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Pres A
Presentation Studio A, on the fourth-and-a-half floor of Television Centre,
was where the trailers were made, voiced and transmitted for many years. Many happy, though sometimes fraught
evenings were spent with people
like Ray Moore, John Braban and Alan Dedicoat, popping down the club now and then for a glass of Tantine (an evil red wine that Ray liked).
It was also the home of the weather forecast.
Cameramen were,
for most of this time, rotated up to Pres for three months at a time. If they ended up in Pres B, next door,
they worked mostly on Late Night Line Up and its spin-offs, the most famous being The Old Grey Whistle Test. This
could be great fun, noisy, and sometimes historic. Not many cameramen, let alone anyone else, can say they have
worked in a room not much bigger than the average living room with Bob Marley, Joe Cocker or Jimi Hendrix
at full blast.
Pres A was rather more peaceful, apart from the odd noise from next door interrupting live weather forecasts.
Most of the work, until caption generators came along, consisted of helping to hang strips of caption paper
on boards with magnetic strips. Each strip would have the name of a programme, and the cameramen would pan
down from one to the next during the making of the trail. This boring activity did not entirely stretch the
abilities of the average cameraman, so they filled in time doing other things - Pete Cleveley built an Acorn
computer, Jeff Goodwin (in rather less time) invented LOPS, a device for remote-starting the (mechanical) VT clock consisting of a Long Operational
Piece of String.
In the evenings the crew of three was generally reduced to one -"the late man" - who had the challenge
of operating all three cameras one after the other on the late weather. It wasn't too difficult to keep up, but you had to shift around the studio in absolute silence.
Pres A was the last place in the BBC to enjoy the dubious delights of the enormous Marconi Mk 7 cameras, which had been moved up there from TC7.
Personally, I can't complain much about working in Pres A, because as a person with no theatre or whatever experience,
and no degree, it was the only area of production I could reasonably try to get in to. Eventually I did,
and spent many years in the gallery of Pres A putting together trails of my own. (And many more hours
in VT hacking the clips together - see www.oldboys.dabsol.co.uk)
.
Some time in the late 80's I borrowed one of the new Hi8 cameras from news and walked around the Presentation department
recording "the way it was". Recently I found a VHS copy of this (unique record etc) and lifted some stills and video.
Sadly, not only are some of the people featured in the video now dead, but the whole area, including slightly historic Pres B,
is now gone, converted into transmission areas which are themselves soon to be redundant.
There are very few records
of the area, so I make no apology for the low quality of the pictures shot in semi-darkness. |
