Memories – Page 55 – What Was Pebble Mill?

BBC Club Staff 1987 – photo from Gail Herbert

BBC Club Staff 1987

This photo shows the BBC Club Staff at Pebble Mill in 1987.

Included from left to right are Pauline Rice, Lesley Moore, Gail Herbert (Club Chairman), Jim Simmonds, Kim Giles, Theresa Gordon, Mac and H, Linda Parsonage, Hilary Paton, and Mavis Silver.

The BBC Club was based in separate single storey building across the brook from the rest of Pebble Mill. It is the only building still standing on the site.

BBC staff spent many a happy lunchtime over at the Club! It was an excellent place for networking and catching up on the gossip.

Thanks to Gail for making the photo available.

David Waine

David Waine was Head of Building at BBC Pebble Mill from 1983, when he took over from Phil Sidey. The photo was taken in David’s office, and in the back of shot is a still of the famous Harrier landing at Pebble Mill, from ‘Pebble Mill at One’.

CM2

CM 2

Leigh Sinclair in CM2

Photos by Ben Peissell and Tim Savage, no reproduction without permission.

The lower photo shows VT Editor, Leigh Sinclair in CM2.

CM2 was an outside broadcast truck based at BBC Pebble Mill. It normally had two cameras controlled from it, and was used to record programmes like ‘Gardeners’ World’, before portable single cameras became the norm in the mid 1980s.

Mike Bloore was a VT editor who worked on CM2:

‘There was no edit controller on CM2’s VTR’s. There was only a button to start both machines at the same time and trust to luck! On ‘Gardeners World’ we often did “roll back and mix” which involved playing back the last shot of the previously recorded sequence through the vision mixer allowing the vision mixer(the person) to mix through to the live camera of the next sequence to be shot while recording the whole event on the other VTR. This enabled mixes on location to be possible with only 2 VTR’s. Then someone invented pre-read but thats another story!’

Mike Bloore

Delicia Picture House – cutting from Gail Herbert

1959 old Delicia Picture House

This press cutting shows the Delicia Picture House in 1959, which was one of the main BBC studios in Birmingham before the opening of BBC Pebble Mill in 1971.

The Gosta Green studios were where many early television studios were recorded.

Thanks to Gail Herbert for making the cutting available.

John Major – photo from Gail Herbert

Gail Herbert meeting John Major

Prime Minister John Major visited Pebble Mill in the 1990s and appeared on Good Morning with Anne and Nick for a sofa chat. He is shown here meeting Gail Herbert, Chair of the BBC Club and P.A., outside the front of Pebble Mill Reception. Between Gail and John Major is David Wayne, the Head of Building.

You’ll notice that John Major has signed the photo for Gail, who was a supporter of his.