Look! Hear! College Rags

Copyright resides with the original holder, no reproduction without permission.

Thanks to Ian Collins for making these grabs available.

I think these stills are from a ‘Look! Hear!’ special called ‘College Rags’.  ‘Look! Hear!’ was a regional teen orientated music, entertainment and fashion show, presented by Toyah Willcox.  The shows were transmitted on BBC Midlands between 1977-81.

The title card and catwalk shots were taken in the concourse outside Studio A, and I’m presuming that Studio A itself was used for the interviews.

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

Stuart Gandy:  ‘Look Hear was one of the first programmes I worked on when I started at Pebble Mill in 1980 in vision ops. On one occasion I remember we needed to get an overhead shot, looking down on one of the bands. Now these days that wouldn’t be too difficult with the small size of today’s cameras, but back in 1980 when the cameras were EMI 2001’s it was altogether more involved. The camera had to be mounted horizontally on a sturdy board with a mirror in front of the lens angled downwards. The whole thing was then lifted up above the stage using four hoists. The scans on the camera were suitably switched to get the picture the right way round because of the mirror. The shot worked though, so worth the enormous amount of time needed to set it up! ‘

Keith Brook: ‘I directed that programme!! It was full of problems during the planning and even more when a strike was called for the recording day. This will be a subject for one of my missives!! The recording went swimmingly and I finished at 4 seconds before 9. It took the whole of the following day to edit and just made transmission. I didn’t watch it go out, I went to the bar!!’

One comment on “Look! Hear! College Rags
  1. I was employed as a model to show of the final year students clothes. I would really love to see a video of the shoot. The song that I remember was Duran Duran’s ‘Girls on Film’.

    Would it be possible to obtain a copy of the College Rags video.

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