Copyright resides with the original holder, no reproduction without permission.
This title grab is from 100 Years of Speed, a history of motoring programme, made at Pebble Mill.
Thanks to Ian Collins, for making the grab available.
If you know any more details about this programme, please add a comment.
Photo from Keith Brook, no reproduction without permission
Photo from Peter Poole, no reproduction without permission
The photo is of John Jeavons lighting either Studio B or the foyer.
Jeavons was relegated to working those two places because of an incident at a meeting Sidey had called.
Every department was there to discuss the viability of a simple little TV programme to be made in the foyer. As Sidey went through each section he was greeted with ‘Crazy, but we’ll give it a go’. Finally it got to Tech Ops, who said it was impossible to light, ceiling too low, not enough manpower, far too difficult, yada, yada, yada.
Good old Jeavons stood up and said if we remove the ceiling tiles we’ll have enough room and he’ll only need two sparks who can also do Midlands Today and stay within hours.
That slightly upset Head of Tech Ops, and not being the vindictive type at all, made sure that Jeavons only did those two shows.
Incidentally, he’s using a Weston Master V, the best exposure meter ever made. Which makes him a great lighter!! There’s a load of complicated stuff for still photography but in the TV world, these meters were used to maintain a consistency of light level. To that end, we only used the top window with the needle and tried to keep everything the same.
Keith Brook (Aka Scouse)
Vision Crew of CMCR9
Photo by John Abbott, no reproduction without permission.
Ian Dewar, shown here on the lefthand side of the photo, sadly died recently.
His funeral will be held on Monday 15 July, at 11 a.m. at Hallow Church, nr Worcester. His wife, Jo, wanted people to know about the arrangements, and to come along.
Our thoughts go out to Ian’s family.
Copyright resides with the original holder, no reproduction without permission.
This was the standard BBC Leave Form, for staff to request holiday.
Staff used to get around 25 days annual holiday a year. ‘Compensatory’ leave, was accrued by working extra days, for example if you worked at least 4 x 12hr days in one BBC calendar week (Sunday to Saturday), and came in to work on the 5th day, then you were entitled to an extra day off. ‘Additional’ leave was given for various reasons, e.g. you used to get 2 days off for moving house, and the same for paternity leave, and long service leave was earned at the rate of 2.5 days a year, after you’d worked for the BBC continuously for ten years. You earned 20 hours extra leave for each year over ten you’d worked. Long service leave could be carried over, and couldn’t be taken for periods of less than a week. It meant that you could take a very long holiday of a couple of months or longer, if you’d worked for the Corporation for a long time.
If you were paid weekly, then you could get a cash advance, from the Cash Office, to get your pay in advance.
The following comments were left on the Pebble Mill Facebook group:
Stephen Martin: ‘You had to give your “leave address”. There was no escape.’
Stuart Gandy: ‘Those were the days when we actually had a cash office. Very useful it was too for cashing personal cheques (I think you were allowed up to £50, but my memory is fading a bit on that point!) as in those days cash machines were not that common and the nearest bank to Pebble Mill was quite a long way away.’
Ruth Kiosses: ‘Talking of the cash office, what about the purchasing forms in multi coloured layers? We could only pay cash at Makro because finance were so long settling bills they refused our purchase forms. We had a hole put in our Makro card if I remember rightly? This labelled us as bad payers!’
Marc Price: ‘Wasn’t there also a form of leave called “Bisque”? It was leave that couldn’t be refused by management or something like that?’
Ruth Kiosses: ‘And gardening leave? I’m sure my boss had that once?’
Ray Lee: ‘Any overtime could also be taken as Comp Leave. Overtime was normally paid at 1.25T (irregular hours contract) but if you took comp leave instead you were paid the 0.25T balance and accrued comp hours at the 1T rate.’
Pete Simpkin: ‘Yes Marc that’s right, usually for desperate times like sudden bereavements etc and remarkable for the fact that the system was respected by most staff. Incidentally I seem to remember there was a spectacular payment if you had to work on Christmas Day, at one time there had to be two engineers on duty at every studio centre which had a control room for the Queen’s Christmas Day Broadcast so most people had at least one of these payments during their career.’