Ray Lee – Page 4 – What Was Pebble Mill?

Studio Operations (part 6) – Ray Lee

All Creatures Great and Small, Studio A. Photo by Tim Savage

Saturday Night at the Mill, 1977. Photo by John Burkill

Saturday Night at the Mill, 1977. Pebble Mill courtyard. Photo by John Burkill

The Programmes

Studio A had a lot of drama series, and one off plays, as in those days drama was more often than not recorded in a studio. Exterior shots were done on film for the most part, and played in from TK during the recording session.

One of the early drama series was The Brothers which was a fairly dire soap opera about a set of brothers who owned a lorry transport business. I remember virtually nothing about the series apart from the lovely Lisa Goddard, but it was a regular booking and kept us all in employment. Rather more interesting were the Dickens classics – Martin Chuzzlewit and Nicholas Nickleby. Then there were several series of All Creatures Great and Small adapted from the James Herriot books. The first few with Carol Drinkwater, and the later series with Linda Bellingham, as James’ wife Helen. Then there was Gangsters which was I think the first studio production to use a “handheld” camera. The camera was a Bosch Fernseh, which had a quite large camera on a shoulder pad, connected to a back pack by a short cable, then the cable from the backpack went to a further CCU which was rigged in TAR. The Camera / backpack combination was pretty heavy, so the cameraman tended to put it all down as soon as the required shots had been taken.

There were a number of plays for today, and several series of The Basil Brush Show. The latter was recorded on a Saturday evening with a live audience, but for the afternoon dress rehearsal, several staff members and their children formed and audience so that “Basil” had someone to perform to. My wife and children came on several occasions when I was working in the gallery or TAR.

We hosted Playschool for at least one series, possibly two. This may have been around the time when there was a union dispute regarding who was to start the clock! As I remember, electricians said it should be them as it was electrical, and scene hands said it should be them as it was a prop. I don’t remember how it was resolved, but it was that kind of union silliness that set Margaret Thatcher on her crusade against the unions.

Studio A hosted Young Scientist of the Year at least twice, and also The Great Egg Race with professor Heinz Wolff. There were several series of Angels a kind of forerunner to Casualty. Then there was the great Pot Black which really put snooker onto the map for the first time. This was recorded over four intensive days after Christmas (27th – 30th Dec) and then shown one game per week. The quote of note being “For those of you watching in black and white, the red ball is next to the green ball, just beyond the black” or something like that. The problem was there was little difference in the grey level of red and green balls, so identifying them virtually impossible. It really was a game that had been waiting for colour. There were just so many programmes that came out of Studio A, the place buzzed with activity.

In addition to that there were all the Pebble Mill at One programmes which came from both studio A and studio B gallery, with the cameras in the foyer area or outside both at the back and front of the building, and occasionally on the roof! From the camera rigging point of view it was like an outside broadcast, but with the fixed infrastructure of a proper studio gallery.

In early 1975 a pilot programme Pebble Mill at Night was produced. It eventually materialised as Saturday Night at the Mill but not until 1976. This likewise used the foyer area, and depending on whether Studio A had a drama booked in used either Studio A or Studio B gallery.

Saturday Night at the Mill had the dubious honour of causing 2 of the big windows to be replaced. I think it was the night that a parachute jump landed on the front lawn, and in order to get some additional lighting, the lighting director (TM) had 2 big lights shining through the long gallery windows onto the lawn. The lights were well back from the windows and he checked that the windows were not getting hot. However they would have warmed slightly. That night after the show we had one of the hardest frosts in a long while, and the thermal stress on the windows caused them both to crack (several hours after the lights had been switched off). The replacement of the windows subsequently featured on a Pebble Mill at One, although what may not have been seen was that the new ones were about 3/4 inch too short! The gap was filled with mastic.

Studio B progammes in addition to the regular Midlands Today, hosted the Asian unit New Life programme on Sundays, and Farming, (the forerunner of Countryfile). Pebble Mill at One on any days when Studio A was in use for drama, and several programmes that could be squeezed into the small space, including incredibly some with an audience. Sadly I cannot remember all of them but The Clothes Show certainly started off in Studio B. There was rarely any slack days, and Studio B (or its gallery at least) may well have seen at least 2 and often 3 different programmes during the course of 24 hours! The presentation annex was arranged as a self operated area, and close down was done from there every night, with just a couple of engineers manning the TAR end of things. David Stevens was one of the regulars, and used a series of colour slides for his close down sequence. Sometimes the slides jammed in the slide scanner, resulting in a somewhat curtailed sequence. One of the slide scanners took a pair of slide boxes from which the slides were pushed up into the scanner gate by a metal plunger known as the Sprod. Unfortunately this required consistent slide mounts to work properly, and David’s assorted slides were not quite as regular as required, so sometime it spat out a slide altogether, just leaving a blank white screen. When possible the other slide scanner was used for this as the slides were pre slotted into place in a pair of discs which rotated into the scanner gate. The disadvantage of that being that changing the order of the slides took much longer if they needed to be changed. As there were only the 2 slide scanners, and both studios might need to use slides there was a lot of pressure on the engineers to keep them both in working order.

Ray Lee

Studio Operations (Part 5) – Ray Lee

Studio A production gallery 1971, by Ivor Williams (including vision mixer)

Photo by John Kimberley, Studio A colour matching desk

Other Equipment

Most of the rest of the signal chain equipment, Video amplifiers, colour coders, vision mixer etc. were BBC designs, from Designs Department, as the BBC had largely pioneered television equipment in the U.K. from the earliest days. Again to get the best out of it, much of the equipment needed regular adjustments to keep it within specification. The normal day to day drift due to voltage changes or temperature changes, was enough to require correction.

As the colour TV service had only started quite recently, the designs were first generation colour equipment, and basically pushing the limits of what was achievable. The vision mixer was basically a black and white vision mixer, with additional modules to allow it to work with colour signals. One quirk of this first generation vision mixer, was that it truly was a mixer. In the same way that sound mixers added all the signals, so did the vision mixer, so several picture sources could be added together to create several superimposed images. As there were 8 channels, in theory one could have had up to 8 images in the combined output. This required some quite special precautions to prevent the signal exceeding the maximum video level, as well as ensuring that the synchronising pulses and colour burst stayed constant so that the receiving equipment would correctly decode it. Such a requirement for multiple images was not really needed, and most of the time it would just be a transition from one source to another, either a cut, or a fade. I believe simple wipes were also possible, i.e. top to bottom, side to side or diagonal, but that was about as much as could be done at that time. I believe there was also a mode of selecting modulated line drive to one or more cameras in order to create a sort of wavy – dream like transition.

All subsequent commercial vision mixers, were more correctly called vision switchers, as they did not allow for more than two images to be simultaneously displayed, in a mix mode. However they came with a whole lot more transition effects, and it was quite noticeable at the time, particularly with L.E. programmes that the directors would try out all the latest transition effects on their programmes if they thought they could get away with it. They also tended to have more channels so that more picture sources could be permanently wired to particular channels. The old Designs Department mixer quickly ran out of channels if there were 5 cameras and several other sources, like VT, TK, slide scanner and O.B. feed. Some of these had to be preselected, and could not all be present at the same time.

Because all the first generation equipment needed careful tending and not infrequently became faulty, there was a need for a good number of engineers on hand throughout studio recordings and live transmissions. The equipment on outside broadcast units was also subject to vibration, cold and damp, and so needed even more regular intervention, but space was limited, so that meant having fewer more experienced engineers. It was not uncommon for engineers to be repairing equipment minutes before it was needed to be used.

Ray Lee

Studio Operations (part 4) – Ray Lee

Studio A EMI 2001 line up. Photo by John Kimberley, no reproduction without permission.

The Cameras

Both Studio A and B were equipped with EMI 2001 cameras, which were unique in using four 1.25 inch camera tubes. Unlike most of the other colour cameras which used just 3 tubes, the EMI’s had a 4 way light splitter block (the ice block) which allowed a full spectrum image to the Luminance tube, and then split to red, green and blue for the colour images. The reason for this was that it meant only the luminance channel needed to be a full bandwidth channel, as this was the one channel to define the image sharpness and detail. The colour channels could get away with a lower bandwidth, and thereby were less critical. The downside was lack of sensitivity, as the luminance split effectively halved the sensitivity for the same amount of light. This meant Studios had to be lit very brightly, with a lot of lighting power.

Other manufacturers used only a 3 way colour split and had the green channel as the full bandwidth channel, to provide the detail information. This maintained sensitivity, but because the image was the filtered green image, this did not always work as well as a full spectrum image.

One of the problems of the early colour cameras was the lack of sensitivity to the red end of the spectrum, and this was particularly so with the EMI’s. It most noticeably showed up with purples and magentas which were invariably seen as blue by the cameras. Later cameras used extended red response tubes, and generally seemed to produce rather more saturated colours than the EMI’s could, but few seemed able to match the image sharpness and crispness which seemed so characteristic of the EMI’s

Prior to every studio booking the cameras needed alignment. This was because the electronics of that era tended to drift with temperature, and the camera tubes themselves drifted being thermionic devices. Also the length of cable between the camera and CCU had a big effect on the camera signal, and had to be compensated for by the electronics. The cameras were all set up looking at a grey scale chart, and adjustments were made on the CCU to ensure that all the colour channels were giving the same signal level, in order that the combined output was neutral grey, at the different brightness levels of the chart. The light on the chart was adjusted to give a colour temperature of 2950 and a light level of 1600lux using a special light meter called a Collux.

The cameras were also aligned on a registration chart. This was a grid of lines which enabled adjustments to be made so that the images from each tube exactly over-laid each other. If these adjustments were wrong coloured fringes would appear at the edges of objects.

One of the first jobs I did after starting to work in studio ops. was to write up a set of alignment instructions for the cameras. It helped me to effectively learn more about the cameras and how they worked, and also gave a set of standardised methodical adjustments to aim to get the best out of the cameras, that all the engineers could use. I am grateful to Peter Hodges for pushing me to do this in the early days, as it really helped ground me in the basics. Whether other engineers actually found it helpful I don’t know, or whether they even referred to them, but at least they were available where before there was nothing written down.

Ray Lee

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.’

Studio Operations (part 3) – Ray Lee

‘All Creatures Great and Small’ set in Studio A. Photo by Tim Savage

Studio and camera usage

Studio A was the main drama studio, and at least initially had network drama bookings most of the time. The main drama booking days were Sun/Mon and Wed/Thurs for usually Rehearse day 1 and Record day 2, allowing for set and light on Tuesday and Saturday and sometimes a quick booking on a Friday. Studio B was used every weekday evening for Midlands Today, and briefly on a Saturday for the sport report, and on a Sunday for either Farming (the forerunner of Countryfile) and/or the Asian network programme “New Life”. Farming went out at lunchtime on a Sunday, and “New Life” was recorded on a Sunday afternoon/early evening.

Pebble Mill at One used the cameras from Studio B on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, as normally Studio A was in use for Drama. Studio A cameras were used on Tuesdays and Fridays when there were not normally drama bookings. If there were gaps in the bookings Studio A cameras were used in preference, as there was then an extra camera available. At that time Studio A had a complement of 4 cameras and a hot spare, whereas Studio B had just 3 cameras. In the earliest days the camera control unit (CCU) for one of the cameras was shared between Studio B and Studio A, which involved major re-cabling after Pebble Mill at One. By the time I moved to Studio ops, an additional CCU had been acquired, so this chore was no longer necessary. There was one additional camera and CCU in the back room of TAR, this was the “maintenance channel” and was used to repair faulty modules, and circuit boards. It was rare for it to be fully functional, and occasionally it was a case of checking whether the module or circuit board that had gone faulty in one of the studio cameras was better or worse than the one in the maintenance channel, or which might be quicker to repair! The cameras needed constant cosseting to get the best out of them, but when working well produced pictures that even against today’s cameras were very good.

Later on a further camera was obtained for Studio B which was permanently rigged in the presentation annex, meaning that there were always 3 cameras available in the studio area, and the practise of wheeling one into presentation for the end of Midlands Today was no longer needed.

Ray Lee