Dave Newbitt
Thank you Dave M for getting the Telobians message on to our forum – it seems we would otherwise not have heard of Pete Hales passing. With the seemingly ever increasing losses of former colleagues, we often read and write about just how nice so many of them were and here’s another. Pete was up there with the best of them as a really great guy. He was my SA1 for a time (can’t now remember which crew) but also, through that period when SA1’s were regularly made use of for sound mixing non glamorous studio productions, I boomed for him on a number of occasions.
One stands out in my memory. A discussion between four seated guests arranged in a shallow arc. Starting with the left hand speaker, each in turn said their piece and deferred to the next contributor. No back and forth involved, so hardly challenging for a boom – at intervals move the mic a few feet camera right.
Only I dozed off and was jerked awake with Pete’s voice in my cans saying “where are you, Dave?” The penultimate speaker was doing his bit; I was still over the first!
I should have been court martialled but Pete was just too nice to make any great fuss. I really feel sad to think of the passing of his not always very happy life.
Geoff Hawkes
I would also like to thank Dave Mundy for sharing the news of Pete Hales. Although I didn’t know him well, I do remember him from when he was either on or worked with a crew I was on in the late sixties/ early seventies and he came across as a warm and friendly man. It was at the time when local radio was on the rise and Pete said he’d applied for an attachment or a job, I think it was with Radio Medway which he subsequently got. It wasn’t until some thirty or forty years later that I saw him again when he came to one or two of the Tech-Ops disorganised lunches at the Horniman in Hayes Gallery, London Bridge and he greeted me like an old friend, which seemed typical of him.
Mike Giles
I also remember Pete Hales as a warm, welcoming and helpful colleague at Television Centre. He was one of many who might well have begrudged a country yokel being made SS, but nothing could have been further from the truth.
Alan Taylor
Pete was somebody I worked with extensively because he was the SA1 on the LPU for much of the time I was working on drama throughout the 1980s.
One of the features of doing location drama is that you spend many weeks, not only working together, but staying in the same hotels, eating in the same restaurants and drinking in the same pubs. You really get to know people very well after spending so much time with them. In some locations we liked to rent a holiday cottage for the sound crew if we were in the same area for a few weeks. When staying in a holiday cottage and travelling in the same car every day, you certainly get to know people well. You get to hear all their stories, you hear all about what else is going on in their life and what makes them tick.
Prolonged living and working with colleagues can be a test of their personality and Pete passed that test with flying colours. He was always good company. In any department there are likely to be some people you might not want to spend too much time with, but Pete was the opposite. He was one of those people who made you feel delighted that he was going to be on your next show.
As far as work was concerned, you couldn’t hope for a safer pair of hands, which is doubly true when it comes to location boom operating. Pete was always aware of everything which was happening on set and working out how to ensure that our coverage was as good as possible. If Pete suggested something, only a fool would disregard it.
Towards the end on the 1980s, I started abandoning the sanctuary of the sound control room in the LPU and chose to work from the set. I used a portable mixer and Nagra on an Ursta Cart, connected to the scanner via a multi core cable. By that time, directors were working mostly from the floor, rather than in the truck. Working from the floor meant that communication with the production team, actors, lighting, cameramen and sound crew became more direct. Equally importantly, I could also see what was happening out of shot. That was the time when I really became aware of just how much of a contribution Pete would quietly make behind the scenes. I liked to operate the Ursta Cart in a position where I had eye contact with boom ops during takes. We often exchanged looks which communicated how well things were going or if we needed to try another approach. By the time the recording had stopped, we both knew what we needed to change in order to do it better.
I only got to hear about OB staff reunions in 2019 and went to my first one that year. It was a pleasure meeting up with so many of my ex-colleagues and I was delighted that Pete was able to be there too and we shared some recollections of very happy times.
He was a great sound guy and always professional. It was a privilege to have spent so much time with him. He is one of the reasons why my time working on drama was so enjoyable.
Two pictures courtesy of Steve Edwards. The first one is of Pete visiting the restored LPU, the second one is of him working on location in 1984, with Mike Winser on camera.
