Good Morning with Anne and Nick – Page 8

Studio C, Calrec Sound Desk – Peter Poole

Photos by Peter Poole, no reproduction without permission.

Studio C was the Foyer, made famous by ‘Pebble Mill At One’. In the early days of ‘Pebble Mill At One’, Studio C did not have a dedicated Production Gallery. Studio A or B’s Galleries were used depending on which one was available. About 1982 Studio C had it’s own Gallery built. This enabled much greater use of the Foyer by other programmes. ‘Saturday Night At The Mill’ and ‘Good Morning With Anne And Nick’ were among many programmes to be broadcast from Studio C. In the final years of Pebble Mill the Foyer was used to record the daytime drama ‘Doctors’.

The photos show the Studio C, Calrec Sound Desk, which gave similar facilities to the Studio A desk, and offered more channels than the Studio B desk. It was very well designed for live broadcasting.

Peter Poole

Merrick Simmonds, Film Editor – photo by Peter Poole

Photo by Peter Poole, no reproduction without permission.

This photo shows Merrick editing in one of the film editing rooms. Before PSC (portable single camera) most location programmes were shot on film. Pebble Mill had several film editing rooms. Editors often worked late into the night to meet transmission times.

News was shot on reversal film and processed in Pebble Mill’s film processing unit. I think it took about an hour to process the film. Then it was edited and sometimes a voice over added. This made getting a story to air very slow.

Merrick latter became a director for Midlands Today. After that he directed ‘Pebble Mill At One’ and many other network programmes, including ‘Good Morning with Anne and Nick’.

Peter Poole

Good Morning with Anne and Nick 1996

This photos is of the ‘Good Morning with Anne and Nick’ production team in 1996, around the end of the series.

The photo includes: Sarah Jayne Phillips, vision mixer (pink top), Sue Robinson, director (black top, glasses), Marco, floor manager behind Sue R. Sue Watson, researcher (white jacket over black top), Steph Silk, Editor Daytime, (seated, black jacket), Jo Gray, PA (seated on floor, black top), Jane Lomas, Producer (seated on floor, grey waistcoat), Sue Walton, AP (black top, behind Jane Lomas), Natasha Wood, PA (turquoise top, next to Sue), Katie Wright, Deputy Editor Good Morning (pink suit), Tessa Finch, Editor Good Morning (black suit, next to Katie), Guy, Producer, Rosemary Edwards, Producer (blonde hair, black top, rt handside), Jen Phillips, AP (dark hair, stripey top next to Rosemary). Back row right handside, Jane McLean, PA (blue top), Merrick Simmonds, director (black jumper next to Jane), Sharon Fisher, researcher, (white shirt, next to Merrick). Back row left handside, Derek Hallworth, director. Central – Jackie Deitrich, Producer (blue jumper, glass raised), next to Jackie, Julie Tanner, AP, next to her, Jean (can’t remember surname) who was in charge of finances (pink jacket).

Thanks to Jane McLean for making the photo available.

Good Morning with Anne and Nick – photos by Laura McNeill

Photos by Laura McNeill, no reproduction without permission.

These photos were taken during a ‘Good Morning with Anne and Nick’ trip to Guernsey, for a live outside broadcast edition of the show.

Nick obviously missed his vocation – and should have been a bus driver!

The third photo shows some of the crew in Guernsey, including, left to right, cameraman Bob Meikle, sound supervisor Peter Knowles, cameraman Jim Gray, vision mixer Sarah Jayne Phillips and floor manager Marco.

BBC Radio Birmingham – Blog by Nick Owen

I first worked at Pebble Mill in 1973 after I landed a job as a news producer on BBC Radio Birmingham, the forerunner of BBC WM. It was a case of third time lucky getting into the BBC, having failed twice in the previous months to get a job in the Midlands Today newsroom. I arrived from The Birmingham Post and was overwhelmed with all the technology! I was always hopeless with anything mechanical, so learning to work a tape recorder was terrifying, but I got the hang of it in the end and became pretty adept at editing too, with razor blades and tape etc! I was told I had a fairly boring voice so I had to work on my intonation, to try to sound a bit more interested, but I really felt I had found my vocation. In fact, I loved it. It wasn’t long before I read my first live bulletin – I was introduced on air by a young disc jockey called Les Ross, but I have no idea what happened to him!

Ultimately, I became Sports Producer, following my friend Jim Rosenthal, and that took me all over the country and Europe following the fortunes of our football teams. Up the corridor, of course, was the Midlands Today newsroom with such luminaries as Tom Coyne, Alan Towers, Geoffrey Green and Tony Francis ( whom I’d trained with long before I came to Birmingham). I remember one day Tom Coyne said hello to me in the gents and I was so thrilled I nearly had an accident.

I left in 1978 to join ATV but returned to Pebble Mill to present Good Morning with Anne and Nick in 1992. More about that some other time, but I have to say thanks to the BBC at Pebble Mill for giving me my first chance in television back in August 1977. They were doing a regional opt to herald the start of the football season, but Tony Francis, who would normally have been expected to front it, was away on holiday so they were clearly desperate and asked me! I co-hosted it with Peter Windows, then a familiar face on continuity, and our studio guest was someone who became a great friend Larry Canning, the former Aston Villa player, then well known as a reporter for Sport on Two. The show was produced by another long standing friend, Rob Kirk, now at Sky News.

Some very happy days!

Nick Owen