Blog – Page 314 – What Was Pebble Mill?

Golden Oldie Picture Show, Minehead – photos from Gail Herbert

Photos by Gail Herbert, no reproduction without permission.

These photos were taken in 1986 on a location shot of the ‘Golden Oldie Picture Show’ in Minehead, Somerset. The camera, on a track and dolly can be seen on the first photo towards the right of shot.

The ‘Golden Oldie Picture Show’, was presented by Radio 1 D.J., Dave Lee Travis. The show was made up of specially shot videos for hit singles which pre-dated the era of music videos. Individual directors would submit ideas for films for individual tracks. It was produced at BBC Pebble Mill; the executive producer was John King.

Gail Herbert was the production assistant on the series.

Please add a comment if you know what hit this video was made for.

Mike Johnston – photo by Laura McNeill

Photo by Laura McNeill, no reproduction without permission.

This photo is of Mike Johnston, a floor manager at BBC Pebble Mill.

Radio WM – photo of Maggy Whitehouse

This photo is of Maggy Whitehouse, who was a BBC Radio WM breakfast presenter back in 1983. She presented the Breakfast show for a year and then a lunchtime interview show for two years.

Marconi Mark One Camera – Pete Simpkin

I remember the Marconi Mk ONE……we trained on them at Evesham (Wood Norton) and this picture is of three of us carrying out some ‘impact’ maintenance on one of them! On the left is Phil Upton showing where to hit the camera and wielding the panning handle is Keith Tucker. We were from all the regional studios and I cannot recall the members from Birmingham on TA Course 16 in the Spring of 1963.

Pete Simpkin

‘Fellow Traveller’ – interview with writer, Michael Eaton

This interview with writer, Michael Eaton, was recorded in spring 2011 at an archive screening event of the 1991 drama, ‘Fellow Traveller’. It was the only feature film release from Pebble Mill, and was a co-production with HBO. Michael Wearing was the producer, and Philip Saville the director. It starred Imogen Stubbs, Ron Silver, Hart Bochner, and Daniel J Travanti. The story covered the blacklisted American writers in the McCarthy era. Many of these writers fled abroad, and some ended up working on British television shows like ITV’s ‘Robin Hood’.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

‘Fellow Traveller’ – Michael Eaton from pebblemill on Vimeo.