Alec Bray
I spent the last half of my working life in the IT industry. In the IT industry there is a well-know effect – the “Support Proximity Effect”.
What this says is this – if you have an intractable problem with (any part of) your IT network, one that you have wrestled with for days – as soon as a Support engineer arrives on site – or even if you are on the phone to Support discussing the issue at great detail – the problem just goes away. Happened many, many times.
But the same thing happened in my days in Tech Ops. We were doing a “Panorama”, for which there was a film insert of about 40 mins (hour long “Panorama” in those days), followed by a studio discussion about the film. Of course, it was vital that the guests in the studio could hear the film sound clear so that they could talk about it at the conclusion of the programme. I forgot to say that the programme was live – but that went without saying in those days! About a minute into the film, the foldback loudspeaker died. This was a large affair, about 5 foot high and with width and depth to match –and a nice wooden case.
The boom operator leapt off the Mole Richardson boom and hurried to the loudspeaker. he was just about to give it a good thump – another instance of percussive maintenance – when the speaker came back to life. Oh,OK then, so the boom operator turned to get back on the boom. As he moved away, the speaker died. As the sound man approached the loudspeaker – back came the sound! So he had to spend the whole of the programme standing next to this foldback loudspeaker.
I wonder if there are any other stories in a similar vein?
Peter Neill
A similar effect was exhibited by the magic silver tape in the doorway to Sound Maintenance, TC 2nd floor. The engineers insisted that its sole purpose was to keep the carpet from catching the bottom edge of the door, but we knew better. Just passing a piece of duff kit over the threshold caused it instantly to repair itself.
Bernard Newnham
On a “Tomorrow’s World” once my Marconi Mk4 picture went very bad during a piece of TK. They noticed upstairs in the vision gallery and people were leaping up heading towards me, but time was running out, and Mother was counting to the studio. Desperate, I decided to use percussive maintenance, and hit the thing a few times on the side. Mother was shouting “Quiet in the studio” at me as I hit it. Magically the picture came back just in time. It wasn’t great but it was workable.
I was going to write “only in the age of valves” but then I remembered that that wasn’t true. In the late nineties I was a tech-ops heretic – the producer who did the camera, sound and edited too. One of the documentaries I made was about bomb disposal chaps. We were mostly with a training course, but we also hung around near Porton Down whilst they dug up ancient phosgene shells from WW1. At one point on the course we were at the Shoeburyness range. I was changing tapes in a shed when my assistant Antonia turned up holding four sticks of plastic explosive saying “We’ve not allowed to leave here till we’ve blown something up – it’s tradition”. And so we did – lots of fun was had by all. Our Army safety office turned out to be also the man with a pocket full of detonators.Anyway – we were doing this on and off for three months, and I was endlessly worried about how to end the show. Then a major who we’d been following around – “all that stuff about cut the blue one – I’m colour blind” – asked if we’d like to come to the regimental dinner celebrating 100 years. We couldn’t actually stay for the dinner, but we could film them in their posh gear, and drink their very cheap whisky far into the night afterwards. An ideal end, and it looked great in the doc. During the afternoon before this once in a lifetime event, my Sony VX1000 threw a wobbly and the picture went green. It was a weekend and we were 80 miles from an engineer or another camera. It was desperate… So in the end I hit it, and the picture came right. Though the cameras these days are solid state, they still have connectors, and I think one had loosened somewhere inside. That camera had been around a bit, hanging out of helicopters, in operating theatres, in muddy fields full of ordnance, in my baggage to Johannesburg, etc etc. I still have it here – the BBCs first DV camera, and probably the only one of hundreds that didn’t go on the skip.So percussive maintenance can still work if you’re lucky.
Ian Hillson
But only an engineer knows how hard to hit it!
Back in the 1960s BBC News used to keep an old Pye Mk3 (or 4?) in the Queen’s Building at Heathrow to televise press conferences, celeb arrivals and the like. One day I, then young TA, was told to go and man it along with an engineer to do racks.
After wheeling it down endless corridors we plugged it up to the CCU and the line to BH and fired it up only to find the viewfinder terribly defocussed due to an EHT problem, so percussive maintenance wouldn’t work! No floor monitor either, dang!
The day was saved only because the camera had a remote focus facility from the CCU, leaving me to make the defocussed face-blob vaguely framed up in the viewfinder,
Brian Curtis
One of the most interesting aspects of the proximity effect is the reverse effect of stress failure. This often very apparent in equipment like photocopiers where the more urgent and stressful the situation the more it will play up. If you approach them in a calm and casual way whistling a happy tune and act as if you have all the time in the world they usually work percectly. This rule applies to printers, computers, DVD burners etc.
Dave Plowman
I remember asking Richard Chamberlain how he seemed to have less problems with radio mic than everyone else – even when the same crew was rigging them. He said he went to Tech Stores before the crew arrived and gave the RMs a good talking to.
Pat Heigham
The Support Proximity Effect …
How true! Show it an engineer, and it behaves itself!
I’m reminded of an incident at Wood Norton in the 1960s.
Damage had occurred to a drinks dispensing machine, and we were all arraigned before the Warden (can’t remember his name, but a Mainwaring sort of character).
He wanted to know who had beaten the shit out of the said device.
A Tech Assistant calmly informed him that “No BBC engineer would physically attack an item of equipment, unless it had failed to deliver on at least TWO occasions!”
Doing your own maintenance
Pat Heigham
Dave P mentions Thames crews doing their own maintenance. Some film crews were freelance, and used their own kit – this may have been what he saw. I was fortunate on “Fiddler on the Roof” as we had around five months prep time, and I made every single cable myself, XLR mic, PA speaker, and the 3-phase power cables for the cameras – yes, the camera dept. in those days, took the view that if Sound wanted it all to run in sync, then they should be responsible for the power supply! Whether this was a retaliation for our dept shutting the ‘noisy’ cameras into a booth, I don’t know, but it could have been!
