Note: continued from  Pictures from TVC Roof around 1964-ish

Ian Hillson

When you put them in a projector, the white side indicated the side that faced the screen.

Tony Crake

At Lime Grove "E", a frequent job for "Relief Mainly Sound" was to load the two banks of the telejector… it was in the Sound Apparatus Room!

"White to the Light" was one of the guidelines.. the other may have been "Upside Down"… ?

Rarely did these apply… best to look at them on the preview monitor and run them through.. .  It saved a lot of Editorial Shouting and a few Brownie Points from the VM.

I have still got a lot of them…used for unmounted Agfa transparency films…

When I was at TVC  I "inherited" my Fathers old Voigtlander 35mm Vito IIA .. Excellent bit of kit .. . but somebody told me about the bargains to be had in "end of reel" offcut prices.  The trouble was, it was all movie stock – much thicker than stills stuff.  Because my Dad had always taken colour transparencies that ‘s what I took first of all. All the processing was just that: you did your own cutting and mounting !  Hence I didn’t really mind doing slides on "24 Hours". Lots of old ones lying around (mainly for name captions), all in those reusable blue and white mounts.  Later I progressed to B and W negative… but they, of course, didn’t need anything.  It was a bit of relief when somebody invented "Slide File" and "Aston".

Graeme Wall

I remember the telejector in E:  I thought it was at the side of the production gallery.  One day I was clearing it out to put the slides in for the day and discovered a photo of a naked lady sat on a bar top.  Nobody ever admitted ownership,  I think they’ve might have been too embarrassed: it was a Watney’s pub.

Tony Crake

In monochrome days, before Studio E was refitted  for colour etc etc., it was a little apparatus room tacked on the back of the Sound Control "corridor" ( very thin and small !

The slides came up from Graphics at the last minute, all jumbled up… the instruction was "load them as delivered".  If you did that an awful lot of shouting broke out!  

Graeme Wall

By the time I got to play with the telejector, it was colour.

The shouting didn’t change!

Barry Bonner

One day I did load them as delivered… much to my amusement! (Nobody else’s though!)

Geoff Fletcher

The apparatus room was a horrible hot little "room" off the SCR corridor as I recall. Were there not two slide scanners in there?

On Crew 14 one week we had “24 Hours” on two consecutive days. On the first afternoon Dave Mutton gave the slide job to the junior lad as previously mentioned. He did OK until there was a major last minute change to the program running order and the slides had to be reloaded at the last minute. He got two or three wrong as a result and the abuse and general shouting at him from the plonkers in the gallery was well beyond the pale. It culminated in threats of physical abuse should they get their hands on him. We were not very happy with this.

Next day, Dave did the slides but kept quiet about it. All went well until the prog, when again two or three were incorrect, with the same resulting bawling and shouting, culminating in the same guy as the previous day threatening to give the slide loader some GBH. At the end of TX he demanded that the offender presented himself in the gallery for chastisement – verbal or otherwise. Dave went in, towering over the seated gallery team, and presented himself to the shouter saying something like “Here I am then – get on with it!” A rapid red faced winding-in of neck ensued, and Dave then delivered a lecture on how to treat junior crew members in future, much to the delight of us on the floor still on cans. In the Club later on, we got the full blow by blow account from the VM, who said he would have paid good money to see it! We didn’t do a “24 Hours” again for a very long time!

Barry Bonner

Yes there was a pair of them referred to as "A bank" and "B bank". The scanners were opposite the end of the Prod gallery in the corridor.

I spent some time on crew 14 with Dave Mutton – a very pleasurable experience, although I felt more of a dwarf than I actually am!

Roger Bunce

I too had the pleasure of loading the slide-scanners in that pokey little room behind E Sound gallery. Cameramen tended to get lumbered with any job which didn’t obviously belong to anyone else. We kept trying to persuade someone else to do it, but to no avail.

The slides arrived, as usual, at the last minute. There were hundreds of them! I obediently loaded them ‘as delivered’, alternately ‘A bank’ and ‘B bank’, upside-down and white to the light. I just about managed to get them all in before we were on air.

Then the shouting and swearing began! I was being ordered to take them out again, change the order, put that one after that one, take that one out of the B bank and put it in the A bank, which meant swapping all the others, etc. Everything descended into chaos.

After the show, John Lintern and I, with the aid of a running order, attempted a forensic reconstruction or the original slide order. We discovered that the slides had been delivered in the correct order, and I had loaded them correctly. Unfortunately, the helpful people in graphics had included a few alternative versions of some of the pictures, in case the gallery preferred them – but hadn’t told anyone. Since there had been no time to check them before going live, the first appearance of an ‘alternative’ led to an assumption that they were out of order, panic, and attempts to correct the order that had created a total shambles! Had they simply ignored the alternatives, and gone on to the next one, everything would have been fine.

I think it was as a result of this debacle that a ruling was made: Cameramen would load the slide scanners – but they took no responsibility for the result!

Dave Plowman

Luckily, I never had anything to do with them.

It seems to me an obvious way round. Have spare slide carriers and then graphics loads them in order – then sends them over. The poor tekkie only then has to fit them to the scanner.

Roger Bunce

We often suggested that graphics might like to load their own slides or, indeed, that anyone, other than us might like to do it. But, as the lowest in the pecking order, Cameramen always got lumbered.

I think, later on, they did start to deliver the slides in carriages (often with spaces for slides that weren’t ready yet), and the gallery checked through them before going on air. But this didn’t help the problem of last minute Running Order changes, which could happen even after the start of transmission, and could require frenetic reshuffling of slides.

Yet later, they got a large, newfangled slide scanner down in the engineering area (1st floor?). Instead of carriages, the slides were fitted into rotating wheel thingies. Once again, a Cameraman was lumbered. (Why couldn’t the Engineers do it? They were there anyway!) As before it was upside-down and white to the light, except (if I’m remembering this correctly) because the slides were loaded at the top of the wheel, but scanned when the reached the bottom, ‘upside-down’ now meant the right way up!

Barry Bonner

Frequently in the early days the sound assistant loaded the slides as he was already up in the SCR doing grams thus not taking a cameraman away from the floor. I remember attending a meeting with the Sound Managers, where we said we weren’t happy doing it, during which a decision was made that "somebody else" should do it, although in the true style of Management they didn’t say who!

Graham Maunder

Was it just me or did anyone else play the ‘chicken’ game with the slide scanner?

I used to switch the scanner to manual and see if I could get it all the way back round to the correct slide (1 slide at a time) before it was needed or anyone in the gallery spotted.

OK – just me then!  Maybe a single handed attempt by me to get them to stop using cameramen for the job!

Tony Crake, Bernie Newnham

As I recall there was a “24 Hours” producer, Peter Pagnamenta,  nickname of  ‘PAG’ , who thrived on changing the running order at the drop of a hat. He had no idea of the rather leaden restrictions of 1960s’ TV !   He managed to annoy all departments:  Lighting / Sound /Cameras and the Studio Director  and, yes ,you’ve guessed it… The bloke on slides! 

Peter Hider

His name was Peter Pagnamenta. I left cameras 36 years ago and still remember him as a pain in the…. 

Pat Heigham

I don’t remember Pagnamenta, but my ‘bete noir’ was Michael Mills.  I had been on Grams for ‘World of Wooster’ with Ian Carmichael, and thus was put to service a programme celebrating Winston Churchill’s  90th birthday.  See here for the full story: http://tech-ops.co.uk/next/the-art-of-direction/)

Ian Hillson

‘Twasn’t just “24 Hours” that ‘enjoyed’ this – it persisted right through to “That’s Life” in the Theatre – by which time the VO had been lumbered. And with soooo many slides that sometimes it involved a reload during the show.

Oh, and that final soft, greebly ‘BBC MCMII’ caption, by the time it had gone through the black edger there was little of it left.

Roger Bunce

‘BBC MCMII’? Are you sure that we were transmitting “That’s Life” in 1902?
I know it seems like it …

Chris Eames

Does anyone remember the furore that happened when we were instructed to bin the slides at the end of the programme, and not return them to the production team?

As I remember the story, it goes like this. 

The caption scanner consisted of two 35mm. projectors firing into one vidicon camera. The mixing between the two projectors was done through a mechanical optical system. This meant that there was no means of previewing the next slide. The poor old VO had no warning if a slide of a different density came live on air. This happened quite frequently, as graphics slides were of very variable quality, and caused a number of disasters on end credits, particularly if they were using a video switch to black edge the caption. 

In those wonderful days these problems came up at Tech Review meetings, remember them? The reasons for inconsistent slides was deemed to be that different batches of slides had different exposures, and to save money production were mixing up new slides with old to make up end credits. The edict came down from above that slides had to all be from one batch, and to prevent old slides being reused, operators had to bin all slides at the end of the programme. Unfortunately, this edict came from engineering, nobody told production!

As one of the unfortunates who regularly did the loading chore, with all of the aggro, it gave a certain satisfaction to make sure that the slides were in the nearest bin before one of the production team came to collect them. I also made sure that I had a copy of the relevant WIS on hand to show that I was only following orders.

All hell broke loose, because graphics were charging a small fortune for the slides, and the bill rocketed. I can’t remember the final outcome, but I think that it went to a very high level.

PS I don’t think anyone ever asked why graphics could not produce consistent slides!

Alec Bray

When Studio E was re-equipped with Image Orthicon cameras, E became sort-of the main current affairs studio, and in 1965 it was used for the launch of  "24 Hours".

I recall the absolute PAIN that was the front axial projection graphics.

The camera already had an AutoCue hood and carrier – in those days, the hoods were large and the AutoCue rolls were big and chunky.  (BTW, "Panorama" used to use Teleprompt, which had a feedback system so the remote display always kept in step with the control: many other progs used AutoCue, which had a nice touch such that the remote scroller on a camera and the control could get completely out of sync).

You might have an Angenieux zoom, which meant that there was the servo control and amp box mounted on the right hand side of the panning head.

Then added to all this was a projector with the slide carriers mounted on the left side of the panning head. This projected slides onto the presenter and the background.  The idea was that the presenter was lit normally with key and fill, lighting powerful enough to overcome the projected image on the talent. The backscreen wasn’t really lit, so it reflected the projected slide.  As the slide was projected – in theory – through the AutoCue glass and in line with the camera lens, there was – in theory – no shadow of the presenter on the graphics.

Now, as far as I recall it was NOT the technical crew that loaded the slides into the carrier on the camera-mounted projector.  I can remember a lot of faffing around, and the presenter’s camera being extremely difficult to work.  Could hardly pan up- or down (AutoCue would leave the presenter’s eyeline) or pan (because of the wretched projector) or crab or track (the whole thing now being considerably heavier).

Now SOMEWHERE around Shepherd’s Bush we had a few spring controlled peds (a recent discussion) –  I thought that they were in Pres B but now I am wondering if this magic assemblage used a spring based ped?

Where there were no telejectors or suchlike, the captions were printed on card, stood on Music stands in front of a camera and it was the scene guys who changed them.  Now, it was very rare for the scene guys to wear cans: they worked off the cue lights on the camera.  If the cue light went off, the caption was changed; thems the rules …

Steve Rogers

I can remember Vinten spring peds at TV training in Woodstock Grove late 1970s – early 1980s.

Peter Cook

I am not familiar with this piece of kit (the Telejector), but as a rookie I was often sent to sit by the Eidophor in the TV Theatre. Not sure why, as I can’t recall getting instructions as to how to turn it off or fix it. Good view though.

Alec Bray

I (and, I believe, another TO as well) had to baby-sit the Eidophor in the TV Theatre for a “This is Your Life” – which was for a very old and very worthy lady, but it was a programme as boring as watching an Eidophor chunter away.  As I recall, the Eidophor projected large size images on a screen: the image was produced by a scanning electron beam deforming the surface of a pool of oil, which then differentially reflected the high intensity light beam up to the projection lenses.  As such, it was second cousin to the then current fog generators, which dropped oil onto a hot plate. We did ask “What’s an Eida for?”  – Something to make the pictures fuzzy.   The Eidophor was up in the upper circle (or was it the gods?), certainly a part of the theatre which was not used for the audiences, and it was a filthy dirty place.

Peter Cook

Yes it was high up, dirty and probably full of asbestos!

My experience of Eidophor was either November – December 1963 or January  – May 1964. TO18 punctuated that and then I went to OB. Both periods, however, were definitely B&W with Pye Mk 5 cameras with the oh so slow motorized turret. (Don’t go the wrong way or your shot will be next week) “This is your Life” definitely rings a bell. I was surprised at how nice a man Eamonn was.

Dave Mundy

I seem to remember the Eidophor being towards the back of the circle in front of Peter Neill’s empire, the PA desk! Any picture disturbance resulted in a lovely curved, rotating, oily wipe! Colour Eidophors were used for public relays of all sorts of events. It was projected onto a plastic screen stretched on a dexian-type frame slung somewhere near the famous apple-and-biscuit ‘space’ mic. Slung monitors were used later I think.

Peter Neill

But it was long gone from the Theatre before I took up residence there.

In fairness should be said that I shared the Empire(no pun intended) along with the Greenwood and phone-ins with Joe Ellis. We had a friendly rivalry but for several years had it carved up between us. Ironically we were on the Boom Pool to do this job, but I don’t think either of us set foot on a boom platform in that time.

My only memories of the Eidophor were in Lime Grove where it was used for live BP in current affairs programmes.

Geoff Hawkes

I remember Eidophor being used on “This Is Your Life” at TVT. That was among the first shows I worked on – and made my first appearance in vision while cable bashing when the "victim" was pulled out of the audience. A colleague of my dad’s was viewing at the time and told my dad next day, much to his and my delight. Working for the BBC was thought of as a very respectable job and quite an honour in those days, especially for a member of a working class family like me.

The Eidophor was behind the proscenium arch on that show and used for back projection. I know this because I was on the soon-to-be illustrious Crew 5 during my three months initial training, pre-Evesham TO.18. Jim (no need for surnames, with due deference to John, AKA Jim Corby and of course Jim Kinally, sorry if I’ve left anyone out, there was only ever one "Jim" especially in the context of Crew 5, though at the Time he was Dickie Ashman’s no. 2, but not for long!). On one occasion Jim needed to get  from one side of the stage to the other and unwittingly crossed in front of the Eidophor, casting a BIG shadow on the screen at a critical moment. Whether this was during transmission or the dress, I can’t recall, though I think it was while on-air. What I do remember was how he got unceremoniously bawled out by the Producer, one T. Leslie Jackson, otherwise known as "Jacko" and who could make Brian Cowgill look like a pussy-cat. The Director, I’m pretty sure was the much more mild-mannered Vere Lorrimer, though I stand to be corrected.

Unsurprisingly it stuck in my mind – and if ever anyone’s been on the receiving end of such an outburst, and I envy those who haven’t (for their ability to fib blindly), it can happen to the best of us. And Jim was certainly among the best – at dishing it out too…

Mike Giles

Eidophor came to Bristol for a BBC2 series which I fancy was simply called “Life”, presented by Desmond Morris. I recall that it took Eidophor some time to warm up and it produced a strong whiff of hot oil, not to mention continuous background noise, all the more noticeable because we covered Desmond and his two or three guests on a single boom, which got forced out by wide shots. I think eventually that a change of Sound Supervisor brought in C29s and although the background noise was still there, it was at least a little more consistent than it had been with the boom moving between the contributors.

And speaking of hot smells, I also recall my surprise at my first sight of the incredibly fast-rising plume of smoke, I suppose, rising from the BP film projector machine on the studio floor for a “Softly Softly” – another quite noisy bit of kit!

John Howell

I remember Eidophor being used in TC2, but not the programme. Apparently there were dire consequences if it was switched off rather than powered down by a fairly prolonged procedure. I seem to remember the noise was the vacuum pump as the electron tube was continuously evacuated. There was a later version that used a xenon lamp instead of an arc.

Chris Woolf

Eidophor was a clever system, invented in Germany before the war. An electron beam scanned the surface of a spherical mirror, which had a thin oil smeared over it. The beam would distort the oil film surface electrostatically – the "brighter" the beam the deeper the disturbance. The illumination was an arc or Xenon lamp, which was focussed on the oil film, and reflected back to a striped mirror. If the oil film was "dark" at any point the light was reflected to a silvered part of the mirror and never got out; if it was "bright" it got bent towards a clear part of the mirror and travelled on through a projection lens to the screen. The oil film would tend to flatten itself again over time, ready for the next frame; and the spherical mirror also rotated slowly under a smoothing blade.

It was unchallenged for large screen projection for about 40 years – not bad going. The downsides were the need for a vacuum pump for the oil film and electron beam, and a refrigeration unit to keep the oil at the right temperature – they made the system acoustically noisy. The upside was a 300:1 contrast ratio and resolution to 1250 lines, with brightness largely governed by how bright a projection lamp you could supply.

Pat Heigham

Eidophor.

I do not recall that in the TVT, but I do remember being at Wood Norton, maybe it was my senior tech ops course, and  being bussed up to Aston University to see a demonstration, with programme material
up the line from London.

It looked pretty good, but I was more impressed with the PA from the lectern, which was beautifully judged as being sound re-inforcement, and I discovered afterwards, was being handled by a Midlands OB unit.

It was perfect.

For a Gram Ops view of further ‘who does what’ disputes with management, please see http://tech-ops.co.uk/next/we-are-the-management/