with commentary from the relevant event (if we got our act together, but mistakes have been known!) and in the overseas BBC control room, we had dedicated four channel Shure mixers, to allow quick changes, or the generation of an audio ident (another subject for explanation). We also added simple parametric equalisers to these commentary chains in the overseas control room, to account for the vagaries of analogue circuits. Indeed, in the days of analogue international circuits, hours were spent in squeaking lines (measuring frequency response) and making noise and cross-talk measurements. Then, if a circuit was rejected for under-performance, the rigmarole had to be repeated when it was replaced. It had long been the case that BBC Sports Dept considered good quality commentary circuits to be worth the expense, because of the listening fatigue engendered by long periods of telephone bandwidth speech, but of course, the increases in bandwidth were incremental, so you would get about 3.5 kHz from a bog standard line, perhaps 7.5 kHz from the next option, then a pretty generous 15kHz, our preferred standard, although 10kHz would almost certainly have sufficed. (In these days of digital circuits, a truly binary situation has evolved, in that circuits either work, or not, without much grey area in between ~ occasionally a few splats and garbled speech may occur, but it seems generally to be a case of satisfactory sound, or silence.)

Back at home, each commentary circuit was delayed appropriately and matched against the relevant EBU vision feed, for distribution to sub-mix areas, who in turn fed VT with a mix plus clean, equalised and level controlled commentary, and clean equalised and level controlled effects. The sub-mix output was also made available for the likes of news, or regional interest, and the main mixer for the sport transmission would usually take the mixed feed, rather than doing their own mix.

It was often possible to predict the amount of delay required for sound to match picture within a frame or two, but precise measurement during line-up procedures was highly desirable, otherwise the first opportunity to judge lip sync might well be a piece to camera for transmission. It was usual in the early days of any event for very expensive satellite time to be booked strictly as required, so it was undesirable to spend time determining sound and vision sync by eye. We were in the process of discussion options for inserting coincident signals in sound and vision as part of the line-up process, when one of the managers in the International Control Room at TVC remembered that a device had been produced by News Special Projects for use in telecine areas, which seemed to be the basis of what we were discussing. A quick phone call established that said device was about to go in the skip, but that it still worked and might indeed be capable of modification to suit our purpose. In the event, new prototypes were built, which inserted a line flash at the top of picture and a DTMF (dual tone multi frequency) pulse in the audio, the same sound which you hear when dialling on a telephone. DTMF was chosen because it meant the receiver was less likely to be fooled by spurious bursts of single frequency tones. The receiver compared the leading edges of these sound and vision signals and gave a digital read-out of the difference in milliseconds. And so Hot Lips was born and was a success from its first outing, except that the vision department was not always happy that their colour bars were corrupted by an occasional flash, so we were encouraged to make a quick judgement (now quite realistic) and then switch it out of circuit. Two or three sets were built in-house, but Canford Audio built a commercial version soon afterwards.

Hot lips would have helped enormously for a program I got involved with during the first Gulf War – Christmas With the Gulf. Essentially a Songs of Praise, the singing was to be led by a largely military congregation at a church in Aldershot, handled by OB SS John Caulfield, with congregations of further military personnel at Fällingbostel in Germany and at a location in the Gulf, all joining in to sing in sound and vision sync! It was quickly realised that there was more involved than could be handled by the Aldershot OB, so TVC staff were included in the early planning. I still have the paperwork somewhere, but forget the precise details at the moment. Suffice to say that there were many satellite hops involved and that the timing from Germany was different from the Gulf. The whole project was only made viable by the sudden availability of two vision delay devices, which had been released from a commercial project, making hitherto unheard of amounts of video delay a practical proposition. So the simple theory was that the Aldershot output would be fed to Fällingbostel, where they joined in and passed a feed on to the Gulf, where they in turn joined in, whilst London received clean feeds of the Aldershot, German and Gulf signals for transmission. Vision feeds from Aldershot and Germany were individually delayed to match the arrival time of the pictures from the Gulf and all three sound feeds needed delay to account for satellite delays and vision synchronisers. To establish what the loop delays were, we sent the good old speaking clock,TIM on the clean-feed circuits, which each of the international events returned to us on their main output, so that we could measure the difference by comparing a feed of delayed TIM against the return feeds, and listening for them to get in phase as we tweaked our local delay, which then gave us the figures required for each of the transmission delays.

The event was originally planned to go into Presentation Studio B at TVC, as no studio floor was required and as much planning went into determining where the stack of outboard audio kit could go in a small shared control room, as into the mechanics of the programme. In the end logic prevailed and at the last minute we were given TC3 instead, but although this meant plenty of room for the kit, it was nearly our undoing! All the initial planning had involved the Studio B S.Tel.E (Senior Television Engineer) who understood exactly what we were about and we had agreed between us that what was absolutely essential was for the vision routes to be made synchronous and then locked off, before we could get accurate figures for sound. We also insisted that we needed a half hour line-up, unheard of with the cost of satellites, but BT were generous because of the nature of the programme and I believe the satellite feeds were essentially free. But the move to TC3 meant a change of personnel and the handing on of much paperwork and last minute briefings. But something got lost in the translation and as we readied ourselves for the first accurate audio measurement during the generous half hour line-up, we got a rough result whilst pictures were being synced and once we established that vision were happy, quite quickly found sync for one OB, but whilst we were measuring the other, the first went awry. So we started again, with the same problem. After much head-scratching and mild panic as the recording time ticked ever closer, one of the studio engineers popped his head round the door and said that they were having a problem, because every time they tweaked the vision delay to get the OB’s synchronous with each other, something changed with the sound and they were chasing their tails! Funny that, I said – we’re having the same problem – please put the vision delays back as you first set them and then put your hands in your pockets. Suddenly, we had sync for all three sources, with only minutes to go before the length of the recording would be compromised because there was a hard cut-off on the satellite time. Fortunately, the whole show went smoothly, with hardly any retakes as I recall, but boy were we glad that the production team had been persuaded against their original plan of going live!

By the end of my time as a Sound Supervisor with Aunty, the move towards fully integrated digital systems was well under way, but there had been quite a long cross – over period when the mix of analogue and digital sources, which meant that when we planned the final refurbishment of TC5 for Sport, there was still a toss-up as to whether it was worth going to the extent of installing a digital sound desk. (TC5 is now one of the casualties of the disastrous decision to rip the heart out of TVC – one of the most inspired designs in its field. Why it had not been listed as a graded building I shall never comprehend.)

So, for the seemingly brave new world of a dedicated complex for Sport, as had existed for News over many years, we chose a Calrec analogue desk, which was built in time to go to Atlanta as our main desk for the Olympics in 1996. The requirements for the Olympics and for TC5 were substantially the same and both installations benefitted from dual funding and it was not uncommon for equipment for a permanent installation to be bought early for use on a temporary project. TC5 was envisaged as a “largely cordless” operation. But delays and shortage of funds meant that much of the intended jumpering (does that need explanation?) was not completed by the time it went on air, so far from being cordless, there was a mass of plugging. My colleague Jim Cadman became heavily involved in the detail and was allowed to go on a CorelDraw course, with a view to preparing the paperwork in general and, as it transpired, the jackfield labelling in particular. The labels which the SCPD system generated automatically were woefully inadequate and almost unreadable. There had been a practice of inserting coloured lighting gels over the labels in the channels above each strip of jacks, to identify particular functions, but it was so much easier with CorelDraw to incorporate the colour in the label itself, particular where very few jacks in a row required a particular colour. Although this proved to be a very time consuming process, making the jackfield negotiable by a wide range of staff was essential because the TC5 installation differed from all other studios, and the policy was that all Sound Supervisors and Deputy SS’s could expect to be scheduled to appear there from time to time, but it soon became established that at least one of the SS’s should come from a relatively small group of staff who had become very familiar with TC5 and the sport operation in general.

Principal circuits between the studio and CAR/CCR, (whatever it was called by then), were now on fibre, whilst a lot of the peripheral stuff was still on copper and this leant weight to the idea that two interlinked matrices should be installed, one digital and the other analogue, but both controlled by the same BBC devised computer control system – BNCS. This enabled the then fairly revolutionary idea for TVC that most outside source routing to the sound desk could be via the matrix and by installing a MWW matrix of sufficient size as to match the potential number of sources which might require a clean feed, a nice degree of logic crept in. We applied the same principle to incoming and outgoing talkbacks for the twelve main sources, so that any given Outside Source line would always use the same numbered clean-feed and four-wire talkback routes. This followed through nicely to the Drake digital comms system, which used a 256 square matrix, configured to allow the Director’s custom built panel to control many more functions than were traditionally offered. So, for example, a CUE assign button allowed the director to enable clean feed to commentators feedback and/or to the production coordination circuit, functionality and status indication also being accessible by the Studio Resources Manager and the SS, so everybody could check facilities during line-up, without bothering the director, or confirm during transmission that he or she had done the right thing.

The Senior Sport producer at the time also chose to complicate the TC5 situation by using Virtual Reality (VR) to place the studio presenter and guests in the heart of the OB action, or to put a variety of backings behind them. The issue for sound was that the delay introduced by VR put the pictures out of sync with sound, easily solved for transmission by a delay line, but then, if the Production Control Room monitored line out or off-air, so that they saw sync pictures and sound, programme sound heard over TB was delayed in the presenter’s ear. The alternatives were for the PCR to listen to pre-delayed sound and accept that their sound and pictures were out of sync, or to listen to delayed output, (for preference off-air during live transmissions), and use very close TB mic technique, with the output of the three principal PCR talkback mics being gated to keep programme sound spill to a minimum. The second option was adopted and worked extremely well, but definitely added to the fear factor for SS’s who were not very familiar with the TC5 installation, as it was obviously essential to set TB mic gains and gate thresholds specifically for individual users, but one nicety of the Drake system was that it was possible to recall gain settings for named individuals.

Another feature of the digital age, which represented a big change from traditional practice, was the advent of disc based recording systems in place of quarter-inch and two inch tape. One of the earliest iterations which found its way into fairly common usage, particularly in dubbing, was Audiophile. Quite a steep learning curve, but an experienced gram op could work what seemed like magic. I never had the need, or time, to become very familiar with it, so others may be able to expand on that as a topic, but various devices were experimented with in differing programme strands. Mini-disc found favour with some, as did digital versions of the ubiquitous cartridge machines, much loved by DJ’s. Each had their pros and cons, not all of which now come to mind, but after much research, in sport we adopted Akai DK4 four track hard disk recorders as the standard machine for recording the sound-only football reports which were a regular feature of Grandstand. They required a more disciplined approach to identifying the start point of any recording than was generally necessary with good old quarter-inch tape, and many decried such “progress” as providing unwarranted toys for the boys, but we mounted four machines and a mixer much more efficiently in terms of space than could ever have been achieved with the standard tape machines of the day. It was essential, though, to provide clearly written idiots’ guides to ensure that every DSS stood a fair chance of achieving a recording and replaying it without false starts, or unwanted out words, whereas with a tape machine, one demonstration was probably enough and after that it was simply down to practice to improve dexterity and speed of operation.

One spin-off from investigating the DK4’s was that we realised pretty quickly that they might be ideal to replace the quarter-inch machines which the VT operators used in sport for maintaining copies of the clean commentary and FX tracks during editing, to allow smooth transitions in sound over the picture edit. It would need a VT man to describe the precise procedure, but suffice to say that of the batch of DK4’s bought for the BBC VT operation at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, many found their way into TC5 on their return.

Another innovation around that time was ISDN, which enabled a new breed of self-operated reporters’ units. Since the year dot, sports reporters in particular had taken small self-contained units to football grounds, where they would connect to an outgoing “music” circuit (so-called) and a telephone control line. The first units were built by Equipment Department, I believe, and were affectionately known as COOBEs – Commentator Operated Outside Broadcast Equipment. They provided a lip mic for commentary and some, at least, catered for an FX mic as well. There was an inbuilt field telephone, with a hand–cranked magneto ringer to ring the far end, and headphones which could monitor the commentary output and the control line, which would carry studio talkback and cue programme. I believe that some units had receivers so that cue could be taken off-air.

These had been designed in the dim and distant past for BBC Radio sports reports, but TV soon cottoned on to the fact that sound-only reports on football matches were a useful addition to the results service at half and full time. When the reporter left the ground, he (usually male, certainly in the early days) was supposed to put in a link to loop the music and control lines, so that circuits could be tested for continuity before the next time of use, well before the reporter arrived on site. Circuits from each ground terminated at the local exchange and had to be booked in advance for routing on to the relevant BBC control room, invariably London BH as far as we were concerned and it had to be agreed in advance with Radio as to which points were free for TV to use. It was not unknown for Grandstand to take a report from a radio commentator who was already covering the match they were interested in, but that report would usually be recorded in the Grandstand studio, as arranging a timing for a live report which didn’t conflict with Radio’s requirements could be difficult. Otherwise, the editorial intention was that COOBE reports should be live with only a few exceptions recorded, as the workload on the gram-op could exceed what one man could manage, but live TV being what it is, it was often necessary to summon a Sound Assistant from the floor to man a tape recorder when the gram op began to steam. The number of quarter-inch machines which the SCR could accommodate was a limiting factor in itself, but even the best of gram ops could flounder with start points to mark, (usually no time to top and tail) durations and out words to note, TB to listen to for cueing replays, incoming reports to monitor for starting the next recording, etc., etc. It was acknowledged that this was more than could be reasonably expected and the production provided a “COOBE producer” for a time, to gather the details and pass them to the production assistant, but that fell by the wayside fairly quickly.

But in advance of all that, the circuits from the appropriate ground had to be routed to the Grandstand studio and the mechanism was, to say the least, archaic. At some stage, the first BBC control room in the chain would have done a loop test to confirm circuit continuity, then, when the reporter arrived, he would remove the link and connect his COOBE kit, with a 5-pin F & E. This meant that he could not get his connections the wrong way round, but the process of getting through to the intended destination could be time consuming. So, on arrival, the reporter would ring the first point in the chain and they would exchange rings and check the music circuit, before he/she was handed on to the next control room in the route and they would go through the same process again. With luck, there would only be two or three check points, but far flung grounds might have several more. So, by the time contact was established with the studio, a moderate amount of time would have elapsed, and that assumes that everything worked first time. As Grandstand started to use more COOBE reports, we became frustrated that we could not get ahead of the game by at least proving circuit continuity and appropriate pairing, as problems would often become apparent only when CAR at TVC handed things on to the studio – it was not unknown for music and control lines to become jumbled, and then we had to listen across all the music circuits to see where the current caller was appearing, or occasionally music and control lines would be reversed, so the poor reporter was getting no response at all to his frantic ringing! Eventually, as the number of reports increased still further, we persuaded a reluctant system to route everything to us at the beginning of the day, so that we could do loop tests and at least confirm appropriate pairing and that we had the music and control lines the right way round. This went against the grain for old hands who had been used to checking everything before routing onwards, but, of course, even a satisfactory loop test did not confirm that the loop you were testing actually came from the ground you expected, but at least we had the right number of circuits and listening across all the music circuits meant there was no need for the reporter to ring on the control line any more – he/she simply needed to call out on the mic and we would answer on the control line. If everything sounded OK, it was done in an instant and the reporters who had been used to the old regime were very grateful. This system became increasingly valid as the number of sound only reports into Grandstand increased. The increase also meant we needed more units in the field, so we went to Alice, who made a useful TBU (Telephone Balance Unit – another topic!) which we had used on overseas trips, in particular, and we got them to incorporate a TBU into a revised reporter’s unit, which meant they could revert to a phone line if the COOBE point didn’t work, or in some cases had not been installed at lesser grounds. We spent a lot of time making the unit user friendly, including traffic lights to indicate level and a line reverse switch to save the day when circuits were the wrong way round. We also got them to commission a convenient flight case, with room for headphones and cables, which could sit on the reporter’s lap with the lid removed, making everything accessible and visible under a Perspex cover which served as a writing surface, whereas the old style COOBE’s were anything but convenient in that respect. To distinguish them, we titled the Alice units SOOBE’s – Self Operated Outside Broadcast Equipment.

But all this was swept aside when ISDN materialised and reporters could dial in on a digital circuit. There rapidly followed a significant expansion in Sports department’s interest in providing coverage of every premier league ground, with the prospect of up to twenty half and full-time reports into Grandstand. This meant significant expansion in the number of units in the field and of codecs at the studio end. Glensound had developed an ISDN unit for radio and we commissioned a variation on their theme for television reporters. Quite what differences we required now escape me, but I’m sure there was good reason.

In the studio, the number of prehear sources in front of the director now meant that managing to enable and cut them appropriately was almost impossible, so we used gates once again, to suppress the feed whilst we were lining up with reporters and again when the report went on air. This meant the director could keep his prehears open all the time and if a reporter had something to offer during the game, like a goal or other incident, he or she only had to open their mic and shout out to be heard in the gallery. Because the digital system inherently produced a delay, in both directions, it was no longer appropriate to feed complete programme as cue, because the reporter would get themselves back out of sync, so it was also necessary to install a larger multi-way working matrix, so they each got a feed clean of themselves.

A significant problem now was that a proliferation of telephone and ISDN points at football grounds meant that reporters often had trouble in identifying the right seat and socket. So one of the more experienced reporters, Ralph Dellor, was given the task before the beginning of one season of visiting every ground at which TV Sports department had commissioned a connection and documenting precisely where the right point was to be found. It was not uncommon to overhear the Resource Manager on the phone to a reporter, reading out Ralph’s documentation, which they had forgotten to take with them.

If you’re not bored to death by now, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din! So as it’s past my bedtime, I’ll stop now and perhaps pick up on a few things another time that revising this has reminded me of.