University of Birmingham Film Reel 1978

Photos by Richard Airbright, no reproduction without permission

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This can of 16mm film was bought in an auction lot. It is a positive colour print from Rank Film Laboratories, of some rushes of Birmingham University, Faculty of Science, care of BBC Pebble Mill. There are 1010 feet of rushes, and the note is dated 8/9/78.

Does anyone know what the rushes would have been shot for, and how might they have ended up in an auction lot?

Thanks to Richard Airbright for sharing the photos.

The following comment was added on the Pebble Mill Facebook page:

Malcolm Hickman: ‘When Producer choice started, I had to charge each unit according to the space they occupied. Film Unit had rooms of rushes in cans. I asked why they were kept after the film was finished and transmitted. They said that they wanted to keep them in case they wanted to recut the film. I eventually persuaded them to get rid of them and save the space. I’m not sure what Mike Aldridge would have done with them. Possibly just junked them. Not sure what this particular can was from.’

 

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Michael Wearing obituary – Simon Farquhar

Michael Wearing in 2009.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Below is Michael Wearing’s obituary written by Simon Farquhar, for The Times. Thanks to Simon for allowing the obituary to be shared here.)

When Michael Wearing gave screenwriter Andrew Davies a copy of Michael Dobbs’ novel House of Cards in 1989, suggesting he dramatise it for the BBC, he said, intuitively: “it’s not very good but it’s got a great plot. It wants a bit of tweaking. Think Jacobean”.

With ideas now flourishing in his mind of a charismatic villain who talks directly to the audience, Davies was on his way to creating three series of immaculate drama that proved so popular that they even inspired a surprisingly successful American incarnation.  Wearing’s was a masterful piece of guidance that exemplified what made him one of the most incisive and supportive drama producers in the BBC’s history, a man who skilfully fought to tell stories he felt were worth telling, a man undervalued by the broadcaster who he had provided with some of its greatest successes during some of its most troubled times.

The single play, which Wearing had learnt his craft working on, traditionally the space that allowed original voices the freedom to say original and often radical things, had been a threatened institution for twenty years, due to its habit of upsetting the apple cart. Finally, in a new, nervous and more accountable BBC, it was a form that would gradually be abandoned in favour of genre serials. But, despite his frustrations, Wearing’s superb record of creating sophisticated popular successes showed that stimulating television could still be made if producers had his blend of courage and good taste.

As well as the knavish House of Cards, which he saw as “a racy story about power, money and sex, and one I thought the BBC should tell”, two other wildly different works stand as a testament to those qualities: Troy Kennedy Martin’s nuclear conspiracy thriller Edge of Darkness (1985) and Alan Bleasdale’s savage, funny and despairing Boys From The Blackstuff (1982). Each of the serials were political to a greater or lesser degree, each boldly reimagined traditional storytelling techniques on television, and each was a phenomenally successful exploration of something that was wrong with Eighties Britain.

Wearing was a man of pleasing contradictions, affable without being easy, earthy yet elegant, as distinctive for his graceful hand gestures as for his gravelly laugh, an admirer of the bon mot whose eyes would light up if he inadvertently coined one. He enjoyed good wine and good company, but unlike many in the convivial atmosphere of the BBC bar in the 1970s, he was also disciplined and quietly determined, more interested in those who created drama than those who caused it, not a man who went out of his way to please people or to mollify those who supposedly needed mollifying. Those traits won him passionate admirers and dangerous enemies.

Even his much-imitated working-class accent, incongruous in the hushed upper echelons of the BBC, made him instantly recognisable as a different kind of animal. He was a grammar-school boy, the son of Douglas, a Stock Exchange clerk, and Molly (nee Dawson), born in Southgate, North London. His performance at Dame Alice Owen’s school in Islington earned him a place reading anthropology at Durham University. He then worked as a research assistant at the University of Leeds, during which time his fast and funny production of Max Frisch’s The Chinese Wall took the Sunday Times Cup at the 1967 National Student Drama Festival and landed three nights at the Garrick. The production starred his future BBC colleague, Alan Yentob, but the judge, critic Harold Hobson, was decidedly grumpy when announcing their victory. Wearing, with a candour and irreverence he would later become celebrated for, told the press: “Hobson could have been more constructive in his criticism. It’s a bit much when five universities spend hundreds of pounds and he finds more to say on a fellow journalist than on the plays”.

The triumph was enough of an encouragement for him to quit his research job for the theatre, first working as an assistant stage manager at Bromley Rep, impressing with Muck For Three Angels at the Traverse, then being invited to direct at the Royal Court. The attitude of a theatre dedicated to new writing was one which Wearing thrived on, and he carried its mentality with him throughout the rest of his career, even if directing wasn’t his best expression of it. He helmed the eagerly-awaited but disastrous follow up to Hair, Isabel’s a Jezebel (1970), and later directed a couple of television plays, but the producer’s chair would prove his natural home.

His route to it came via one of television’s great impresarios, David Rose, in his new role as the BBC’s Head of English Regions Drama. Rose was impressed by Wearing’s touring (via transit van) production of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, and brought the production to television. The piece stunned the critics, and led Rose to invite Wearing to join the team as a script editor.

Initially a quiet and tentative member of this creative powerhouse, he worked diligently, gradually growing in confidence, and upon becoming a producer, inherited a gift of a serial in Malcolm Bradbury’s concupiscent The History Man (1981), a campus saga of gross moral turpitude that had already outraged as a novel and which vividly established Wearing’s credentials as a producer unafraid of whipping up a storm. Boys From The Blackstuff, with its confrontational depiction of a Britain crumbling both spiritually and economically under the weight of unemployment, was again a project which guaranteed controversy and governmental displeasure.

Wearing then took over as producer for the final season of Play for Today in 1984. The strand had been dying of neglect since the turn of the 1980s, lacking the innovation and courage that had made it such a force for good throughout the previous decade, but under his command there were some final triumphs, such as Barrie Keefe’s King, exploring the exploitation of the Windrush generation as they neared retirement age, and Doug Lucie’s horrifying study of a spiteful, privileged metropolitan elite, Hard Feelings.

Wearing was never afraid to make life difficult for himself if it might yield good work: Edge of Darkness meant having to rely on a writer as unpredictable and undisciplined as Troy Kennedy Martin, whose original pitch was “detective who turns into a tree”. The finished work perfectly expressed Britain’s growing fear that the Cold War might be hotting up for a nuclear winter. Another BAFTA winner was First And Last (1989), Michael Frayn’s story of a retired everyman (Joss Ackland) walking from Land’s End to John O’Groates. A road movie on foot and a long-distance love story, the huge production was hit not only by inconsistent weather but by tragedy when its original star, Ray McAnally, died half-way through shooting, but the finished film remains a gentle masterpiece.

As Head of Serials, as well as inevitably controversial works of the highest quality such as Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1993), he became a late convert to period drama, overseeing the BBC’s massive renaissance and reinvigoration of the genre after the success of Pride and Prejudice (1995).

An executive role thankfully never smoothed his rough edges: at a weekly programme review meeting, after listening to two senior BBC figures dissing a recent and challenging serial, Grushko (1994), Wearing, rather than disassociating himself from the production, told them “you’re both completely wrong. I think it’s a really important piece that is very well made and one that isn’t easy with its audience”.

He was awarded BAFTA’s Alan Clarke Award in 1997 and the RTS Cyril Bennett Award the following year, but with the arrival at the BBC of John Birt, an invasion by consultants, an obsession with ratings and the centralisation of the decision-making process, Wearing was driven disgustedly to resign and set up his own production company. Within a few hours of the announcement, 300 people signed a petition of support for him. A former colleague later bumped into him in Soho and “he said to me: ‘one day I’ll talk to you about betrayal’”.

Wearing was modest in his achievements, a gregarious but unpretentious character who lived at arm’s length from the showbiz world, in Peckham, where he shared a home for over twenty years with the artist Karen Loader. They had two children, Ella, an artist, and Benjamin, a cinematographer. He was previously married for twenty years to Jean Ramsay, with whom he had two daughters, Sadie, an academic, and Catherine, herself an exceptional television producer, who predeceased him.

Although there has been a flowering of impressive drama again at the BBC in the last two years, Wearing remained justifiably angry that “there is now nowhere for new, original voices to be heard. New writers are trained on how to write EastEnders instead”. There remains an unjustifiable gap in the schedules for the kind of work he believed in. As producer Kenith Trodd said at the time of Wearing’s resignation: “the symbolism of the BBC becoming a place where Michael Wearing cannot exist is very, very ominous”.

Michael Howard Wearing, producer, born 12 March 1939, died 5 May 2017

 

Simon Farquhar

 

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Gangsters complaint

Letter from Mary Whitehouse to David Rose

David Rose’s reply to Mary Whitehouse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This exchange of letters was given to me by David Rose several years ago.

Mary Whitehouse, in capacity of General Secretary of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, which she established, complained about many television programmes from the 1960s onwards. The 1975 ‘Play for Today’, Gangsters, clearly wasn’t to her taste, because of its violence, and ‘coarseness’. David Rose’s response defends the themes and tone of the film, as well as stating its public acclaim. I suspect that it felt like a badge of honour to provoke this kind of complaint from Mary Whitehouse: a way of gauging that the point of the play had been successfully made to the audience!

The following comment was left on the Pebble Mill Facebook page:

Jane Partridge: ‘Did you know the lady herself was a visiting speaker for the Royal Television Society Midland Centre’s meeting at Pebble Mill? It would have been somewhere around 1979-1980, possibly early 1981 (but definitely before June that year when I had to change departments). John Grantham was Secretary of the Midland Centre, and as his secretary, I had the job of meeting Mrs Whitehouse in Reception and taking her up to the room we used for the meetings. She was, in fact, a very nice person.’

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Boys from the Black Stuff scene by scene

Copyright resides with the original holder, no reproduction without permission

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Thanks to Rachel Selby from the costume department, for keeping these scene by scene breakdowns for Boys from the Black Stuff  ep 1 ‘There’s Nothing For You’, safe since the early 1980s, and for allowing them to be shared here.

This episode ends with the death of Snowy, as he falls from a window onto the street below.

The photo of Snowy’s death is from make-up designer, Maggie Thomas.

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Brian Johnson in the Comms Centre

Copyright resides with the original holder, no reproduction without permission

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brian Johnson in the Comms Centre at Pebble Mill, on an evening shift – not comedian Dave Allen on the television.

This photo was originally posted on the Pebble Mill Engineers’ Facebook page.

The following comments were posted on the Pebble Mill Facebook page, where I had asked what duties there would be in Comms Centre in the evening:

Malcolm Hickman: ‘At one time we knew what every button and switch did.’

Colin Pierpoint: ‘We did a number of duties on evening shift. for each Midland opt out of BBC1 we extended opt out control to the Pres Desk. There was usually one at every programme junction. Contribution circuits for television were routed through BM Comms Centre from Manchester, carrying Scotland and Northern Ireland contributions, and from Norwich. There were two vision contribution channels from Manchester and two to London Switching Centre, although we could hire extra circuits from BT if necessary. Each of these extra circuits had to be tested. Sound circuits were 669, 297 and 148 from Manchester, and 136 or 276 going north. 289 from Norwich. Sound circuits to London were 549, 296, 271, 698 and 339+689 via Daventry. From London 114 and 270. All these are music circuits, which mean broadcast quality for either speech or music. All were regularily tested. Routing tests tended to be in the evening when they were less used. They were switched according to the SB chart which was issued daily by Circuit Allocation Unit in BH London. Later changes and additions came on a teleprinter in Comms Centre. Control lines associated with these bookings could carry talkback and cue programme. Control Lines into BM from London were 007 and LO-BM 30 and 31, similar to Manchester. So if there was any contribution from the regions in the evening going to London it would be routed through BM Comms. There were sometimes region to region contributions, not ending in London, and contributions from London to the regions, particularily for Scotland and Wales. At the time I worked there distribution passed through here and we were responsible for testing and maintaining circuit quality and rectifying faults. Birmingham fed Towyn transmittion station with Radio networks (R1 and R2 I think), as well as all the Midland transmitters and feeds north. We also routed circuits within the building from Studios A and B to VTR. Outside Broadcasts coming into Birmingham on radiolinks had to be tested and routed. These could be in the evening. Radio News contributions looked after themselves most of the time on the NCA network, but we dealt with any faults. However, other sound circuits could be booked for Radio, for example if there was a stereo OB from the Town Hall (later Symphony Hall) of an orchestral concert on radio 3, the lines would be tested to BM comms and then routed to London. We also took calls from listeners and viewers on technical and programme queries.’

Malcolm Hickman: ‘As he is wearing a tie, I suspect he was the shift supervisor. The shift was the B shift – 15:30 until BBC 1 closedown. He would have an engineer on the same shift with him and a second engineer doing the D shift that finished at 22:00 hours. When David Stevens was on form, the Presentation show could extend the closedown by 30 mins.’

Colin Pierpoint: ‘..and once went out in Northern Ireland because their opt out had already closed down and the transmitter automatic switch (TLS failure) switched over to the Midlands RBS (Rebroadcast standby)’

Steve Dellow: ‘When I was on B shift (particularly on a Sunday) I’d be ringing the Club to see whether a certain supervisor was in a state to get back to the Comms Centre so I could go home! Other times on a quiet evening I’d practice coding something with SIS (?) on the bays as if it needed feeding to LO (say). Or practice commoning up some audio circuits to the single speaker in the desk, which was useful to hear all the footy commentators starting to plug up their COOBE’s on a Saturday.’

Jane Partridge: ‘The breakfast shift was more fun… I was working in Contracts & Finance at the time, so Phil and I travelled in together and the aim was to have just had a full cooked breakfast (so there was the lingering smell of bacon) just before the A shift got in. The Comms Centre had its own kitchen, so that early and late shifts could have a hot meal.’

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