Copyright resides with the original holder, no reproduction without permission.
Goodbye Pebble Mill was transmitted on BBC1 in 2004, as a tribute to production at Pebble Mill, as the building closed prior to demolition. It is introduced by Toyah Wilcox and features highlights from Pebble Mill programmes and interviews with many stars.
Copyright resides with the original holder no reproduction without permission.
This titles grab is from the daily magazine show, Good Morning with Anne and Nick, which ran on BBC1 from 1992-6. The show was scheduled to compete with This Morning on ITV. It was presented by Anne Diamond and Nick Owen.
Here is the Radio Times entry from one of the early episodes from October 12 1992, courtesy of the BBC Genome project:
Anne Diamond and Nick Owen welcome you to a new week of chat. fact, tips, fun, daily horoscopes and star guests.
10.50 Beauty Spot with Liz Simpson
11.00 News (Txt) and weather
11.10 Library of Romance
11.20 Star Guest of the Day
11.30 Consumer Action with Will Hanrahan
11.35 Medical Phone-in with Dr Mark Porter
1 1.50 Travel Spot with Carol Smillie
12.00 News (Txt) and weather
Editor Mike Hollingsworth
http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/650fac97edd84607b638b8e3dcd3c32e
Thanks to Ian Collins for making the grab available.
Photos by Karen Bond, no reproduction without permission.
These photos are of the Good Morning with Anne and Nick set, circa 1993. The set was built in Studio C, which was originally the Foyer at Pebble Mill, and where Pebble Mill at One was staged. The set mimicked a domestic house, and blocked out much of the iconic view from the street scene on Pebble Mill road, which characterised Pebble Mill at One. The successor programme to Pebble Mill at One, called simply, Pebble Mill, was using Studio A at this time.
Good Morning with Anne and Nick, was a mid morning magazine show, presented by Anne Diamond and Nick Owen which went out between 1993-6.
Photos by Joanne Kenyon, no reproduction without permission.
(This Good Morning with Anne and Nick sweatshirt was worn by the band of Community Service Volunteers who manned the phone-lines on the daily live show. Good Morning went out on weekdays between 1993-96. They were sometimes seen in shot, hence the need for the sweatshirts. The hotliners, as they were known, took the calls from viewers, and would then put selected viewers through to the studio phone-in, to talk to presenters Anne Diamond and Nick Owen, as well as TV Doctor, Mark Porter, or Agony Aunt, Deirdre Sanders etc. The sweatshirts were obviously made to last, as this one is still in former hotliner, Joanne Kenyon’s wardrobe, almost twenty years on!)
At an age when you were fresh and new and itching to get into television production, with no idea how to get there, if you were lucky enough, you gained a voluntary position with CSV Media.
The CSVers would turn up every morning at the crack of dawn to Pebble Mill, walk through Reception, down the corridor with all the celebrity pictures, past the ‘Quiet Please’ signs on the Studio doors and would make their way to the Good Morning Hotline office, next door to the main production office.
After the obligatory cuppa and breakfast in the Crush Bar you would hear Maggie’s dulcet Northern Irish tones shouting ‘logooon…’ which would signal that you would spend the next few hours speaking to members of the public about whatever the topic of the day was. You would filter calls and put them through to the Studio floor and when the cameras came to the Hotline (with the live show broadcasting the telephone number) you would concentrate on not looking into the camera and be on the phone looking extremely busy (well after all your Mum was seeing you on TV!). After the excitement of the live show was over you would spend the afternoon researching and answering viewer’s questions and calling them back with the information you had found.
It was a fun time, everything was new and exciting, you would see celebrities in the corridors. I will never forget Dale Winton collapsing in the chair next to me claiming he was shattered after his ten minute interview; Lennox Lewis or Gary Lineker answering the phones with us and sending most of the girls (and some of the boys) in the room giddy! The celebrities are too many to mention. I have very special memories of looking after Bob Monkhouse, a real gentleman.
Despite making life long friends, lots of giggles, feeling part of something important and having great fun in the Pebble Mill bar, it was a vital, amazing and necessary start in your TV life. You were given opportunities that would not exist anywhere else; assisting in the hospitality; meeting the hard working production team, assisting with their research and learning from what they did. It was valuable for your career and an amazing springboard into the life of live television.
You weren’t paid, worked long hours and at times it was extremely difficult, especially if the subject of the day was one that devastated the lives of the people calling in. At the end of my CSV year I had made great friends, created great memories, gained the experience to be recruited by a local Production Company ….and not forgetting, I came away with an extremely memorable and now super cool and retro sweatshirt – what a great time in my life!
Joanne Kenyon
Good Morning OB in Rwanda, Caroline Officer and Sue Robinson
Photo copyright Sue Robinson, no reproduction without permission.
The date was December 1994 which began with an appeal we launched on Good Morning in September 1994 in conjunction with Oxfam requesting our viewers to knit jumpers for the Rwandan refugee children who had been displaced just over the border in Goma, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) due to the horrific genocide in Rwanda between the Hutus and Tutsis that began exactly 20 years ago this week.
Within weeks we were inundated with jumpers, so it was decided that a team would go out to Goma in Eastern Zaire and broadcast the distribution of the jumpers live on a pre Christmas edition of the programme.
Will Hanrahan was the presenter, Sue the director and I was the producer. Jim Knights was our camera op and our engineers were lovely guys from the OB unit in London, I remember our lead engineer was called Chris.
There were no commercial flights to Goma, so for the recce Sue and I did with Chris we flew from a Kent RAF base on a Russian cargo plane, I remember being given some vodka on take off, there were no seats or seat belts and I slept on top of a large water pipe which was far more comfortable than an economy seat.
The Oxfam people in Goma were fantastic, as were the aid workers at the camps, Toby Porter, a very young emergency relief worker was hugely charismatic and we decided to use him to convey the appalling situation the children were in. Toby has continued to work for aid organisations and is now CEO of HelpAge International.
We returned to the UK and planned the broadcast for a week later.
By now we had at least 100,000 jumpers, so Oxfam arranged to fly them to Goma and we travelled with them on the same cargo plane, along with BBC news journalist Roger Hearing. For our OB engineer Chris, the challenge was building the portable satellite dish and finding a satellite to bounce off. We were lucky to have with us one of the very first satellite phones and this helped us contact an American satellite company who turned theirs towards us, it was amazing how rudimentary it was, but it worked.
I will never forget the first communication with Gallery C at Pebble Mill and clearly hearing Jane McLean in my ear as I was standing in the middle of Africa, one of those magical TV moments.
For the final link, the idea was to have all the children, about 800, wearing a jumper each and we had about 12 minutes to get them on, so we had lines of small children with their hands in the air as we rapidly worked down the line.
We’d also chosen a handful of knitters to join Anne and Nick in the studio and it was my job to ensure that the jumpers they had made were shown on the children for this final link. This connection between the donor and the recipient was another important moment. Such a simple thing as a jumper meant so much to these children and I have often thought of them in the intervening years. We stayed in touch with the aid workers for a while and did learn that quite a few of the children had been reunited with relatives.
I am very proud to have been part of this broadcast, on a personal level it was the most moving experience of my career.
Caroline Officer