The Camden Theatre was designed by W.G.R. Sprague and opened in 1901. With
a capacity of 2,434 it was one of the largest theatres in London outside the
West End. In 1913 it became a cinema known as the Camden Hippodrome Picture
Theatre. Closed during World War II it was used by the BBC from 1945 and was
found to possess a fine natural acoustic. It became the home of the BBC Concert
Orchestra until the BBC moved to the Hippodrome, Golders Green, in July 1972.
Another regular booking was the "Goon Show".
The photo, right, shows the exterior in 1958.
The Camden had the only Pye console in BBC Radio in the 1960s, although there
were several at Television Centre. It was an overwhelming beast to a Studio
Manager used to the old Type A mixers in Maida Vale and the Paris Studio,
the strange mish-mash of Type A/B/C at Aeolian One or Piccadilly One, or the
largest BBC console in the Outside Studios, the Type B Mk III at the Playhouse.
The photo above shows the desk in situ in 1965 and those below show it as
preserved by Chris Chambers.
The Pye console was built in a semi-circular format and had four 8-channel
groups and four independent channels. Each set of 8 channels was separated
from the next by a wedge-shaped spacer; a centre section housed the group
and independent faders. The master fader was a large rotary knob, with a second
identical one alongside designated as the standby output.
The faders were quadrant type, and worked in the opposite sense to those in
the commercial studios of the day, fading up towards the operator. This enabled
the fader graduations towards the open end to be seen, as the curvature of
the faders meant that the opeator could not see the other end. Line up, with
10dB in hand, was stop 23; the graduations went from 0 to 30 but in a linear
manner. It is believed that this may be the reason why later BBC Radio mixer
desks with linear faders were manufactured with the faders operating in the
opposite sense to commercial studios. Another theory was that with linear
faders it was important to ensure that any accidental operation of a fader
(e.g. by the SM catching it with his cufflinks!) would result in the level
being reduced, as a sudden increase in level could take a transmitter off
the air.
There were two associated rotary controls for each fader, echo send and PA
send. The echo control was a dual log/antilog potentiometer providing echo
mixture in a similar way to the standard BBC echo mixture switch but continuously
variable. This was later used as a pan pot when the desk was adapted for stereo,
which was simply done merely by using the echo send output as the ‘B’ leg
and using the PA control as an echo send. Each channel had its own RSA – Response
Selection Amplifier – the BBC term for what was known elsewhere (inaccurately)
as an equaliser, and there were several (four?) compressor/limiters which
could be patched into channels or groups. There were two enormous jackfields,
one at each end of the console built into the ends of the semicircle.
The electronics were based on germanium transistors, which were highly sensitive
to overheating. The console was cooled by a forced air system with the fan
unit in the corridor outside the cubicle. A large orange lamp indicated that
all was well, and it was rumoured that if the fan failed and the lamp went
out we had about 30 seconds to power the desk down before it melted in a mini
China Syndrome! The transistorised electronics was also quite noisy, with
a very small margin between overload and excessive noise, and there were strict
instructions about the permitted usable range of the main fader, which was
about 10dB!
For audio monitoring, two loudspeakers were provided – an LSU10 for the Popular
Music SMs and an LS5-1 for the Light Music SMs. Due to the large size of the
cubicle it was difficult to achieve a satisfactory listening level with either
of these units so they were often used together by the Pop Music SMs. To ensure
that any distortion was not caused by loudspeaker overload the practice was
to send tone at PPM6, set the desk LS control to maximum and turn up each
LS gain control in turn until distortion occurred, then back it off a little.
That was quite loud!
The Camden, being a theatre, had a raked stage i.e. it sloped down from the
back towards the audience. This was a nuisance, especially when setting up
microphone stands or wheeling pianos. The old “bent arm” microphone stands
had no clamp to stop them rotating in the bases, and the weight of a 4038
microphone made the arm rotate so that it pointed down stage. This meant that
piano mics, for example, had to be set up so that the stand was upstage of
the instrument and the whole stand had to be moved to position the microphone
where it was required.
Friday Night is Music Night at the Camden - December 7th, 1962.
If you have memories or photos of this studio which could be added to this
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