The Pips
I remember one Easter Sunday, when, at 0900 (just at the end of a night shift) Light Prog was to SB Home Service, which was to carry Big Ben followed by an Easter address. I was in Light Con, and I was kidding the Home Con operator that he would forget to cancel the 0900 GTS, and put it out over Big Ben.
Come the event, in Light con I duly faded up Home Service - and got Big Ben plus GTS. I put down the intercom and laughed "Told you you'd forget, I said". The man in Home claimed it was "All Right Leaving Him". To my horror I then realised that the GTS I'd put out came from my own GTS selector. I hadn't worked out that I should also have cancelled the GTS! - Mike Benson
According to the book
In "Sound and Television Broadcasting - General Principles", K.R. Sturley says of a BH con "It is, of necessity, more versatile than a Regional continuity suite (or those used in External Services) and it can, when desired, be used as a production mixer and for the replay of tape recordings." This book was first published in 1961 and thus must have been written before the Type B cons were in service even though it gives the impression that they had been in service for some time. Indeed there is talk of TR/90 tape m/cs even though the cons started with Leevers-Rich. The only time that I recall of use as a production mixer was on Home for cricket reports at 1215 I think. The duty announcer was the presenter, an OB producer would attend and the routine was a quick report from match 1, 6 mins or so from match 2 who then cued straight to match 1 for his long spot the back to match 2 for a summary and then a back anno from the announcer. I remember that a certain elderly female continuity operator who usually "had a slight preference for eating at 1300" used to regularly "have a slight preference for 1200" if she was in Home con during the cricket season. - Barry Taylor
I'm so worried about Jim
My story involves a broken tape joint. It happened at the start of "The Dales" when I was the con op in Radio 2 or was it Light Prog then? My tape op leapt back in horror, and I had to jump up and feed the tape onto the floor. When I got the machine settled and happily playing onto the floor I told him to take over - he was, after all, the tape op! Then the news sub came in with the news summary. It was a slack news day so he added to the script "The programme you just heard was saved by....quick thinking...." - and then named my tape op. The lucky chap got his photo in the papers (and the quote "I'm not a Dales fan, but my mum is"). I was a bit miffed!! - Mike Benson
Another Sticky Moment
I was in Home Continuity one day and was warned that a 30 minute recording had more tape edits than usual - all quarter inch tapes were physically cut during editing in those days. I therefore took the precaution of spooling through the tape to check for sticky edits. Despite this, about 10 minutes into the transmission of the tape a bad sticky join came through which sent the compliance arms of the Studer C37 into huge oscillation and promptly stopped the machine. Quickly I restarted it but a little later another join broke after the capstan so, holding the compliance jocky manually, I fed the rest of the programme off into the waste bucket conveniently close to hand (or foot!). The show must go on!
I later discovered that there were 206 edits in that half hour programme, mostly caused by one of the speakers having a bad speech impediment so necessitating many pauses and stutters having to be removed by the tape editor. - John Hale
Talkback Humour
A Radio 2 announcer (from New Zealand) used to make a speciality of telling jokes during the shipping forecast. This was on R2 in those days, before the frequency changes. It came from mixer 1A which was then in use as Radio 2 continuity. He would turn his mic off after one line, hold the talkback key down and tell a line of the joke and so on. His timing was excellent, the forecast and the joke finished at the same time. He must have spent hours rehearsing it. The talkback in 1A was of very good quality, I think it was a prefade feed from the main D202 mic. Someone decided one night that this must be recorded for posterity and paralleled the talkback and the transmission output. This was unbuffered - need I say more! - Russell Hedges
Spooky
We Continuity Operators, like the Announcers, had the luxury of an overnight bed. Trouble was that the bedrooms were across the road in the Langham. Previously it was an hotel (to which it has again reverted) but in the middle of the night with no one around, it was a creepy place with many reports of the Langham Ghost ringing telephones, squeaking and banging doors and 'floating' along dark corridors. - John Hale
The Langham is home to several ghosts. One is thought to be of a German prince who, according to legend, jumped from a fourth floor window in the early years of the 20th Century. Another is a grey-haired Victorian dressed in a cloak and cravat with blank staring eyes - the spirit of a doctor thought to have killed himself after murdering his bride during their honeymoon.
The most haunted room is 333. One night, announcer James Alexander Gordon awoke in this room to see a fluorescent ball which began to take human shape....... - R.B.
Breakfast
One of the old school of Radio 3 announcers used to eat a full breakfast
on the announcers' desk while playing discs into the early morning show.
If you turned up the LS5/1A (the main mono monitoring loudspeaker) you could
hear him cutting the bacon coming over the turntable! You couldn't hear
it when monitoring in stereo because we used Goodmans Maxims - very small
speakers with no bass response. - Russell Hedges
It was, I think, the same announcer who often either mistakenly played
the wrong track of an album, or knocked the record with his newspaper, such
that he rarely knew quite what he'd played. He could often be seen moving
his head around reading at the label as the record turned, trying to find
out what to say he'd played! Many a time the pips were cut because the track
was 'mis-timed' due to such events. - John Westbury
Light in the Dark
I recall being told very early on in my career that when playing in the
taped inserts for Dwight Wylie on Night Ride (midnight to 0200 on Radio
2) the cue to start the insert was for Dwight, who nearly always did his
programme in 1A in near total darkness, to flash his pearly white teeth.
Dwight Wylie was a jovial Jamaican announcer, and one of the nicest people
you could ever meet. Those days of 10.5" reels of inserts played on trollied
EMI TR90 machines still live with me, as I'm sure they do for many an ex-TO!
Were they better than the old Leevers-Rich? I was never sure! - John
Westbury
Horse Play
Related page
Continuing Education
During my last week at the BBC I howled the whole Open University network. It used to go out on R3, VHF only, after close down and there was some complex switching to seperate the MF transmitters, not sure why they bothered with that! I certainly didn't understand it and faded myself up and couldn't understand why the PPM went to 6 with hardly any sound every time I did this. The ATOM (Assistant Technical Operations Manager) was asleep and didn't understand what I had done either! The programme started only ten minutes late and do you know there was not a single complaint. - Russell Hedges
I joined the BBC as a Direct Entry Engineer with no background in broadcasting at BH in May, 1967 and was shortly afterwards thrown into the maelstrom as the Control Room and Cons were being converted for the new (to the BBC) concept of self-op programmes which were to sustain the new Radio 1 service.
With the imminent introduction of the Marine Offences Act which was to put the pirates out of business the BBC was obliged to provide, at quite short notice, a new pop music service. Early in 1967 the realisation dawned that if Radio 1 was to originate from the Cons, the most practical solution to the problem, this new service would need two studios if hot seat change-overs were to be avoided and a spare continuity studio would have to be built.
The cubicle of 1A seen in 1969.
Photo - Derek Windebank
Photo - Derek Windebank
I was teamed with Johnny Longden who was responsible for Special Projects within the Central Maintenance Unit (CMU) and between us, with the indispensable help of the Langham woodwork shop and the BH mechanical and wiring workshops, we created Con G beside the TOM's office in the Control Room. The adjacent Dispatch Position was to act as its control cubicle and in the space of about nine weeks, including building work, the project was completed. Though small due to restrictions of available space the mixer was comprehensive and used the relatively new range of transistorised amplifiers.
I was then dispatched off to Wood Norton for three months to learn all about broadcast engineering! - Robert Smith
Robert's black and white photos, right and below, show the desk shortly before it entered service.
Con G announcer's desk in retirement. Clearly heavily
modified by the later addition of extra quadrant faders! Photo
- Philip Hughes
Not so wonderful Radio 1 ... carts
With the launch of Radio 1 also came the introduction of the 'jingle machine' in the form of the Spotmaster which used an endless loop of 1/4" tape in a NAB cartridge. Apart from all the jingles such as the famous "Radio 1 is wonderful" there were trails and promos for transmission which were transferred from the original tape to carts in the Cartridge Transfer Suite on the 2nd Floor of BH Extension which were then to be played on air by the machines in the studios.
After some time it was found that many of the carts began to stop on-air suddenly, apparently at random, just after starting - much to the annoyance of the presenters several of whom passed off the malfunction on-air but were privately livid that such a simple and recurring problem should make their shows sound so unprofessional.
On test all the cartridges invariably played successfully on the machines on which they had been recorded. In response to the frequent Engineering Fault Reports (EFRs) during the preceding months the action of the maintenance engineers, and I was one of them, had been to simply change the machines either in the studio or the Transfer Suite. There seemed little other option open to us. The result was usually noted in the maintenance log as a successful fix due more to optimism than evidence!
I resolved to do something about this small but intensely annoying fault! The machines would stop playing the endless loop of tape in the cartridge by detecting a short pulse of 1 KHz tone at the start of the recording which was on a separate Cue Track. The detecting circuit was defeated for about one second after the press of the Play button to avoid the tape stopping until the tone had gone by the rep head on its first pass. Think of it, if you like, as a model train leaving the station and completing a circular layout. The delay allowed the guard's van to pass the end of the platform before the signal turned to red but would stop the front of the train as it came round again! None of the tones was heard on air, of course.
The fault was compounded by the fact that there seemed to be no consistency to it. Provided each record and playback machine conformed to the NAB spec interchange of carts between machines should have been possible without any problems. Rola Plessey replay cart machines had been installed into the on-air studios in previous months and I began to suspect that problems only occurred on certain carts and most seemed to come from the CTS on the second floor. It didn't take long for me to discover that the Spotmaster machines were recording rather longer Cue pulses than was specified although it didn't prevent successful playback on those machines when the recordings were checked.
The Spotmaster which was invariably used to record the trails on the third floor relied on a 1 KHz oscillator whose death throes, sustained by a simple reservoir capacitor and resistor network, formed the 'stop pulse' as the tape was started in the record mode. Unfortunately it took rather longer to die than the delay built into the Rola Plessey replay machines in the studio. This caused the studio machines to stop just after starting when it detected the remains of the stop tone of any cart which had been recorded on a Spotmaster.
Other articles by Robert Smith
