Something that we have not heard during the ten weeks or more of lockdown.

Dave Taylor

TV Sound techniques kept changing continually from those earliest days when many of us started in ‘sound’. As I don’t see much written about TV Sound back then I would like to write up something, most probably in book form, detailing the changes.

Although I’m interested in everything from Operas to Sit-Coms, doing shows live or getting them post produced, I thought I’d start by asking all the BBC and independent Sound Supervisors and those who ‘did the rigging’ about coverage of football matches.

When I started as an assistant at Anglia TV, we used a ‘parab’ for match FX and hung one or two ‘omni’s over ‘the gantry’ for crowd FX.

1967 Coltishall Airshow AngliaTV:  STC 4035 in a Grampian Parabolic Reflector….made more professional with the foam rubber backing added to it!

When I moved to LWT in 1969 they had started using Senny 805 long-gun mics, still manual operated up in ‘the boat’. However Paul Faraday, who started at Rediffusion in 1961 recalls his Supervisor Don Chapman favouring the enormous Electro-Voive EV-643 ‘bazooka’…when it could be fitted up in the gantry…it was 7feet long!

Things changed I recall in the early 1970s when camera mic lines allowed Senny gun mics fixed to cameras…and 416s and other mics were appearing around the pitch.

Any memories of how you handled football OBs at the BBC  and other ITV companies and facilities like TVI, Trilion etc would be interesting to find out.

Alan Taylor

In the BBC there were two types of football coverage, the routine MOTD matches and then the big events such as the Cup Final.

At Wembley up until the early 70s and the introduction of Sennys, a 1 metre parabolic reflector was suspended from a girder above the gantry and panned to cover Fx from the pitch.  The microphone in it was the ubiquitous 4035.  We sometimes found the focus sweet spot by feeding 1kHz tone into the microphone and panning it from side to side while somebody else listens at a distance so that we can move the microphone in and out from the dish to get the best focus and hopefully the optimum range.

We did have Electrovoice 643s, but they were generally too unwieldy for football matches, although I do recall being required to operate one at the centreline of the Harlem Globetrotters, where the mass of the microphone, the speed of the players and the polished wooden floor conspired to make the mounting slide about alarmingly. There is an old picture available of OB trucks and crew with a couple of those mics laid on the floor.

Before Sennys, we used Labor gun mics ( I think the spelling is correct).  I’ve never found any details of them on line, but the MCR21 restoration people have got a home movie from Ken Osborn which shows them in use mounted on cameras.  Other things such as crowd Fx were usually covered by dangling a 4035 from the gantry.

Once the 805 and subsequently the 815 became available, they were mounted on cameras using a custom made side mount fixed to the panning head of an EMI 2001.

The commentator used a lip mic. The older ones had a spacing bar either side of the mouth instead of the bar on the upper lip. The mic was wired to a mahogany box containing an adjustable equaliser.

The commentator also used a Baron Box, which used a single XLR cable to connect to the scanner and offered talkback, a telephone handset and a button operating a cue light to alert the Sound supervisor when they intend to speak or stop speaking.

Dave Newbitt

The Labor we used at TC was the Labor MD82. I seem to remember we referred to it as a rifle mic in the early days. I believe it was the first mic of its type. Labor of course was Sennheiser before it was called Sennheiser

Dave Taylor

Thanks for that information….I’m learning all the time. I didn’t know Labor was Sennheiser’s name early on.

Do you remember how they were used at TC? It was a big mic I know. Did the BBC ever try using the EV-642 at all?

Dave Newbitt

We typically used them for participating audience programmes, sometimes in the hand held mount but also boom mounted. I well remember operating booms carrying the unwieldy things and swinging the arm around with a careful eye on the folk below.

Pat Heigham

I remember using the long Electrovoice, pointing at the feet of tap dancers. If I recall, it came in two cases, one for the capsule, and one for the interference tube.

Was there any truth in the story that a very obvious mic being slung over the football crowd, so they could shout their obscenities at it, but it wasn’t plugged up!

Dave Plowman

I well remember working on a cup final at Wembley when on attachment to OBs. As the junior on the crew, I was sat on the touchline with a rifle mic. Mates outside the BBC who were keen on footie would have paid handsomely for that job.

I also remember ITV were covering it too. The full catering setup, with steaks and the works. We got an aircraft packed lunch, as there was no room for two lots of catering vehicles.

Got chatting to an ITV sound chap about my age. And we compared pay.

I moved to Thames the next year.

John Nottage

I remember rigging the big Electrovoice on the roof at Ascot. The Labor (pronounced “la-bore”) rifle mics came later. They had their own screw-on lead to start with, then they were converted to XLR. They never had any sort of windshield.

The parabolic dishes were still important for fx coverage when I joined OBs in 1969. There was the choice of 2ft or 4ft (we were imperial measures in those days, Alan). Panning the 4ft parab, complete with its 4035 mic, was a regular job up in the gantry at football matches, including the cup final.

General crowd fx were usually just a slung 4035 off the gantry. I seem to remember the Rugby League crew used to sling a special dummy 4035 near the commentary box so the fans could shout abuse at Eddy Waring who they were supposed to hate.

We rigged a 4035 on a tall stand (the stands were complete with STC sockets fixed to the top) for the field events at the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh in 1972. After a heavy rain storm, we brought the mic into the scanner, emptied the water out of it, left to dry for an hour or two, then stuck it out again – very tough. I think we must have swapped the windshield which was horse hair and so could get very sodden easily. They found a 4035 hanging above Oxford Street that had been there for years: it still worked! I always assumed the 4035 was the enclosed version of the old 4021 apple and biscuit mic which must have been for indoor use only.

Once the 805/816 kit arrived, the ideal soccer rig was one 816 at each end of the boat pointing towards the penalty spot, & one 816 on the low, touchline camera with stick for interviews. Lip and spare for the commentator, lazy mic for the SM, and a couple pairs of old STC cans via the Baron Box. That all made for as fairly quick rig and de-rig. Of course it all got more complicated as Sound Supervisors tried for better, closer fx. I recall Ian Leiper trying ECM50s hanging on the goal nets at Ipswich: good goal fx, but rather a lot of bad language!

Stick mics: I started with STC 4037 and (shorter) 4037a. Ian Leiper (again) turned up one day with this new Electrovoice 635 stick. He said it was indestructible and you could hammer nails in with it, and proceeded to sling it down the scanner steps. Somebody pointed out that if he bent the socket, he wouldn’t be able to plug it in, so he became a little more careful.

Mike Giles

I operated one of the Electrovoice beasts at Dorchester Courthouse for a production whose name entirely escapes me. I think we had two EVs and two Labors, which were certainly less unwieldy. I can’t remember the precise reasoning as I wasn’t on the receiving end, but we abandoned the EVs, certainly partly because the limited space we had on a raised platform, on one side of the courtroom, sometimes made it impossible to point at the right person and I think that the off-axis response was noticeably different, whereas the Labors were more tolerant off-axis. I don’t know where the EVs were sourced, but I don’t remember ever seeing them again. 

What this does remind me is that we had a couple of parabolic reflectors in the Bristol stores, one was referred to as the Two-foot Parab and came without any protective case as it was quite a sturdy device, the other was actually a 3 footer, but was listed by the storeman as the Four-foot Parab, because being less robust it came in a four foot square box. I well remember watching that one and its lightweight tripod sailing through the air at Highbury, with the crowd already on the way into the ground! It had been rigged by the Sound Supervisor, who shall remain nameless, but he had merely placed it on a flat surface above the stands, without roping it to the adjacent hand rail. No spectators were hurt in the making of that programme!

John Nottage

I’m sure our Kendal Avenue 4ft parab was about 4ft not 3ft: I remember heaving it about enough! It was about twice the diameter of the 2ft parabs.

Dave Mundy

This varies from the over-hyped, OTT, 20+ cameras+VTs, gimicky coverage, by you-know-who, down to what I was frequently asked to do on one of Kendal Avenue’s two dedicated sports PSC units, SUE2.

During the early FA Cup rounds many of the matches were from non-league grounds, often with no grandstand and standing room only! A rostrum would be built level with the halfway line and that was that! The SUEs carried an SQN4s mixer, an STC lip-mic, a 416, an RE50, a 635, a few ECMs , cans, assorted cables, and a Panamic pole. If I knew commentary was required I would get a DI box from stores which was a sound isolating transformer (usually used to get a feed of a guitar before it was connected to it’s amplifier) . It had male and female XLR sockets  on both the input and output, and ‘domestic’ jack socket for the guitar lead. After plugging the lip onto SQN ch.1, I plugged the 416 into one end of the DI box, connected the same end of the box to the SQN ch.2 ( to get the phantom power), the other end of the box to ch.3. Channels 1 and 2 were routed to the ‘left’ output and mixed as usual, on cans, channel. 3 went to the ‘right’ output. Left went to track 1 on the Betacam as a program mix and Right went to track 2 as the CFX ! Simplez!

I even used this arrangement at Anfield one night! In that case, I had booked out and 816 as I knew we would be up on the gantry. The lip mic failed just before kick-off and Tony Gubba had to use the RE50, which did the job very well, as we were far enough away from the crowd! As an added extra, Roger Prior, my cameraperson, bought a digital stopwatch from Tandy which displayed time-of-day, I set the time-code on the Betacam to be the same and gave the stopwatch to the AP to do their log.