Nick spent a couple of years working at Alexandra Palace, then the home
of BBC TV News, in the mid-1960s. He looks back on his role as a Holiday
Relief Sound Assistant.
My first memory of AP is of driving up the hill from Wood Green. This imposing
building with the wonderful transmitter mast still in place looked out over
London with a confidence that spoke of BBC superiority in all things technical
and it was with due humility that I went inside. I had transferred there
from Ealing as at the time I was living in Essex and the journey to and
from AP was much more convenient - and as the film sound dubbing and transfer
departments were a detached exclave of Ealing, we were in theory answerable
to nobody for miles and miles!
As a Holiday Relief Sound Assistant my position was lowly, but I was made
very welcome by my shift partner, John Hills-Harrop. Our job was to man
the transfer bay and the recording area of the dubbing theatre. The transfer
bay would usually be duplicating 16mm magnetic film for the library, but
was able to record the output of the dubbing theatre if necessary. When
I was there there were two 16mm channels and a 35mm channel routed through
a patch bay and a mixing desk with limited equalisation and (memory is hazy)
I think six of those huge pots that you could pull out to clean the contact
studs. There was a Leevers-Rich ¼" deck for the very occasional
reel of tape that came our way: most location news film sound was recorded
on magnetic stripe on the edge of the film in the camera. During the years
I was there we never had to try to synchronise the pulse on a tape (if recorded
on a sync Nagra), which is just as well, as none of us knew how to do it,
and the equipment was missing! One of our constant occupations there was
to splice countdown leader onto the front of the 16mm or 35mm mag film stock,
so that the magnetic film would be in sync with the film on the projectors.
These projectors lived upstairs, manned by a cheerful crew of projectionists
or projjies, who were great fun and a constant source of new jokes. One
of the projectors was a venerable great lump of metal, festooned with fire
extinguishers and designed to run nitrate film. All the projectors and all
the mag film recorders could be linked to the Selsyns, which lurked in the
basement. I was shown them once, ushered into their presence in a manner
similar to that of Howard Carter seeing Tutankhamen's treasure. There they
were, great grey beasts like the engine room of the Queen Mary. When dubbing,
projector and recorder were connected to a Selsyn - and you had to make
sure that the lock was good by twisting the inching knob, because a false
lock would result in a runaway - and having laced up the film so that the
Start mark was on the recording head you pressed a button which signalled
readiness to the dubbing mixer. He would press a buzzer which asked the
projjies to start the process and slowly the Selsyn would start up, with
projector and recorder slaved to it. A counter as well as the projected
picture would tell the dubbing mixer and gram swinger whereabouts they were
and the music, commentary and fx would be played in.
Apart from the projectors upstairs there were some mag film players, which
had loops of fx which were in almost constant use. "Prov" was
one, a contraction of "Provincial Street Atmosphere", a useful
low level background noise that fitted very many pictures. In addition to
the grams and tape loops, another source of fx was PEG, the Programme Effect
Generator. I was told that this had been adapted from the principle of the
Mellotron, a musical instrument that operated on the principle of having
a spring loaded magnetic tape cartridge for each key on a piano keyboard.
The length of the tape in each cartridge was enough to run for a little
under 10 seconds, enough for most musical notes, and enough for most spot
sound effects. The great thing was that when you hit the button, the sound
came almost instantly, great for synching gunshots, door slams etc. A simplified
playing deck with buttons instead of a keyboard was made - I presume by
BBC engineers - and a number of cartridges could be played, I think about
four. Each cartridge could be pre-recorded with the desired effect and the
start up time was very quick and remarkably free of wow and flutter - unlike
the telephone fx you heard in a lot of big budget movies at the time.
As many news films were shot in those days without sound, even the wretched
sound on film effort, dubbing was a necessary process for nearly all news
items. Even those which had been shot with sound had to be smoothed out
and music and commentary added. The usual equipment for recording sound
on film in the field, with which I became familiar later on, was an amplifier/mixer,
usually made by Auricon, which had two mic level and one line level inputs.
The output was connected directly to a magnetic head within the camera (sometimes
an Auricon, others a CP16) via a multicore cable, which also brought back
the audio from the confidence head. The ill-named confidence head! I can
remember the first time I listened to it I sent the gear back into maintenance:
I couldn't believe how awful it was. To be fair to the equipment, it had
to smooth out the intermittent motion of the film in the camera in only
a very short distance. You always had to be aware that if you unplugged
the connecting lead to the camera while the amplifier/mixer was switched
on, the heads would get magged up and if you saw the cameraman's hand stray
to the plug to free himself of the irksome sound recordist a sharp reprimand
had to be issued.
Life inside AP was good. There was a bar - of course there was, the place
teemed with journalists - and a canteen. I instituted an innovation there.
In my opinion the portion of baked beans although low in cost was small
in size, so I asked for two portions, which I would of course pay for. This
was considered for a little while by the catering hierarchy and then accepted
with grudging and suspicious aspect. Somehow, they felt, there was a scam
going on, but they couldn't see it! No scam: I just loved baked beans, and
plenty of them.
The reader will, I hope, excuse me if I allude briefly to the lavatories
at AP. They were kept spotless and were the usual haven of introspection
where one could reflect upon the verities of life. But in common with the
rest of the BBC at the time they had a very serious shortcoming: the loo
paper! I had thought that the shiny, glazed variety had been phased out
in all civilised places shortly after the war - in fact, that would have
been an excellent reason for going to war. But here, in every cubicle, was
not only a plentiful supply of the stuff, but each separate sheet was emblazoned
with the BBC coat of arms, in a delicate green, if I remember correctly.
To use it smacked of treason, or revenge if one were inclined that way.
I am very glad to say that having left AP I never encountered this ghastly
invention again, even when I occasionally visited Lime Grove or TVC.
As AP was the headquarters of BBC News, and we in film dubbing and the film
editors were not under anyone's control apart from our masters in far away
Ealing, we developed some unofficial practices that were convenient. The
usual shift pattern was a twelve hour shift, 1000 to 2200 two days on and
two days off. Over weekends when the two day shift went over both Saturday
and Sunday the two operators split the shift so that one chap would do both
jobs of transfer and dubbing on the Saturday and the other chap would do
the Sunday. As there was much less library work to do, this was entirely
possible, although sometimes you would be whizzing from transfer bay to
dubbing area like a demented fly.
Each area had a talkback system which connected with everywhere necessary,
but the one in the dubbing recording area also had a button labelled QPD.
This puzzled me, so I pressed it and asked who was there. A very friendly
engineer called Roger Tone (known to his friends as Thousand Cycle) appeared
round the corner and took me on a guided tour of QPD, which was a method
of recording video images onto film, the intervals between video fields
and frames being so short that the Quick Pull Down was necessary to move
the film along fast enough. Also in the dubbing recording area was a distortion
meter and a wow and flutter meter, both of which provided hours of harmless
fun: on a slow day the recorders were measured to within an inch of their
lives.
Sometimes we would stray out of the transfer and dubbing areas to see what
was going on in the editing department. I can remember being sickened by
the raw footage coming in from the Biafra War in Nigeria. The Nigerian Army
wanted to impress the world's press by shooting one of its own soldiers
who had been caught looting. He was tied to a tree and a firing squad assembled.
The order to fire was just about to be given when one cameraman needed to
change a battery, so everyone waited. Then a member of the firing squad
turned mutinous and was punched and hit with a rifle butt until he fell
senseless. Finally, when the officer in charge was assured that all cameras
were working the firing squad did its job, but quite badly as for a minute
or two the poor chap tied to the tree moaned as he slowly died. To me, a
lad barely 20, it was frightening and horrible. It should have been transmitted
as is, I think, but of course it couldn't be.
On a happier occasion one of the editors put together a film that he had
shot on holiday in Spain of a narrow gauge railway. That fascinated me and
I stayed to watch far too long. The dubbing mixer, Digger Shute, was unimpressed
by my excuse and gave me a rocket!
After a couple of years at AP my time as Holiday Relief came to an end and
I went off to another world of feature films, ITV and eventually back full
circle working for the BBC, amongst others, as a freelance. I don't think
that I have had happier times than when I was working in Alexandra Palace,
though.