Pay, Practices, Personalities, Performance, Problems
Alan Taylor
Reading in the news (05th October 2020) about the debacle concerning under reported Covid cases, the explanation given is that the numbers were higher than the maximum which the system could handle.I’m delighted to say that I experienced a similar issue after I did the Moscow Olympics in 1980. There were a number of unusual factors, principally that we were an ENG operation which was supposed to be shared between BBC Sports and BBC News. However in order to make sure that News didn’t get a look in, we were booked almost continuously by Sports dept. So much so that one of our reporters, a lovely young lad from radio, called Des Lyneham, complained that we were spending all our time on wild goose chases. After the Olympics, Des sent each of us a specially commissioned tie with a wild goose flying through the Olympic Rings.
By this stage you might be wondering what this has to do with Covid numbers. But before I explain, there is one more factor which needs to be mentioned, I was on one of the highest BBC pay grades which attracted overtime payments.
When I got back to Kendal Avenue and submitted my time sheets for those six weeks in Moscow, the computer in the admin office was unable to process them as the figures exceeded the integer limit which the software could handle. Most of the women in the office had never calculated overtime payments manually. The lovely admin manager Jackie was the only one who had any experience of doing that and she had to spend ages calculating our payments by hand.
That September was also the first time I bought a brand new car … and for cash too.
Before anybody gets the impression that life on OBs was always like that, we really did work incredibly long hours under arduous conditions while we were there. There were certainly opportunities to earn substantial overtime in the UK, especially on dramas where directors over ran their schedules, but those Olympics were truly exceptional.
By contrast, we had an Engineering Manager on our crew (well it was the BBC). He worked exactly the same hours, if not more, but didn’t qualify for overtime. The BBC felt that he too should be rewarded for such hard work. He wasn’t particularly impressed to receive his cheque for £50. Incandescent might be a better word.
Dave Mundy
Just to add a little extra to Alan’s Moscow memories, Trevor Wimlett told me how Alan wound up the KGB so much that when you left they presented you with a plastic ‘wild goose’! So Alan won in the end!Barry Bonner
Alan’s EM got £50…luxury!I was given 4 days notice to go to Helsinki as Resource Coordinator for the 1999 World Skating Championships as the usual suspect preferred to go to Ireland for the horse racing.
I did 8 days totalling 92 hours and as it was at the end of one week and across another I didn’t get any Woods payments. I was on the end credits as EM. I looked after the sound, all the comms, a VT guy, satellite play-outs, the cameraman, and all the kit.
Back in Television Centre I had the audacity to ask for some financial compensation as I thought this was a little bit more than the job of a Sound Supervisor.
I received the princely sum of £25 and my manager was surprised at my fairly blunt reaction! Barbara Slater was the producer who’s now director of BBC Sport on a measly £224,000!
Albert Barber
I remember in the bad old ACTT days. I had to show my card even though I worked for the BBC and as the Director was paid less than the sparks who actually set a light and then sat in the van all day playing cards. After, they expected a tip from me. I couldn’t believe it. Then Woods payments came in which made it a bit better.Bill Jenkin
A totally useless bit of information no doubt misremembered from my rabble rousing days – the Woods payment came about as a result of the long 1974 P.A.’s strike (P.A.s were in those days what you would now call Production Managers). It ended in arbitration which awarded the extra payments to people on days conditions (or was it still then known as M.P. conditions?). They conveniently hooked some acronym on ‘Woods‘ like Work On Off Duty (days) but they were really called Woods because the chairman of the arbitration hearing was a Professor Woods.Chris Woolf
When I first started at the BBC (late 1960s) my annual payment was much less than £1000.In the days when ITV was expanding – mid 1980s – I was asked to do some overnight installation work, which inevitably meant some substantial ACTT-driven overtime rates. My pay for one night exceeded that first annual salary. I never had much love for the obstructionism of the ACTT but I did love the negotiated pay;
Dave Plowman
One reason I left the BBC.I regularly worked on Des O’Connor, recorded at TVT on a Sunday. The recording always started late – very late. And we then over-ran by the same time. No real option to refuse. As some wag put it, we barely got paid the price of the pint we missed because the pubs had closed.
The very idea of paying someone less per hour for overtime (and in practice compulsory overtime) was just ridiculous. Perhaps fine if you were already highly paid, but many crew members at that time weren’t. Plenty were struggling to just pay their bills.
My view then was the BBC couldn’t care less about their staff. More worried about keeping in with the government of the time.
By the way, not long after I moved to Thames, so did Des. No nonsense there about starting late. I’d guess he was told in no uncertain terms that if he wanted to start late, he could foot the overtime bill. Which at 1.5T would have been considerable.
I still have very fond memories of working at the BBC. Due to the people I worked with and enjoying the work in the main, but not senior management.
Roger Long
For reasons unknown we in Film Department were Day Workers. Everything out side 0930-1730 was overtime.We loved “Dixon…” , “Z-Cars” and “Softly…” for 3 weeks of nighters…
Not that Overtime was generous, first 5 hours at time x 1.25 then time x 1.5, but it certainly helped those long February nights in Acton or in a sand pit.
Kinsey did a time and motion on us, and decided it was the most efficient system. Penalty payments were always a creative bonus.
My final 3 weeks before enforced redundancy in 1992 were chaotic – we were off the payroll and computer.
A rush project to fill a BBC2 slot was scheduled. It was about Magnum, the photo agency, and fronted by Charles Glass, a noted US journo. I used my kit and a BBC Sierra estate.
They couldn’t pay me through the system, so I had to submit a Freelance invoice for me, overtime, my kit and the car. “It’s your BBC” as Wogan used to say.
Mike Giles
Talk of Woods payments reminds me of good old Mike Jones, former Sound Supervisor at Television Centre, who become a manager with a job title which escapes me. He remained a little too sympathetic to the troops for the more senior management’s liking and curried great disfavour with them when he authorised our Woods payments to be tripled after one of the overseas events ~ possibly the Mexico World Cup, which spawned that great quote from the Mexican Director of Communications, or some such title ~ after the first match, when the likes of Brazil never got their commentary feed, amidst a myriad other problems, he said “We never realised so many people would want to speak at once!” We got our feeds because Dave Warton from ICR had wheedled his way into the confidence of the Central Control Room staff and went up to ensure that our stuff was plugged up in good time.After the first match, we thought the second should be better, because it should have been just a matter of moving everything that had eventually been plugged up for the first match, in order, to the second set of circuits ~ but no ~ nothing came up on the jackfields in the same order from one venue to another, so further chaos ensued, but by then, Dave’s electronic accreditation card had been limited so that he couldn’t let himself into CCR. The host broadcaster said that it was interference by interlopers that had caused the problems in the first place, so all non-host accreditation to CCR was removed ~ quite a clever system for its day ~ pity the broadcast chain didn’t match its sophistication! Hibou will correct me if I’ve misremembered details.
Alan Taylor
We always referred to the Russian security staff as Goons. Every time you entered any building, the equipment had to pass through an airport style X-Ray conveyer belt, and they would always ask (by miming) that you demonstrate the equipment working in some way.As I previously mentioned, the most reliable mixer available at that time was a Nagra tape recorder and the Goons always did a mime of rotating spools. My Nagra was transported with the monitor speaker turned up and cued up with a pre recorded tape of my voice speaking in the style of an interviewer “Why do the Goons always want to see the wheels go round?”
Being the BBC, obviously we had a four, or occasionally five, man ENG crew. Camera, sound, engineer, E.M. and sometimes a Spark. Quite unexpectedly Duncan Goodhew started doing very well in the swimming and we were scrambled to get there ASAP. Our director was Bob Abraham and he was obsessed that whatever we did, we had to do it better and sooner than ITV sport.
The first problem was when we got there, we were only allowed three elasticated arm band passes for the poolside and we needed six (4 crew, Bob Abraham and David Coleman). Undaunted by this minor detail, Bob explained that we should keep going in and out of the venue making sure that they noticed and remembered us, but with our passes worn casually and progressively less visible. Once they recognised us and no longer asked to see our pass, it could be handed to somebody else who would repeat the same procedure. It was quite a slow process and Bob needed more passes quickly.
Seeing an opportunity, Bob asked me if I had a razor blade for tape editing. He then went up to ITV’s presenter Jim Rosenthal, put his arm around him and greeted him as a long lost friend, while deftly slicing through the elastic of his arm band, which fell to the floor. Bob “accidentally” dropped his script on the floor, picked up his script, scooped up the pass with it and returned to us triumphant.
The way that ENG was happening in Moscow was that recorded tapes would be passed to our driver, who would speed back to the broadcast centre for transmission. Bob discovered that ITV had engaged the services of the Russian equivalent of Hell’s Angels to rush their tapes back to the broadcast centre. There was no way we could match that, so Bob hatched up a plan to briefly go live at the critical moment. He asked me If I had a very long microphone cable. It was plugged into the third microphone input in the commentary unit, which was on a balcony just above the winners podium. When Goodhew won the gold, the mic cable was thrown over the balcony, I plugged a stick mic onto it, thrust it into Coleman’s hand, who burst into the international live feed asking “Duncan, how does it feel to win gold?” Pictures via the live world feed and sound via our commentary unit.
It was a sneaky plan requiring careful timing and a certain amount of chutzpah. It would have worked perfectly except for one tiny detail. Nobody thought to tell the sound supervisor mixing the BBC feed in the broadcast centre to fade up the spare microphone feed.
Mike Giles
I don’t remember that last detail Alan, but it was the case that if ever anything went wrong, as always happens, the Russian staff with us in the studio were fearful of being sent to Siberia – we had to go great lengths to persuade individuals that we would not be complaining about them – some were really very helpful.Which event was it where John Tidy, the graphics guru, produced very realistic copies of the official car passes which apparently worked a treat – I think Jim Reside was the executive producer?
Barry Bonner
It was the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville where John Tidy produced our car pass to get us into the IBC in Moutiers. The colour was blue and described to John over the phone from Albertville using a bit of a picture in the official programme! We drove very gingerly into the IBC the first time we used it with no problem. Mike Giles, of course, preferred driving the “bus”!Mike Giles
Yes, of course. As usual your memory is impeccable, Barry!You had a preference for walking in a driving blizzard and deep snow with no leggings, although Tony Bate was fully equipped, I recall, whilst annoying people at the warm and cosy IBC kept ringing your mobile to ask how you were getting on, making you take your gloves off to dig the phone out of your pocket! Very poor show that a brand new vehicle should break down so catastrophically ~ I blame the driver myself! Am I right in remembering that you found shelter in a nunnery? Rainbows come to mind.
Barry Bonner
Not a nunnery but a youth hostel called L’Arc en Ciel (yes “Rainbow”, well remembered, Mike) and the young ladies there certainly weren’t nuns!Big problem with the phone was that a day earlier we’d lent it to a production member and he’d put a key code into it! So initially we’d called from the hostel’s phone. By the time the “Renault Assistance” (anything but..) breakdown truck arrived it was dark and still blizzarding. He took us on a frightening trip almost down the mountain and then turned back up a different road to a remote garage, leaving us and the gear-less Renault Espace on the forecourt. The owner wouldn’t let us in so we stood outside for 2 hours until a taxi arrived – just before we were about to die from hypothermia – to take us down on what was now on a road akin to bobsleigh course, back to the IBC.
Whole incident was 5 hours and Jim F. Reside thought it was funny!
Roger Long
In 1991 we took Enoch Powell to Moscow for his personal view of the collapse of Communism.We started in St Petersburg and followed a police station in the city: they gave us unprecedented access to every aspect of their dominion. They had no idea of the limits of democracy, they were institutionalised. We filmed the Hermitage and again no limits.
We boarded the train to Moscow, and after a panicky exit from the train with 30 pieces of kit and a 2 minute time frame, we checked in at the Ukraina – the huge skyscraper Hotel (modelled on the Empire State Building). Food was in short supply, and we often overshot lunch: we could only officially eat at the Press Club or the Hotel. We were reduced to scavenging tables for morsels…
On one occasion we had a lunch on time but were forced to leave our meal due to time restrictions on entering the Kremlin and Duma (Parliament). Our resourceful spark took a silver salver with a lid from the table and loaded it with goodies. This he carried through security to the huge Duma building, saying that the BBC always took roast beef on a job. He was not challenged.
Our producer wanted Enoch to do a PTC in the Duma, whilst seated with the representative, he refused saying it would never happen in the House of Commons. Enoch spoke no Russian , but communicated in broken Latin, which worked to a degree.
We interviewed Yeltsin in a park opposite the Ukraina, he was drunk.
Also Gorbachev , who was not.
We filmed at State TV and the Moscow TV tower, both strangely BBC like.
People were bewildered at change, especially at our Hotel. I wandered into a top floor huge room full of tape machines (Revoxs) that were bugging en masse, made my excuse and left with no action.
At the same time as our visit, there was a World Conference of Disabled Communists: at night the huge lifts were full of Deaf and Dumb, some trying to communicate with the Finnish prostitutes that inhabited the Lifts.
A quite Baroque experience all round, we were all knackered when we got back home.
Albert Barber
When I was in China I passed a top floor hotel room full of cameras and tape machines. Funny security I thought!Alan Taylor
A few Moscow stories …During the opening ceremony for the Moscow Olympics, Gorbachev, who was often rumoured to be rather frail at that time, viewed the occasion from a sort of concrete bunker where he couldn’t really be seen by the rest of the crowd and certainly not by foreign TV crews. From time to time a shot would appear in the stadium on the big screens of him applauding. The odd thing was that although it got dark in the stadium, it was always still daylight when he applauded.
It was widely rumoured that Levi jeans could be sold for huge profits on the black market. In order to prevent this, the Russians made copies of Levi jeans and effectively flooded the market with them. The only problem was that they seemed to make exact copies of jeans originally made from stretch denim, but used a very tough Russian denim material instead. As a result, you could spot those wearing the Russian Levis because that had a strange way of walking. Imagine John Wayne walking out of the bar after having been kicked in the place where a gentleman would prefer not to be kicked.
I asked our interpreter for a suggestion for a gift to take home to my wife, something typically Russian and which would be appreciated. His reply … “You can’t go wrong with tinned carrots”. I initially assumed he misunderstood me or was answering a different question, but he really meant it.
Prior to the athletes arriving in Moscow, we shot lots of scene-setting stories out and about in Moscow. One lunch time we found ourselves in a wooden hut rather like a London cabbie refreshment shelter. Our interpreter left us for a few minutes, presumably to telephone his superiors about our plans for the afternoon, which he did multiple times every day. We saw some wine bottles on the shelf and ordered one using our finest miming skills. It wasn’t ordinary wine, it was a fortified wine something like Port. It turned out to be quite a jolly afternoon after we polished that off.
On those rare occasions when we didn’t have an interpreter breathing down our necks, asking the cost of something was tricky. For those who have visited places like China, the standard technique these days is to tap the numbers into a calculator and show you the number. In 1980, digital calculators were a rarity in Russia, so they would produce an abacus, whizz beads one way or the other and present it to you to make it crystal clear. It’s hard to know what the beads represent if you don’t know the conventions for where the decimal point is presumed to be and whether the beads on the left or the right are the ones that matter.
When I arrived in Moscow, maybe three weeks or so before the games started, the first thing to do was to get some Roubles. They couldn’t be sourced in foreign countries at that time and you had to exchange hard currency for them. The guy in the exchange booth had been learning to speak English and relished the opportunity to practice his conversational skills with a real Englishman. “Have you just flown in from London? How long did it take!”. I told him three hours. He proudly replied “In Moscow I can get on a plane, fly for four hours and still be in Russia.” I replied “In England we have jet airliners.” Suffice it to say that the Russian sense of humour is different to mine.
Nick Ware
I could bore you all for months with my Russian adventures. Some snippets:My first time in Moscow was early 1981, for nearly a month. We too, stayed in the rather depressing looking Ukraine Hotel, so that immediately brings back memories! Eat at the official dinner time or not at all, and as most evenings we were filming concerts in the Bolshoi, Kremlin Concert Hall and other fabulous places, that did mean we literally didn’t eat properly some days. You couldn’t just walk into a restaurant or a McDonalds! Martin, my sound assistant, was a type one diabetic, a detail that he hadn’t mentioned to Production or me, so straight away, that and the jab-kit he carried was a recipe for potential problems. I spent a lot of time looking after his interests. But it was an unforgettable and fruitful trip in every respect. Martin was a valuable source of musical knowledge and immense enthusiasm that kept all of us in good spirits. I had to fight the ACTT hard to get him onboard rather than some random unemployed member with no interest in the subject. A sizeable chunk of my earnings had to go into Union funds in order to make it happen, and in time, Production were very supportive too, and helped him get full membership of ACTT’s scandalously closed shop. Sadly, Martin is no longer with us and he died far too young.
My next time in Moscow was about ten years later, and one of our interview locations was the Moscow Central Lenin Stadium, which was, by then, in a state of major neglect and decay. A sad sight indeed.
Then followed nearly two decades of frequent CBS “60 Minutes” visits to Moscow and St Petersburg on a wide variety of topics, ranging from Presidential interviews to missing briefcases (don’t ask!). CBS News has a Moscow Bureau, and at that time, a ‘fixer’, a wonderful character who openly declared herself to be an ex-KGB senior official. You knew immediately that she wasn’t exaggerating. Olga (not her real name) could get us into (or out of) absolutely anywhere, no questions asked! Guards and officials used to back away when she flashed her ID card. We always flew BA Business for “60 Minutes”, and ‘Olga’ would meet us airside and escort us through the VIP route, with no customs checks, nothing. We often had more trouble clearing through customs on returning to Heathrow because we had no documents to show where we or the 100+ kilos of gear had been! (No Carnet for Russia in those days, only your own unofficial equipment list that you got stamped on the way out). With CBS the hotel was at the top end of the hotel spectrum: The Hotel Metropol, opposite the Bolshoi, and that was truly magnificent.
At one time you weren’t allowed to take radio mics or any other transmitting devices into Russia, so we used to list them in some non-specific way like “remote” or “distant” etc., and if asked, would show a 416 (special mic for picking up sounds a long way away, allegedly). On one ‘story’ we were at a military base near Moscow to do a major interview with Mikhail Gorbachev. Part of the interview was ‘sit-down’ with simultaneous in-ear translation, followed by some impromptu B-roll ‘walk-and-talk’ around the base. You should have seen three cameramen yanking out all the camera cabling and foraging for batteries to go running after them! I had Micron 700 radios on the Correspondent and Gorbachev, and at the end of the sit-down, off they went, some of the time up to 100 metres from the cameras. Although it was planned as mute B-roll, Gorbachev lapsed into good English, and some valuable stuff resulted. One of our military escorts showed surprise that the radios worked. When I said I would expect them to go that far, he said, no, he was surprised that they worked at all as the base was heavily RF shielded with jamming equipment. Not on UK Channel 69 (then) though, evidently.
And, if you can take one more: – a “feature” shoot for ITN about the Russian Classical Composers who had been declared unpatriotic under Communism, and all of their works and filmed and recorded concerts (conducted by the actual Composers in most cases) were ordered to be destroyed. Except that they weren’t. Film tins and tapes were secretly re-labelled by the archivists with innocent titles, and carefully preserved exactly where they were, and after Perestroika, they magically reappeared. Quite a story, that!
Apart from the 1980 hunger pangs, I can honestly say all my Russia trips are amongst my very favourite jobs I ever did. Love the place, the people, the music we filmed -classical and pop, etc., etc.
One last thought on all this: My good friend Martin Palmer took his Nikon everywhere we went and took loads of pictures of us working, travelling and relaxing. Mine went everywhere with me too, but I was generally too busy to take many pix myself, and knowing that he was, I didn’t feel the need to. It was only after he died a couple of years ago that his wife told me he had kept a box of literally hundreds (her words) of undeveloped films that she had thrown away because amongst all his clutter she didn’t know what to do with them. I should have acted sooner. I think nowadays, most of us take lots of pics on our phones and never print any of them, and unless we make a point of saving them in a form that our kids and grandchildren can access in the future, they will be lost.
Here endeth the First Lesson!
Roger Long
More Moscow tales…We did a Panorama history of the CIA for BBC1. This involved visits to Langley and KGB headquarters. Washington was more paranoid than the Lubyanka. We filmed one top floor CIA meeting mute because of security issues but our camera could read their notes.
I had to get our DigiBeta recorder from the hotel and erase the shots that showed detail. This was done in the basement you see in all the movies with all the TV feeds in the World but no digibeta machine…
We did a story of radio active materials being smuggled from the Moscow state factory to the machinist’s home flat, he was hoping to sell them in the market. Security was so lax they only measured radiation levels on the way into work. He was picked up in the underground by a meter looking for Radon gas!
During that trip we stayed in an apartment with one bed, the cameraman’s: I slept in the bathroom on a board over the bath. The food was terrible. Our fixer was ex KGB , very effective, but production very panicy and drama.
Russia was interesting, the States much better: we filmed U2s and SR 73s, silos and bombers and interviews that went on for days. Best was in Las Vegas, a weird plot to destabilise Sukahrno, involving a porno film shot by Bing Crosby’s brother featuring a pneumatic blond and a Sukarno lookalike. This was shown illicitly in Indonesia and meant to discredit him. It had the opposite effect.
Pat Heigham
Folks being helpful:I’ve never been to Russia, but had several trips into East Germany, before and after the wall came down. One such was a profile of Katarina Witt, the figure skater. One sequence was to film her addressing the East German Parliament. A neat patch panel to supply a feed from the lectern mics was built under a set of auditorium steps, ideal for our camera position. Trouble was the sockets were all Tuchel! The local PA chap arrived: “You would like XLR, yes?” He produced an adaptor tail, and promised to send tone at zero level. I plugged in and set the knob to my usual expected place for line input. Blow me, tone came up at exactly PPM4!
There is an unfortunate sequel to this tale. The next day, I was checking the tape of the Parliament footage, we used BVU – separate recorder, then – when we got the hurry-up to move to a different viewpoint for general shots of her city (Karl Marx Stadt). Into the vehicle and off – setting up a shot, unfortunately the recorder could be started by the camera, and after capturing the long slow pan over the town: “Let’s see that back” After that shot, the Parliament footage played – I realised with horrible dread that I had not had time to re-set the tape to the end of the previous day’s takes. ARRRRGGGGHH! There was enough left for the editors to run a bit – for a flavour, though, and the NBC director was incredibly understanding.
I think this was before the wall came down, as we returned much later to shoot a follow-up profile, where she was able to view the secret files that the Stasi had on her. The warehouse staff were not happy with us seeing these, but we explained that we did not read or understand German! It was spooky, just like an Ipcress File story – long lens surveillance of her out with boyfriends etc, very badly taken, however!
Bernie Newnham
All this stuff makes me pleased that I mostly worked at Television Centre.Mike Giles
Oh – it was fun (mostly!). Variety is the spice of life, after all.Alan Taylor
It’s horses for courses. I thoroughly enjoyed my time on OBs, but I don’t think I would have been happy working in a studio environment.Obviously there were hardships and sometimes even dangers, but it was frequently an adventure. I was able to live a long way out of London (Newbury at that time) and travelled to work in different directions. It wasn’t possible to settle into a routine.
Location drama could be an extraordinary way of life. For ten or twelve weeks, you are living and working with a bunch of people who you see more of than your family for the duration. It’s a very intense way of working, although I would be the first to concede that it’s not for everyone, but personally I had a whale of a time and it changed my life in profound ways.
Working away from base also fosters a rather independent and, at times, insubordinate attitude. In hindsight I felt sorry for line managers such as Colin White and Jeff Baker, because although I would never have admitted it at the time, they were excellent managers and did a brilliant job of keeping our department working well, despite the efforts of some of us to liven things up a little from time to time.
I suppose what it boils down to is that those of us who stayed in the business for decades discovered a niche which suited us and those who didn’t find a suitable niche moved on.
Roger Long
Working in a NPC on film was true diversity in action.I had worked at Bush House in World Service and at Television Centre in my induction to Television. TFS offered studio work and location, but the BBC Bristol Film Unit was continual Life on The Road and I loved it.
One week we could be shooting an NHU doc on saving Howlers Monkeys, the next month working on an Anthropology film about an indigenous tribe killing Howlers.
When the production teams met in the club , there could be tensions.
We shot Nat Hist, Music for Arts and Features, Drama for Drama Dept London, Light entertainment for John King, docos for TV features and Science for Horizon and OU.
We worked 220 days a year, sometimes away for months, all over the world, with shows bolted on to your schedule (especially in the States) unexpectedly.
My freelance life was never as varied as my BBC experience.
Pat Heigham
I agree that working outside a studio environment was very much an adventure, but unlike Roger, I found that my freelance work was incredibly varied. Although I loved working in Television Centre, preferably on audience shows (as that, to me, was more ‘show-biz’), I was happy to be part of the crews bringing entertainment. But I will say that freelancing in the feature film and documentary fields offered visits to places that I would probably never have been able to encounter.A 17 week location in an undeveloped ski village in Switzerland. Where I learned how to drive in snow and ice. 12 weeks in Amsterdam.v
5 months in the then Yugoslavia.
The Far East – Thailand, Hong Kong, Macao, for twelve weeks or so.
Two round the world jobs, including the States – Florida, Texas, Louisiana and New York (twice – didn’t like that much!), Canada, and Oh! Yes! The Caribbean – I took a feature film job, pity that it was Michael Winner, but I was happy to visit Antigua, St. Lucia and Curacao on someone else’s wallet!
Documentary work provided insights to manufacturing processes that the general public would never see – close to cast iron blast furnaces, a potato crisp factory presented us with a box of 24 packets when we left! and most awesome, Pilkington’s factory where they made the huge sheets of glass for shop windows.
Working on a series following the McLaren F1 team around led to Canada and Pennsylvania (where we ended up in the middle of the bible belt in a motel which was dry! – that also happened in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, but we did get to swim in the Red Sea, and watch the land crabs in the evenings. (a glass of Sauvignon Blanc would have been nice!)
McLaren took us to Adelaide, where there was time to explore the vineyards of the Barossa Valley, and a small wildlife park to scratch the ears of a kangaroo. Our PA on that trip said: “I’ve been in this country for nine days, and not seen a sensible animal yet!” Upon discussion, we surmised that if indeed the Almighty had created the Earth and all creatures, that maybe He had started in South America, tried the coke and went back to the drawing board to design the fauna of OZ!
That, and some splendid musical venues (assisting Nick Ware), which included Vienna, Cologne, and Prague, plus a fascinating trip to Iceland for a Thames Schools programme – we had the best guides for everything we filmed, leapfrogging around in a Twin Otter aircraft and standing on the volcano that nearly wiped out the town on Heimaey.
Nick Ware
Much as I enjoyed and valued my 19 years in Tech Ops, it was time to leave when I was told at a Sound Supervisor board that I looked too young to be supervising others. I was 38 at the time! They would never get away with that now. At that point, I was tipped off by one of the ‘nicer’ Sound Managers that any chance of promotion was being effectively blocked by one of the others and someone above them. I knew the real reasons.As it happens, they unwittingly did me a huge favour, and I never looked back.
I’ve seen the World, or a great amount of it, and the diversity of work I’ve done in the meantime beats any done and forgotten TV programmes (with obvious exceptions!)
1980 was a new dawn in many ways. For me, a divorce and a new relationship that’s still rock solid today. For work: that was the arrival of PSC (ENG to some), and the inevitable disappearance of Arri BLs, Aatons and Nagras, etc., and not long after that, the arrival of all things digital, and non-linear editing.
For me, months away from home wasn’t what I wanted, and best of all, I totally got to choose what work I wanted to do and what I didn’t.
And as it turns out, looking younger than my actual years is paying off now, as I’m still fit and working all these years later!
Roger Long
My freelance experience was pleasing and varied, pretty much the same clients as before BBC 2,and then CH4. Soon TV History came into play and “War Walks” and “History of the Monarchy” became staples for 10years.I became employed regularly by Granada who had a branch in Bristol. This led to Historical Drama and Music. I worked between 4-5 regular Cameramen , and Films of 59 were my agent and dry hire source.
HBO was a good Drama provider, mostly in Eastern Europe. Natural History for the Beeb and Discovery.
Film withered and Video and digital segued in, BBC Light Entertainment and Drama resurfaced, Music and Arts too.
My last show was a 3 month trip to Paris and its Cultural History.
Strangely my first trip to the US in1975 was the Ozarks for a film about Red wing Blackbirds. My last trip to the US was also to the Ozarks for a Clinton Marriage film for C4. I had done 35 of the US states by then and 88 countries worldwide.
Not bad, but the breadth of freelance work never quite matched the vast variety BBC Bristol Film Unit produced in its heyday.
Pat Heigham
I always enjoyed the journey travelling more than arriving, as then the realisation dawned that we now had to work!
