Gallery C – What Was Pebble Mill?

Good Morning with Anne and Nick – D-Day

Copyright resides with the original holder, no reproduction without permission.

Today it is the 70th Anniversary of D-Day, the beginning of the end of WWII.

I remember the 50th Anniversary of D-Day in 1994. I was an assistant producer on Good Morning with Anne and Nick. The D-Day Anniversary was an important topic for Good Morning, and one that we wanted to cover with a live outside broadcast from Normandy. I think that we were going to borrow an existing BBC Events OB unit which was going to be covering some of the events later in the day. They initially said that that was going to be fine, and then decided a day or two before D-Day that they would be too busy to help us out, so we had to organise our own OB!

My job was to be the producer back in Birmingham, in case anything went wrong. We had a whole parallel script made up of links and short films, to go to, if the OB link went down. I think that Will Hanrahan was one of the standby presenters, and I can’t remember who else joined him on the sofa. I was ever so slightly terrified, as I had never produced a live show in the gallery before – but all was well, and the OB signal behaved itself, and I just sat in Gallery C, and followed the dummy running order and script I’d spent days perfecting, alongside the live OB.

Vanessa Jackson

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

Sharon Fisher: ‘I remember! My first OB. Vidal Sassoon was being interviewed and I was busy doing specially printed red white and blue viewer response cards.’

Caroline Feldon: ‘My first OB was for Radio 3 at the Cheltenham Festival. A week or so of fab concerts at the Town Hall and Pittville Pump Room with legends such as Mark Decker, Tony Wass, Steve Portnoi and anyone remember Alan Ward?’

Paul Hunt: ‘Tom Horsfield and I were there in 1994 by Southsea castle looking out across the Solent with Tony Wadsworth and Julie Mayer to do a live OB for WM. We had a very early start to do our rig – once done we had some time to take in the immense scale of what we part of and what we were remembering. Tom then took some photos of the flotilla of ships including the Canberra, the QE2 and the George Washington aircraft carrier. The OB went without a hitch. As we de-rigged we discovered that Tom’s camera had been stolen from the OB van – which put a sad end to such a memorable event.’

Katie Wright: ‘I think you’re thinking of the Dunkirk anniversary Vanessa Jackson. We were on board HMS Alacrity, escorting the little ships across from Dover to Calais…. Phil Thickett was with me.. And Helena Taylor. My father was on the beaches and it was a real honour to remember him and all the others and the many who risked their own lives to rescue them. We had to get Alacrity to sail at a strange angle to keep ‘line of sight’ to our vehicle on the white cliffs, which would explain why you were on standby throughout. ‘

Good Morning, Rwanda OB – Caroline Officer

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

Studio Operations (Part 8) – Ray Lee

Studio Lighting Studio B

Studio B lighting was a much simpler setup. All the lights were on sliding pantographs, which had tracks running from one end of the studio to the other. The luminaires were mainly dual source again, but from what I remember the lighting circuits had switches on a panel in the studio, to allocate them to faders on the desk in the gallery. There was no memory system, and all changes had to be done manually. Considering the complexity of some of the programmes to be made in Studio B it was a testament to the ingenuity of the TM’s in arranging the lighting. One of the problems was that the height of the studio was insufficient in many cases to get the lights as high as would have been liked, and there was a real danger in some cases of tall people walking into lights where they needed to be fairly low to obtain the desired lighting effect.

Studio Lighting the Foyer

Photo by Robin Sunderland, no reproduction without permission

Pebble Mill at One Lighting, was all fixed, and before Gallery C was built there were no dimmers or lighting control. A series of scaffold bars were suspended from the foyer ceiling, and all the lights rigged on those or on floor stands. The “soft lights” were basically a set of 6 car headlight type lamps, and the key lights a variety of spotlights including some CSI discharge lamps. The latter had the problem that if you turned them off e.g. to reposition them, you had to wait 20 minutes before they could be turned on again.! The TM had to guess on how bright to light the area based on what he expected to weather to be like at transmission time. Too bright on a dull day would make outside look like night, too dark on a bright day would make the outside burn out on the cameras. The one time the TM could never win was when the weather was variable, with sun and clouds.

I happened to be on the racks on one such particular day. The programme started well enough with bright fairly sunny conditions, and lighting to match. About 5 minutes into the programme dark clouds came across and it started snowing, It became so dark outside that the cameras outside were wide open with master gain added in order to get a bright enough picture. The shots on the inside cameras looked as if it was night time outside. After half an hour, the snow stopped, (now about 4inches deep!) and the sun came out again. The inside cameras now looked as if there were no lights on, as the sun reflecting on the snow provided a backlight many times brighter. The outside cameras were now well stopped down, with no master gain. This was the day that there was a parade of Easter bonnets! A group of lightly dressed girls in Easter bonnets were now parading in the snow trying not to look cold, as the programme came to a close. At the end the director said to the TM, “That’s just one of those days where you can never win!”

Ray Lee

John Kimberley blog

OB Scanner CM1 (1980s)

I joined Pebble Mill in 1974 and was a staff Studio and O.B. engineer until we lost the O.B. fleet in 1992, after which I became a freelance engineer. I did do some contract work at the Mill afterwards until 1997, then I became a full freelancer working for Sky, BBC and ITV via various O.B. facilities companies. I retired this year, but if offered an O.B. which appeals to me, I guess I’ll take up the offer! Regional Engineers, as we were known were expected to work in Telecine and Videotape as well and we were trained to work in Communications (‘Comms Centre’ and Radio Links) if required.

During my first few years at the Mill, Studio A was usually working 6 days a week, with 2 sets of 2 day dramas and 2 days of Pebble Mill at One; during the latter there would be a complete scenery and lighting reset for the following production. I worked on the last series of Poldark, various series of All Creatures Great and Small, Angels, Juliet Bravo and countless Plays for Today. Amongst memorable Studio A productions were a series of live dramas for BBC 2 around 1980. We were using the very first colour cameras, EMI 2001s, and the first incarnation of the studio technical facilities. Despite the age of the equipment, all the plays went out without a hitch, and much alcohol was consumed afterwards as we all came down from the adrenaline ‘high’. A great breakthrough came with the inclusion of Light Entertainment programmes in the late ’70s, a welcome change from a constant diet of drama productions. I thoroughly enjoyed the specials with Showaddywaddy, Elky Brookes and Don McLean and have very fond memories of doing Basil Brush shows on Saturdays. Oh, and I nearly forgot Saturday Night at the Mill! In the 80s, drama became a single camera operation, usually on location rather than in the studio. However, the studio seemed to be just as busy doing many other productions like Telly Addicts, The Adventure Game and Young Scientist of the Year. When London decided to kill off Pebble Mill at One, there were many spin off daytime programmes involving D.I.Y., fashion (The Clothes Show), and cooking, mainly done using Gallery C. A house was built in the back quadrangle for some productions! Studio B shouldn’t be remembered as only doing Midlands Today – I worked regularly in there on Farming Today and various programmes for Asian immigrants. There were often innovative ideas for the regional opt-out programmes, some of which went on to be networked – Top Gear being a good example. We even did a rock music show in there, and on one occasion, the sound travelled through the building and was picked up on the microphones in Studio A which was doing a Play For Today at the time.

I worked briefly with CMCR9 during my first ever O.B. stint in 1980, but it was moved to Manchester to become ‘North 3’ during that time, and we had CMCR10 for a few months until our new scanner, CM1 arrived. An O.B. stint then was very varied in programme type. It would include football, rugby, swimming, cycling, snooker, horse racing, cricket, party political conferences, inserts to Pebble Mill at One or to drama productions. After I went freelance, all I seemed to do was football!

I have so many lovely memories of my life at Pebble Mill, and it’s great to see that everyone else remembers it fondly and that we are all keeping in touch. I remember that when I left in 1992 I felt like I had suffered a divorce and a bereavement at the same time and it took a long time for me to come to terms with the fact that I no longer worked there. I must say that I don’t feel that way about retiring now as the industry has changed so much and has completely different principles from those with which I’m familiar. I completely agree with the idea that we saw the Golden Age of Television in the 70s and 80s!

John Kimberley

Good Morning – Gallery C

Sue Robinson, Jane Mclean

Roger Sutton, Vision Mixer

Peter Knowles, Sound Supervisor

Photos from Sue Robinson, no reproduction without permission.

These photos are of Gallery C, probably from a ‘Good Morning with Anne and Nick’ show.

The first photo is of multi-camera director, Sue Robinson, and live PA, Jane Mclean.

The second photo is of vision mixer, Roger Sutton.

The third is of sound supervisor, Peter Knowles.