Adrian Goldberg. Copyright resides with the original holder, no reproduction without permission.
A chance to listen to one of the Plaque For Pebble Mill Campaigners making their case on a recent edition of Radio WM’s Adrian Goldberg Show. It’s about 1 hour 50 minutes in.
The show will be available to listen to until 10th December 2016.
Thanks to Steve Weddle for sharing the link.
Copyright Martin Fenton, no reproduction without permission
This is Jill Archer’s Aga, and presumably quite a bit of her kitchen equipment piled on top! It would have been regularly used during recordings of The Archers.
Martin Fenton took this photo in Radio Studio 3 in Pebble Mill in 2003, where The Archers used to be recorded.
The following comments were left on the Pebble Mill Facebook page:
Kathryn Shuttleworth: ‘We still have the Aga but it nearly didn’t make it as there were concerns about the weight of it! I’m pretty sure there was some concrete reinforcements installed, not just for the Aga but the entire BBC building structure. A team from Aga did the move to The Mailbox as it had to be dismantled into many pieces and reassembled. It really does weigh a tonne!’
Malcolm Hickman: ‘When I used to do the guided tours of Pebble Mill (sometimes helping Sheila Brown) the Archers Studio was always very popular.’
Copyright resides with the original holder, no reproduction without permission.
The Century Speaks was the BBC’s Millennium Oral History project. It was a national regional and local radio initiative to record biographies of up to 8000 people, on a number of different themes. The recordings were used to create sixteen programmes per local station, one on each of the different themes. The recordings and programmes are stored in the National Sound Archive of the British Library.
The following comments were left on the Pebble Mill Facebook page:
Dave Harte: ‘I was interviewed for this project. Helen Lloyd came to my house and recorded an interview with me. I think there was also a Birmingham-focused book about the project?’
Robert Thompson: ‘Gosh. I remember this – it was a big BBC Local Radio project which culminated in some extraordinary programmes some of which were re-broadcast on Radio 4 and are held by the British Library. There was a follow-up a few years later called A Sense of Place. It was an epic under-taking delivering a snapshot of life across the country as the century turned.’
Visiting Droitwich with Martin Watkins, who was later Quality Monitor. Copyright, Colin Pierpoint, no reproduction without permission.
Part of the comms work was out on the road. I did many Sound Lines Tests. These were on the day before a broadcast, which was usually live, but lines were also used for VTR (Videotape recording in London or other regions). From my diary, I tested lines in Birmingham Cathedral, Cheltenham Racecourse, Rugby, Wolverhampton Football Ground, Nottingham Forest Football Ground, Coventry, Ipswich {which at the time was of course in the Midland Region. (Only the BBC could do it this way)}, Hereford Cathedral, Hanley Queens theatre, Villa Park, Moseley Football Ground, Edgbaston Cricket Ground, and Birmingham City. Most of these I tested many times. I liked to take the “self drive car” then if it broke down it was not my fault. (see below!). At that time the lines were provided by the Post Office, later to separate as British Telecom. For a lines test the BBC engineer met a PO man usually with a cable coming down a telegraph pole, or from a hole in the ground. We did have some comms engineers who were not too good on the Comms switchboard (EMX); in one lines test I suddenly heard Stan Smith’s voice (the ACSE in the Comms Centre). He had been talking on the phone to someone else in Birmingham, so I said “Hello Stanley”. He asked Where are you? I said “Would you believe, standing in a flowerbed in Peterborough?”
As I mentioned above, we also did the radio links to get the television signals out from the OB to a BBC centre. Amongst others I did Coventry Locano, Derby FA cup, Dunstable mid-point (where you receive the signal and pass it on to the next radiolink site). Ipswich Town, Norwich City, Moseley Rugby Ground. The Comms Supervisor was often in the Sutton Coldfield OB room receiving signals from dishes on the top of the mast. There was a lovely catering woman there, who would ring me at Pebble Mill to take my order for the next day, and then bring my meal into the OB room on a tray!
When reporting on site at Sutton Coldfield, I often had a chat to the transmitter staff and got to know some of them quite well. They had a monitoring problem there because it was difficult to get a quiet signal with all the RF (Radio Frequencies) around at high level. At the time their Radio 3 transmitter drive occasionally made a low frequency rumbling noise, so we had an arrangement that it was all right for them to ring me at home to listen and check for them. My equipment was nothing special, but I did have a clean signal. They also encouraged me to ring their MIC (Monitoring Information Centre) whenever I heard the fault.
Photos by Roy Thompson, no reproduction without permission
Thanks to Roy Thompson for posting these photos of the envelope designed to celebrate the tenth anniversary of BBC Pebble Mill. In the closer photo you can see the myriad of programmes made at the broadcast centre. Here’s the impressive list:
Network Television – Pebble Mill at One, Saturday Night at the Mill, New Life, Farming, Gardeners’ World, Kick Start, Top Gear, Pot Black, Pebble Mill Showcase, Day and Night, Dig This, Pop at the Mill, Top Sailing, 6.55 Special, Bypass, Shakespeare or Bust, The Fishing Party, Penda’s Fen, The Roses of Eyam, Three for the Fancy, The After Dinner Game, Gangsters, Glitter, Trinity Tales, Licking Hitler, Empire Road, Underdog, Vampires, Bull Week, The Muscle Market, The History Man, The Olympian Way, Artemis 81
Network Radio – On your Farm, Farming Today, Make Yourself at Home, Voice of the People, From the Grass Roots, My Music, My World, The Archers, Top Tunes, Alderburgh Festival, Cheltenham Festival, One Man One Voice, A La Carte
Local Radio – Coming Home, The 206 Team, Home James, Saturday Sport
Regional Television – Midlands Today, Look!Hear! Midlands Tonight, Straight Talk, Know Your Place, Spare Time, Day Out, The Garden Game, Weekly Echo, Buying Time, Action, The R & D Show