Peter Poole – Page 10 – What Was Pebble Mill?

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!!’

John Jeavons lighting the Foyer or Studio B

Photo from Keith Brook, no reproduction without permission

Photo from Peter Poole, no reproduction without permission

The photo is of John Jeavons lighting either Studio B or the foyer.

Jeavons was relegated to working those two places because of an incident at a meeting Sidey had called.

Every department was there to discuss the viability of a simple little TV programme to be made in the foyer. As Sidey went through each section he was greeted with ‘Crazy, but we’ll give it a go’. Finally it got to Tech Ops, who said it was impossible to light, ceiling too low, not enough manpower, far too difficult, yada, yada, yada.

Good old Jeavons stood up and said if we remove the ceiling tiles we’ll have enough room and he’ll only need two sparks who can also do Midlands Today and stay within hours.

That slightly upset Head of Tech Ops, and not being the vindictive type at all, made sure that Jeavons only did those two shows.

Incidentally, he’s using a Weston Master V, the best exposure meter ever made. Which makes him a great lighter!! There’s a load of complicated stuff for still photography but in the TV world, these meters were used to maintain a consistency of light level. To that end, we only used the top window with the needle and tried to keep everything the same.

Keith Brook (Aka Scouse)

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.’

Developments at Pebble Mill 1984

Thanks to Peter Poole for sharing these pages about technical developments, including a new dubbing and sypher suite, and Studio B control room refurbishment, at Pebble Mill in the internal BBC Engineering Newsletter from 1984/5.

The following information was added on the Pebble Mill Facebook group:

Keith Brook: ‘The original 1/4″ location sound was transferred onto special 16mm separate magnetic, sep-mag, film. Now, the film and the sound were the same ‘size’ and could be edited together by the film editor. If it was drama, for example, you’d end up with a complete film and dialogue track but minus the music, sound effects, wild-track and so on. You would them make a second, or third, sep-mag track that had the music, effects and so on, all in the right places but with extra lead-in and lead-out.

Dubbing was where you took that 16mm film, its matching 16mm dialogue track, the other tracks and put them on a huge machine that kept everything in sync. You would then run the whole lot through a sound mixer onto a final track, fading the effects in and out according to a dubbing script that matched the frame counter.

SYPHER was a video system and is a BBC acronym for ‘SYnchronous Post-production using Helical-scan video and Eight-track Recorder’. Essentially, it worked like film-dubbing, but the 8-track sound machine was kept in sync with the video player by time code rather than mechanically as in film. Again, once you had the dialogue track and all the other bits in the right places, you would have a final ‘dub’ where you put it all together onto the audio track of the video recorder. The clever bit with SYPHER was the motorised faders on the sound desk which, again using timecode, would remember their settings at each moment during the final dub.’

Stuart Gandy: ‘Good memories of those times. This was during a period of 3 – 4 years of major refurbishment of the studio and VT areas. From the vision viewpoint in the studios , it was the change from the stalwart EMI 2001 cameras to the Link 125.’

Pebble Mill Site Maps

Thanks to Peter Poole for making these site plans of Pebble Mill available, and for adding the following information:

The plans show the patch panel points around the Pebble Mill building. These boxes were fitted with camera connection sockets, microphone sockets, audio tie-lines and mains power sockets. The outside boxes were fitted with heaters to prevent corrosion of the sockets. All the audio circuits appeared on the north riser jack field. They could then be connected to any studio using a double ender. In the audio unit the plans were used in pre-production planning. A rigging form would be completed showing the studio microphone setup. It would show all the cable connections from the studio floor to the mixer jack field. This is a simplified description. Normally the audio set up would be more complex.