Pete Simpkin – Page 14 – What Was Pebble Mill?

Farming sig tune & Radio Birmingham jingles

Here is the BBC Farming signature tune, from the early 1980s. Farming was the predecessor of the current Countryfile series.

Also included here are some Radio Birmingham jingles, which probably date from the 1970s.

Thanks to Peter Poole for sharing these.

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

Stuart Gandy: ‘Flippin, ek! that recalls memories from a long time ago, from 1980 when I was doing racks in Studio B. The racks job for Farming was usually very simple. Apart from the opening introduction to camera and the goodbyes, almost all of the rest of the programme was on film. It was the telecine operator who had the much more to do, from the ops perspective.’

Lynn Cullimore: ‘Music always evokes memories…the Top Gear sig tune does it for me having worked there…it gives me goose bumps.’

Pete Simpkin: ‘Actually Lynn the Radio sig. tune version of the Farming programme always does that for me, I can still hear David Stevens announcing and then the strains of ‘I wish I were plough-boy’ took us into Tony Parkin’s introduction.’

Peter Poole: ‘I used to work on Farming with Peter Mellors. After a few weeks he asked if I would like to mix the programme . In my excitement I almost forgot to mic up the presenter. This was probably my first live TV programme. Great days.’

You and Pete Simpkin – Radio Birmingham Jingle

Pete Simpkin Studio 3 1979

This is one of the second wave of jingles made in Birmingham, which was the first co-ordinated set, tailor-made for Radio Birmingham since the original ones made by the Midland Radio Orchestra. The later Dallas set which were the best we had in my day, were made by Pam’s in Dallas…heaven knows how they financed it, but the result certainly helped promote the station’s new image in the 80s, with the new name (Radio WM), stereo and local opt-out services on the two Medium Wave transmitters.

Pete Simpkin

Radio Birmingham Jingle

Radio Brum badge from Pete Simpkin

Thanks to Peter Poole for sharing this compilation of BBC Radio Birmingham jingles.

Pete Simpkin a Radio Birmingham presenter/producer added the following information on the Pebble Mill Facebook group:

‘The first two sections are part of the original Radio Birmingham jingle package from the early seventies. The original jingles were recorded at Pebble Mill by the Midland Radio Orchestra and there is just a snatch of one of these after the pips. (The voice over incidentally is that of Barry Lankester, the original presenter of Midlands Today who came over in the first wave of staff from the old Midland Region).

The Second part, the ‘News jingle’ was a later example of how the staff started to create versions of the originals and use new samples from non commercial disks. The ‘West Midlands air’ piece is a classic example of homemade items in the mid 70s, but that one was not often used. Later in the 70s and with the name change came major new sets, one locally recorded by a Birmingham Commercial studio and the final great collection used for many years into the 80s was recorded by the famous Dallas Texas Theme Tune Company!!’

BBC Leave Form

This was the standard BBC Leave Form, for staff to request holiday.

Staff used to get around 25 days annual holiday a year. ‘Compensatory’ leave, was accrued by working extra days, for example if you worked at least 4 x 12hr days in one BBC calendar week (Sunday to Saturday), and came in to work on the 5th day, then you were entitled to an extra day off. ‘Additional’ leave was given for various reasons, e.g. you used to get 2 days off for moving house, and the same for paternity leave, and long service leave was earned at the rate of 2.5 days a year, after you’d worked for the BBC continuously for ten years. You earned 20 hours extra leave for each year over ten you’d worked. Long service leave could be carried over, and couldn’t be taken for periods of less than a week. It meant that you could take a very long holiday of a couple of months or longer, if you’d worked for the Corporation for a long time.

If you were paid weekly, then you could get a cash advance, from the Cash Office, to get your pay in advance.

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

Stephen Martin: ‘You had to give your “leave address”. There was no escape.’

Stuart Gandy: ‘Those were the days when we actually had a cash office. Very useful it was too for cashing personal cheques (I think you were allowed up to £50, but my memory is fading a bit on that point!) as in those days cash machines were not that common and the nearest bank to Pebble Mill was quite a long way away.’

Ruth Kiosses: ‘Talking of the cash office, what about the purchasing forms in multi coloured layers? We could only pay cash at Makro because finance were so long settling bills they refused our purchase forms. We had a hole put in our Makro card if I remember rightly? This labelled us as bad payers!’

Marc Price: ‘Wasn’t there also a form of leave called “Bisque”? It was leave that couldn’t be refused by management or something like that?’

Ruth Kiosses: ‘And gardening leave? I’m sure my boss had that once?’

Ray Lee: ‘Any overtime could also be taken as Comp Leave. Overtime was normally paid at 1.25T (irregular hours contract) but if you took comp leave instead you were paid the 0.25T balance and accrued comp hours at the 1T rate.’

Pete Simpkin: ‘Yes Marc that’s right, usually for desperate times like sudden bereavements etc and remarkable for the fact that the system was respected by most staff. Incidentally I seem to remember there was a spectacular payment if you had to work on Christmas Day, at one time there had to be two engineers on duty at every studio centre which had a control room for the Queen’s Christmas Day Broadcast so most people had at least one of these payments during their career.’

Sound Effects Disc – ‘In A Provincial Town’

This BBC Sound Effects Disc was given to Peter Poole when he left Pebble Mill and moved to the O.U.P.C., Milton Keynes.

Sound effects tracks, like the ones on this record were used as background atmosphere on many location based television shows, they were added on in the dub, and helped smooth out differences in background audio.

The following comments were added on the Pebble Mill Facebook group:

Pete Simpkin: ‘The cue-ing up was interesting, there was a blip of tone just before the start of an effect and you stopped the disc on prefade as soon as you had heard this. Was fascinating to hear on live news programmes the occasional ‘beep’ in the background from one of the grams which had slipped or been miscued in the rush to do live on air effects!’

Peter Greenhalgh: ‘Ahh, Prov Town. I used to use that a lot when editing mute news rushes. In fact I think its still used today and exists on our Quantel server. City Skyline was another useful one, although you have to avoid overusing the bus that went past at one point as people started recognising it….’