Andy Marriott – Page 3 – What Was Pebble Mill?

Pebble Mill 2004

Pebble Mill 2004 from pebblemill on Vimeo.

This video was recorded on December 11th, 2004 by John Sarson. By this time production had moved to the new BBC Birmingham headquarters at the Mailbox, and the excess equipment had been auctioned off, prior to the building being demolished in 2005. The site is now being redeveloped as a dental hospital.

Thanks to John Sarson, and the VT Oldboys for sharing this video. There is plenty more interesting material on the VT Oldboys website, so do take a look: http://vtoldboys.com/.

The following comments were left on the Pebble Mill Facebook page:

Terry Powell: ‘I walked through those doors for many a happy year’

Andy Marriott: ‘Where was the tape storage area?’

Pete Simpkin: ‘The nagging question is what happened to all the tapes in that library?’

Janet Collins: ‘Tape storage area was down stairs in the basement.’

Matt Toomer: ‘Did all those tapes get rescued or were they binned?’

Graham Todd – A55 course

A55 course July 1978: L to R, Back row: D Slingsby (Terminated), M Swain, G Todd (Birmingham), J Willis (Belfast). Middle row: N Meadwell, R Pickering (Terminated), D Purdham (Glasgow), S Rowsell (Cardiff), G Russell (Cardiff). Front row: N Barnes, A Best, M Brown, M Devareux, G Fry, N Godden (Resigned at end of course)

A55 30 yr reunion Sept 2008. L to R, back row: Martin Swain, Neil Barnes, Steve Rowsell, Graham Todd, Joe Willis. Front row: Andy Best, Martin Brown, Martin Devereux, Gary Fry

A55 35 yr reunion 2013. L to R, back row: Steve Rowsell, Graham Todd, Joe Willis. Front row: Neil Barnes, Andy Best, Martin Brown, Gary Fry

The photos are from the VT Old Boys website: http://www.vtoldboys.com/etd/etd24.htm.

Thanks to Joe Willis for giving permission to use the photos, from the original TA course, A55 at Wood Norton, and the subsequent reunions. Graham Todd, from BBC Birmingham, was one of the first people that Joe met, when he joined the BBC, and they shared a room in D-Dorm, on the course. The A55 course, Engineering Training Department, visited Pebble Mill as part of the course, to see Pebble Mill at One going out live on air.

Graham Todd, died in October 2014.

The following comments were left on the Pebble Mill Facebook page:

Andy Marriott: ‘Graham was a great bloke. It came as a real shock to hear he’d died.

I made it to his retirement do (which I think was in 2010?) and that was the last time I saw him.

Unlike many retirement do’s I’ve been to where the person in question is usually a little sad to be leaving, but ultimately looking forward to a bit of R&R, spending time with family and hobbies and the like, I got the feeling he retired out of frustration at the way things were going. It was really quite upsetting.’

Malcolm Hickman: ‘I worked with Graham for many years and a better colleague you couldn’t wish for. Another fine fellow gone.’

Jacks’ lead storage

Photo by Paul Vanezis, no reproduction without permission.

This photo shows how spools from old VT tapes were reused as jacks’ lead storage in post production at Pebble Mill. You can see the spools screwed on to the end of this bay outside Dub 1 in post production

The following comments were left on the Pebble Mill Facebook Page:

Keith Brook (Scouse): ‘I think they were the 30 minute size of 2″ spools. They took both sides off the centre, screwed it to the wall, then put one side back on.’

Andy Marriott: ‘I would’ve assume timed video leads would make that an MFA area somewhere in post production. Any increase/decrease in cable lengths would’ve played havoc with timings between VT/studios, unless you can compensate for it. This is obviously in the days before you could just stick cheap frame synchronisers on each OS. ISTR that even by the end of Studio B’s life, only a handful of the OS’ had synchronisers on. The others relied on the sources being synchronous and ‘timed in’, like local VT machines etc.

I think the reason they’re ‘timed’ leads, is that basically they’re all the same length, so if you need to patch a component feed between two VT’s (three patch cables required), you’d need the cables to be all the same length to avoid messing up your picture if (for example) the colour difference signals arrive before your luminance signal.

If you were short of spools you can also chop them at 120 degree intervals have three cable hangers instead. You can label as 50Hz, 0-20kHz and >3MHz.’

Raymond Lee: ‘It may have been a JCB [John Burkill] idea, he was quite involved with the refurb.’

2nd Floor Bar – Keith Brook (Scouse)

Photo by Tim Savage. Included l to r: Ivor Williams, Nigel Evans, Mike Bloore, John Burkill

2nd Floor Bar

The second floor bar, or VT-C to some, was instrumental in the early success of Pebble Mill.

It was a place were everyone involved in a production could meet before, during or after a programme and chew the cud over what went horribly wrong or what went wonderfully right about a show.

This freedom of opinion was crucially important in making producers choose to bring their babies to PM. They loved it and were suddenly free of the ‘unionised’ structure of Telly Centre (which was caused by dreadful bad management) and could relax, as equals, in the talented and artistic world of ‘The Mill’.

Directors were astonished to find they could have conversations over talkback with cameramen and VT instead of relying on nods and buzzers.

It was London’s jealousy, caused by producers ‘wanting’ to work at The Mill, that was its eventual downfall. That moment was continually pushed back by Phil Sidey who would regale us, often at big meetings in the boardroom, with stories of his battles with management, much to the horror of management I’m delighted to say!!

The nearest I got to the feeling of Pebble Mill’s last days was when I worked on the final edition of the ‘Big Breakfast’. So many people came out from the party and stood on the grass just looking at the house. Many in tears, many just stunned, but all in complete bewilderment as to why it should happen and how awful the replacement was.

So, the managers move BBC Birmingham to the Mailbox and contract to pay £2.4m a year for 25 years, instead of £800, just because of jealousy.

If they’d all gone to ‘The Club’ things could have been so different.

Keith Brook (aka. Scouse)

The following comments were left on the Pebble Mill Facebook Group:

Cathy Houghton: ‘The bar on the 2nd floor was the best and yes the BBC lost a treasure when they made the decision to close the Mill .. ‘

Lynn Cullimore: ‘a lot of creative ideas came to pass in that bar!!!’

Pete Simpkin: ‘The original second floor bar was often thought of as an extension of the Radio Birminham newsroom on the floor below. There was great excitement when the journos heard the Newsroom was moving to that exact spot in the expansion of the Local Radio facilities but this turned to bitter disappointment when on arrival in their new newsroom the beverage dispensing facilities had been moved outside the main building to separate premises!’

Andy Marriott: ‘Are there any photos of the interior of the bar? I came along to the mill far too late to have witnessed it. I loved the fact there was such an informal place to relax in after (and in some cases, before!) work.

Working at MediaCity just doesn’t compare, having to remortgage your house for a tiny bottle of fizzy gnat’s pi** while sitting in the same uncomfortable plastic seats you eat your overpriced lunch at just isn’t the same. It seems every time the BBC moves to a new building, a little bit of its soul dies with it.’

Stuart Gandy: ‘My first memory of the old bar was actually on rum punch day. Having spent 3 months on my A course at Wood Norton in the autumn of 1979, I spent just a couple of days at pebble Mill before the Christmas break, but before I officially started there in the January. One of these was rum punch day. Of course I didn’t know what that meant when my new colleagues said it was rum punch, but none the less I went to the bar to find out, and there began my knowledge of this old Pebble Mill tradition. The bar was rammed full including the outside balcony, with the punch being served at the far end so it was quite a challenge to actually get to it. Happy memories of the old place.’

David Stevens, Midlands Today and the self opt

This blog is made up from comments from various contributors on the Pebble Mill Facebook page.

‘David was one of a team of Announcers who in the 70s became both TV and Radio broadcasters reading the radio and TV bulletins and also operating the local TV continuity desks. For a glorious time in the 70s all the Regions had one of these self operated desks, originally placed in the news studios but eventually in their own little cubby hole but using a studio camera wheeled into place after the regional news programme had finished. They shadowed the London announcers doing their own sound and vision mixing ……in vision…… and could call up captions, slides and even telecine. So the entire evening looked as if it were coming from Pebble Mill. The team consisted of David, Guy Thomas and others and seemed to be a great success.’ (Pete Simpkin)

‘David was always a delight to work with. Many years ago when BBC 1 closed down at the end of the day’s broadcast the Regions would opt out to say goodnight. David was famous for these opt outs and would often show photos from local photographic clubs. One time this opt out carried on after the other had Regions had closed down. The transmitters had a system called RBS. If the line feed failed, the RBS would rebroadcast an off signal, signal from the nearest transmitter. This resulted in all the transmitters switching back on and broadcasting David across the UK!’ (Peter Poole)

‘On the subject of RBS, assuming the tx’s of that era weren’t still being shut off manually at the end of the day (it’s quite possible that the main stations were still manned during operational hours in those days). It would likely be that only stations north of Sutton would carry this extended programme, as the RBS system was designed to work from London outwards it would be unlikely that any transmitters south of Birmingham would’ve stayed on as they would be RBSing from sites in the south, which would likely to have been fed from different regions. The network was strictly one way, a fully meshed configuration would have been a nightmare.’ (Andy Marriott)

‘As an engineer in the Communications Centre on the late shift, I would see David come in around 23:30 and load all his slides from local photographers into the slide scanner for his closedown news bulletin. Depending on how many slides he loaded determined how late we would have to stay!

We would do checks with him from the self op desk to make sure his mic and camera were working ok and then ‘opt him in’ (that is, change the route of BBC 1 Network (from London) from going directly to the transmitters to going via his self opt desk so that when he was cued via Network t/b, he could switch his own output to the transmitters instead of that from London Network)….sometimes there were a lot of slides!
When he had finished, we could put the Network feed back to the transmitters and go home.’ (Brian Johnson)

Contributions from Peter Poole, Pete Simpkin, Andy Marriott and Brian Johnson, and photo supplied by Annie Gumbley Williams