Raymond Lee – What Was Pebble Mill?

Tom O’Connor Roadshow – Port Talbot

Photos by Raymond Lee, no reproduction without permission

The top photo is of SCV6 (possibly with Roger Guest operating), on the OB for the Tom O’Connor Roadshow in Port Talbot in March 1987. CM1 was also needed on the OB, because of the sound requirements. The lunchtime entertainment show toured the country with an OB unit, broadcasting a week’s worth of shows from each location. Unfortunately, although popular, it proved too expensive in the long term.

The lower photo includes soundman Tim Green on the left, and Mark Botfield with the blond hair, Kenton Allen in the demin jacket.

These photos were originally shared on the Pebble Mill Engineers’ Facebook group.

The following comments were made on the Pebble Mill Facebook page:

Raymond Lee: ‘SCV6 was an articulated trailer, of a similar length to to the Type 5 CM1. It had an SSL Desk, some specially shaped LS5/8s and a 24 track Otari Multitrack tape machine. It also had 2 or 3 1/4″ tape machines, a cart machine, and record deck. It was quite tight for space which is why the jackfields used Bantam Jacks, unfortunately, they proved fairly unreliable in O.B. conditions.’

Nanny – Goats and Tigers

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This is the cast and crew list, and scene breakdown for one of the episodes (Goats and Tigers) of the drama series, Nanny, starring Wendy Craig. The episode was transmitted in February 1981 on BBC1. It was a London production, hosted at Pebble Mill, and recorded in Studio A.

The pages have been shared by costume assistant, Rachel Selby. It is interesting to see her hand written notes on the sheets, and the crossing through, when the scene had been completed.

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

Lesley Weaver: ‘Wonderful time for me as a Make up lady and I was lucky enough to work on all three series.’

Susan Astle: ‘Wendy was such a great person, all us make up ladies loved working with her.’

Chris Rogers: ‘I loved this series it has never been repeated on other channels? Wendy Craig is fabulous.’

Raymond Lee: ‘Never worked directly on the series but remember vividly showing Wendy Craig how to use the canteen coffee/tea machine!!’

Keith Brook: ‘Oh, that brings back memories. What a wonderful series to work on.’

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New Window Please!

Photographs from Andy Stowe, no reproduction without permission

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Thanks to Andy Stowe and Malcolm Hickman for this tale from Pebble Mill:

Andy’s father, Pat Stowe, supervised the team of glaziers called in to install a replacement window at Pebble Mill in the late 1970’s. As you can see from the photo, it was a huge piece of glass, in the corridor outside Studio A!

Ray Lee added a comment about the cause of the broken glass:

“The incident I remember, was after a Saturday Night at the Mill, which I worked on. There was an item involving Paratroupers landing on the lawn and the Lighting TM had two large lights shining through the windows to illuminate the area. He checked regularly to make sure the windows were not getting hot, and all seemed well.
The program went well, and all the lights were turned off. That night was a very cold night with a sharp frost. At about 3am there was a loud bang heard by security. The thermal stress had proved too much and both windows that had been warmed cracked. A plastic film was applied to the cracked windows to prevent them falling out while replacement glass was arranged, which had to be imported as a special order as the size was too big for any UK Float Glass company.
The cracked windows were there several months before they were replaced, and when they were, it featured as an item on Pebble Mill at One. When the windows were replaced, the top edge needed an extra wide section of “putty” as the glass was about half an inch short of the top frame! I was there on the day they were put in as well, and remember seeing the gap at the top of the glass before the extra “putty” was applied.”

Malcolm Hickman remembers the incident well:

“I was watching as they removed the old glass. They attached these big suckers to it, took all the trim off and started pulling with the crane. It refused to budge, so one of the men claimed onto the frame that had the suckers mounted on it and started bashing the glass around the edges with a big rubber mallet. It came out in 3 big pieces.”

“No hard hats or safety gear. That would have been my dad!” (Andy Stowe)

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

Herbie Donnelly: ‘I believe the light didn’t fall over but was placed too close to the window. Its purpose being to live alone for parachutists to see it as they jumped in on Saturday Night At The Mill. The subsequent heat caused the glass to crack.’

Jayne Savage: ‘ I thought the safety film went on after the Birmingham bombings and because of threats to the building but maybe it was this incident.’

Richard Stevenson: ‘Many happy hours sat by those windows in the days when tea breaks were part of the drama schedule and as the trainee, you were dispatched with loose change from the camera crew to get the tea in at the time of the allotted break.’

Keith Ackrill: ‘I also think the film was added to avoid splinters after an explosion. I also believe the light was too close to the glass, but not as a guide for parachutist. I believe it was for some routine to be shot there, and the lamp was left there too long. I cannot recall any parachutist landing on the lawn after dark.’

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Jacks’ lead storage

Photo by Paul Vanezis, no reproduction without permission.

This photo shows how spools from old VT tapes were reused as jacks’ lead storage in post production at Pebble Mill. You can see the spools screwed on to the end of this bay outside Dub 1 in post production

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

Keith Brook (Scouse): ‘I think they were the 30 minute size of 2″ spools. They took both sides off the centre, screwed it to the wall, then put one side back on.’

Andy Marriott: ‘I would’ve assume timed video leads would make that an MFA area somewhere in post production. Any increase/decrease in cable lengths would’ve played havoc with timings between VT/studios, unless you can compensate for it. This is obviously in the days before you could just stick cheap frame synchronisers on each OS. ISTR that even by the end of Studio B’s life, only a handful of the OS’ had synchronisers on. The others relied on the sources being synchronous and ‘timed in’, like local VT machines etc.

I think the reason they’re ‘timed’ leads, is that basically they’re all the same length, so if you need to patch a component feed between two VT’s (three patch cables required), you’d need the cables to be all the same length to avoid messing up your picture if (for example) the colour difference signals arrive before your luminance signal.

If you were short of spools you can also chop them at 120 degree intervals have three cable hangers instead. You can label as 50Hz, 0-20kHz and >3MHz.’

Raymond Lee: ‘It may have been a JCB [John Burkill] idea, he was quite involved with the refurb.’

Machine Bays

Photo by Paul Vanezis, no reproduction without permission.

This photo is of the machines bays on the right hand side as you walked into the VT area from the main post production corridor at Pebble Mill. The jackfields contained most of the connections between the VT area and the other parts of the building.

The door to Dub 1 is on the left hand side at the back of the shot.

The photo probably dates from the late 1990s.

Thanks to Russell Parker and Stuart Gandy for adding information to this post.

Ray Lee added the following information on the Pebble Mill Facebook Page: ‘As Stuart says this was the VT Bays area just outside Dubbing 1. There were a stack of VHSes and the bottom LH rack I believe was Vision distribution amplifiers, (there is another set at the top of the middle bay). The panel below the monitor was a routing panel, but I can’t remember whether that was just for the VHSes and monitor, or whether it could also select other destinations as well. This was part of the re-engineered VT area when SDI (Serial Digital Interface) had been installed for routing combined sound and vision around the VT Suites. These 3 bays were the analogue vision and sound distribution, when separate non embedded audio and vision were needed. I think the black box top left was a stereo PPM.