Ray Lee – Page 3 – What Was Pebble Mill?

Studio Operations (part 10) Conditions of Service – Ray Lee

Conditions of service

A quirk of the conditions of service at that time, was the ability to take overtime as time in lieu, so that if you worked an hour’s overtime which would normally be payable at 1.25 T you could take the 1T as time in lieu, and just be paid the 0.25T. I made quite extensive use of that option when I was not short of money, as one cannot be taxed on time in lieu, but later with a growing family money became quite important. However I cannot compare to the master of the system Elson Godbolt. As he was part of the O.B. rotation he tended to get a lot more overtime than I did based largely in the studio, and he managed to amass weeks of leave, and around every 2 years, put this together with his annual leave and PHL leave, and took 3 months off during the winter season, on full pay. It was a good job no-one else wanted much leave at that time or it would have broken the system. If all the staff had taken all overtime as time in lieu, there would not have been enough staff to cover all the requirements, as no-one would ever have been working for more than their basic hours in any one year, and the staffing levels were such that some overtime was almost inevitable, especially as some studio sessions would overrun.

Other payments included extra payment if you worked on a public holiday, 2T for working on Christmas day, payments for working over 12 hours, payment for a less than 10 hour break between duties. All of these were intended to discourage scheduling staff for unreasonable duties, but for occasions like Election Night, where staff quite often ended up working though for 24hours at some O.B. sites, they were laughing all the way to the bank!

The engineering staff both in operations unit, and engineering services, were (as far as I am aware) all on irregular hours working conditions, which attracted a 15% lift on basic salary. In some areas many of the staff worked quite regular shift patterns and some even worked days patterns, but to maintain flexibility in moving staff around all were given the same irregular hours conditions. This may have caused some disquiet among some staff they worked alongside who were on normal days conditions and therefore flat rate salary, but I was never aware of it becoming an issue, it was just seen a a quirk of the system. The downside was that non of these extra payments counted towards pensions, so people used to receiving a lot of them, could, on retirement, see quite a cut in their income. From what I have seen since leaving the BBC, pensions have got a whole lot worse!

Ray Lee

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

Stuart Gandy: ‘Commenting on Ray’s mention of Elson Godbolt, I do remember that in my first weeks at pebble Mill at the start of 1980, I wondered who he was. By the time I had been there a few weeks I had probably met all the ops engineers except Elson. His name being on the rota as showing weeks and weeks of leave. Other allowances I remember back then were the MHW, or meal hour work-through. This was when you could get an extra payment if your meal time was disturbed. Then there was the sssa, soft soul shoe allowance which was meant to pay for footwear for people who had to walk on the studio floor. I think this was the massive sum of £4 when I started, and as far as I know, didn’t increase at all right up until it was abolished. It was quite a time consuming task though, filling in all the forms if you wanted to claim these things.’

Peter Poole: ‘And don’t forget meals over five at base. It was a small allowance with a luncheon voucher.’

Brian Johnson: ‘Wow, Elson Godbolt stirred a memory. Sorry this might be slightly off subject………however……When I transferred from London to my home town of Birmingham as a Technical Assistant in 1969, (pre-P.Mill) I had to do a few weeks in every engineering section. One of those was the film processing area at Gosta Green that dealt with all the News film each day. It was an unusually hot summer and we could not get the processing tanks down to the right temperature. I was being supervised by Elson and we had to buy in lots of ice to put into the huge tanks of developer and fixer to enable us to process the film. Midlands Today (I think it was called that then although I might be wrong) sent a camera crew to film us doing it and it went out on the news programme as part of the item on the unusual heat. We obviously managed to develop it ok!’

Pete Simpkin: ‘Brian as a former worker in News film processing in the BBC I can sympathise…we also had an annual maintenance weekend where we stripped the processor down and cleaned every tank and roller having to get it all up and working again by 9am Monday. Informal arrangements were made to cover any emergencies by having film processed at the local ITV studios should the need arise…it never did!’

BBC Engineering 1971

This BBC Engineering magazine was brought out in 1971, just as the Pebble Mill building was opening.

To view the whole magazine, please click here.

Thanks to Ray Lee for sharing the magazine.

Studio Operations (part 9) – Ray Lee

Allowance rate card 1982

Schedule A and the O.B. Mafia

One of the results of the BBC at one time being part of the Civil Service, was its adoption of a lot of the terms and conditions of service that were current at that time. Things like a generous pension scheme, retirement at 60, good holiday entitlements, and good allowances for people working away from their normal base. Whenever the BBC managers tried to change any of this, the Union would generally put it to dispute and status quo would prevail, such was the power of Unions before Mrs Thatcher, that more often than not things didn’t change much.

My understanding was that Schedule A allowances were convenient for the BBC, as it enabled them to save on the administration of booking people into hotels and arranging transport, for staff manning outside broadcasts. Basically the staff themselves undertook booking Hotels/Guest houses and arranging their own transport to the appropriate venue. In some ways I personally think this was a bit of a cop out by BBC managers, but for the staff involved it could be quite lucrative if they “worked the system”. The net result of this was that those on the O.B. rotation defended their position in staying in this privileged position quite vigorously. Some of the arguments in favour were perfectly valid, e.g. CMCR9 had different cameras to the studio, so those not having been on O.B.s would not be familiar with them. On the other hand it maintained the exclusivity, with no opportunity for engineers not on the rotation to gain that experience. As scanners were tight for space anyway it would be difficult to have a supernumerary engineer to gain experience, and the team needed to work well together as most O.B.s were quite pressured. Thus the exclusive nature earned the team the nick name “Scanner Mafia” or just “Mafia” for short.

some of the ‘Scanner Mafia’. Photo by John Abbott, no reproduction without permission

I don’t remember who first coined the term, probably either John Kimberly or Mike Lee, but both used it regularly, as did a number of other engineers who were not part of what at face value seemed to be an exclusive club. People did break into it over the years, and I myself had 2 periods working on O.B.s, but the first was not until we were using another scanner equipped with EMI 2001 cameras. My second period was with the then new type 5 scanner with Link cameras shortly before I left operations to join engineering services where I remained for the rest of my career.

Schedule A used properly enabled one to stay in approx 3 star accommodation, and covered costs of reasonable quality restaurants for additional meals. In theory if one overspent slightly in one place, that would be compensated by underspend in another. In practice, many engineers chose to stay in the cheapest accommodation possible, go to cheap burger bars or restaurants, and pocket the not inconsiderable difference as a tax free lump sum. Additionally those living some distance from base, but on the right side for the O.B. engaged in what was colloquially known as a “flyer”. They stayed in their own home, travelled to and from the O.B. site each day, and claimed Schedule A as if they had stayed on location and as a result profited very nicely thank you. It is reckoned that some engineers almost doubled their take home pay in this way. Certainly a strong incentive for the group to maintain the status quo. The management knew it was happening but turned a blind eye as challenging it would almost certainly have triggered a union dispute.

A few years later, it became necessary to submit receipts to show that there had been expenses of the kind that Schedule A allowances were intended to defray. That came in at about the time that I had around 3 months working with O.B.s. Even so without even trying I ended up better off by a good amount. On the whole the Schedule A allowance was quite generous although it has to be said that certain expensive locations would more than use it up. In those cases it was quite often agreed to take actuality payments, although those were strictly receipts only, and any expenses for which there was no receipt (like beer down the local pub), had to be waived. Nevertheless the O.B. crew did very nicely out of it for the most part, to the great envy of those who were working in the studio, and not on the rotation.

Ray Lee

The following comment was left on the Pebble Mill Facebook group:

Pete Simpkin: ‘Fascinating the world of OB expenses. I recall in my early days being the engineer for coverage of a three day cricket match.This involved three nights away because I could not drive the vehicle back to base after the whole day duty at the last day of the match. One of the jobs I was required to do there was to tape a half hour ‘audition commentary’ in one of the periods we were not on air with the regular commentators. In those days you had to fill in a recording form which went with the tape and a copy was carbonned for Accounts. I happened to not tick an obscure box marked ‘shared’ on this form so it looked as if I had travelled the 60 miles to the location and stayed three overnights away just for a 30 minute recording! Some weeks later I was hauled up before someone in Accounts as the operation as documented was ‘not very economical’!!’

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

Studio Operations (part 7) – Ray Lee

Studio Lighting Studio A

Photo of Studio A lighting gantry 1975, by Jim Gregory

Studio A had a grid of lighting hoists – referred to as barrels – arranged in rows and columns, I think there were 96 in all. Some in the corners of the studio were short ones, but most could accommodate up to 3 luminaires, and were normally equipped with 2 double ended ones, with a soft light on one side and a key light on the other. The lighting hoist could be lowered to floor level to change luminaires, or add extra ones, and it was quite common for additional spotlights, or effects lights to be added to the standard complement of 2 dual source lamps, or even for one or more of the dual source lamps to be substituted by another more suitable lamp. This was all done on the set and light day. Each barrel (apart from the short ones) had 3 lighting circuits each controlled by its own dimmer. There were a number of outlets on the studio wall also controlled by a dimmer for connecting to cyclorama lighting units or floor standing lamps.

The lighting control system was called a Qfile, and was an early system using computer type memory storage based on magnetic core stores. This allowed lighting scenes to be stored both in terms of which lights were on and how bright they were, and facilitated smooth and quick lighting transitions with ease. In the lighting gallery there was a mimic display, laid out in the same way as the lighting barrels, which showed which lights were on in the studio in white, and the next scene (preview lighting) in green. To test the mimic lights one memory (99) was set with all the lamp circuits on, but woe betide you if you ever cut that up to the live scene. The studio would become very bright very briefly, before the circuit breakers in the basement cut the power off. There would then follow about a 20 minute hiatus while the electricians, went through the sequence of going to the basement and of re-setting the circuit breakers. The lighting panel had a set of meters to show how much power was being drawn, and it was expected that the lights would be distributed across the 3 phase supply to keep a balanced load. The circuit breakers were designed to trip if any one phase exceeded 150kW, so in theory the total lighting load could be close to 450kW, which made for a pretty hot studio. Most of the lamps were switchable 2.5 / 5kW, but occasionally 10kW lamps would be used, so it soon added up.

The Qfile operator was drawn from the engineer pool, but because of its specialised nature, was also one of a small group of people. It was recommended that operators had been on a lighting course, and seen as the first step towards becoming a TM2. Initially Dave White, Peter Wood-fisher, and Ian Dewar, with Mike Lee as a stand in. In the mid 70’s Dave left for Norwich, and Peter moved to VT, Brian Jones then became a regular but Mike had to fill in a lot more. I had a brief time operating it, but was never accepted for a lighting course, and did not really take to it, and would not have coped with some of the fast paced work that the more experienced handled.

The Qfile mimic could be made to display some words in a fairly crude block text. When Playschool was hosted “Little Ted” was the favourite. One had to use your imagination a bit to see the words, but that was the kind of idle exercise that helped brighten some quite long studio days.

Ray Lee

Studio A, All Creatures Great and Small, photo by Tim Savage

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

Pete Simpkin: ‘What a fascinating Blog. Congratulations Ray from one who’s lighting experience was restricted to news studios where the maximum availabilty was one key and fill per person in vision, a ‘pup’ for head and shoulders to separate them from the cyclorama backing and the odd background shape light shining through cardboard cut out patterns!!’

Peter Poole: ‘I worked as theatre electrician before the BBC. I used a Rank Strand Threeset desk. Every time a lamp blow out it took the fuse. Was it the same at Pebble Mill?’