Drama – What Was Pebble Mill?

Doctors – end of an era

On 14th November 2024, the final episode of the continuing drama, Doctors, was transmitted. Doctors began it’s life at BBC Pebble Mill, and moved, when the building was demolished, to a new site in Selly Oak, the ‘BBC Drama Village’ at the University of Birmingham.

Here are the comments from a few of people who worked on it, or had affection for it, taken from the Pebble Mill Facebook page:

Clive Payne: I’ll miss being in it as a supporting artist for 12 years plus. It’s a unique family unit and a great joy to be a tiny part of.

Janet Collins: Lovely to have two characters, Bev Dartnall & Carson Black in the last programme. A nice tribute to former producers.

Andy Bentley: I remember when it started and the last episode at Pebble Mill when they did the explosion. A lot of people cut there teeth on this, Emilia Clarke had her first TV appearance on it.

Julie Hill: Why did they kill off Doctors? I just cant believe the appalling decisions that continue to be made by the BBC going back to when they flogged off Pebble Mill without even a backward glance.

Caroline Feldon: You might be interested to know that in my current role as a psychotherapist I advised on some of the scripts for Jimmi. So I was involved from a distance. Sad to see it go.

Sue Robinson: I caught the last episode today by accident. My ears pricked up when I heard one of the characters was called Bev Dartnall. What a lovely tribute. I then watched the documentary afterwards and it was lovely to see both Dave Farline and Andy Payne on camera in the early days of Doctors. Fabulously talented people taken way too early. Well done Doctors for a great legacy and a reminder of a fantastic place I and many others had the privilege to work in.

James Patterson: To be fair, a great and underrated series. When it took over Studio A and other areas in the Crush bar it seemed like the Pebble Mill era had come to an end, but Doctors moved on to the Drama Village and thrived. Hope everyone is well and can find work.

Luisa Prosser: Having worked as a floor assistant at Pebble Mill, I was so excited to be in an episode and to know most of the crew. I’ll always remember Sally from make up, saying ‘Well, this is weird!’ Sad to see this programme come to an end.

Anne-Marie Palmer: When we finished derigging the Drama Village and getting rid of everything it felt like the final demise of Pebble Mill.

It was all so sad, it stated a type of bereavement.

When I watched yesterday I couldn’t stop crying, it was probably also the loss of Pebble Mill 20 years ago coming out as well, as this didn’t really come to an end we just moved premises.

The freelance world is a rocky road to walk (particularly currently) and some of my Doctors colleagues have taken the decision to retire, I have managed to get occasional work and every job I’ve been on my wider Doctors family has been there and we’ve all carried our Doctors (and Pebble Mill) ethics with us of making it a friendly atmosphere to work in. Everyone is important, everyone counts, we work better together.

Nanny – Michael Custance, Part 4

‘Nanny’ was a very good idea and structure for a series. It sold around the world and was also fun to make. In all I directed 110 TV shows and only once did I have a problem with an actor and it was during ‘Nanny’.

The scene was Nanny and the four children having dinner in the nursery with their aged grandmother played by an aged star who shall remain nameless and only had this one scene. As the youngest child was only 4 years old by law I only had half an hour to work with her. Rehearsals went fine but on the take the grandmother suddenly stopped half way through. She said she wanted to start again. We started again and again she stopped questioning the lighting, which was the same as rehearsals and was fine anyway. I rushed down on to the studio floor and stormed onto the set then quietly and with a smile asked her to leave the set as I wanted to talk to her. Once off the set I let rip. “It is obvious what you are doing. You’re attention seeking like a spoilt Hollywood actress in the 1930’s. You are behaving childishly and those children are not. You are simply just one of my cast now get back onto the set and behave yourself.” There were several nods as I went back to my gallery, thank heavens it went that way.

The BBC started to transmit Nanny once a week every Saturday but we took two weeks to make an episode. Inevitably transmissions started to catch up with production so that at the end in the hotel in Birmingham beside the studios we watched Nanny on air at the end of which the presenter said “…and next week Nanny does…” We all said ‘I bloody hope so, we haven’t shot it yet.’ The next day we started the two day shoot. After that came the 1.5 day edit which finished at 12.00 then I drove the tape 200 kms. from Birmingham to London to use in the music recording session in the afternoon and then 200 kms. back to Birmingham with the music tape for the dubbing session 09.00 the next day. By now it was Friday. It was transmitted the next day on Saturday. Thus the schedule could be hair raising. Stress after the studio shoot was often released as when in a Greek restaurant as we were smashing plates on the floor as is the custom. Wendy who had left reappeared with arm full of snow balls and started a snowball fight around the tables.

Maggie Boyd was my PA during ‘Nanny’. A larger than life character and quite outrageous but as a PA very efficient. She came from BBC Scotland where she was PA on their Late Night News and often spent far too long in the club bar afterwards. One midnight she fell into a taxi to go home and slurred to the driver “Take me to the Zoo”. “It’s shut madam” “I live there”. Indeed she did. She lived with the head of the Zoo. They had a much loved and well known old male lion who died. Her husband called a London taxidermist to stuff it and put it in the foyer. An old dusty taxidermist in a crumpled suit with a leather bag full of strange implements arrived. Maggie could not resist it. “Do you stuff animals often?”. “Madam, we do not call it stuffing”. “What do you call it then?” “Mounting.” Exit Maggie fast and doubled up.

We had a stage manager called Tony Vandenend who was quite brilliant as a studio SM but hopeless in real life. Before the studio shoot in Birmingham we always stayed in a hotel close by.

Tony was put in a bedroom the other side of the dinning room and somehow managed to organise breakfast in his room. The next morning room service arrived. “Mr Vandenend, your breakfast”. “Thanks, just put it outside my door”. Nude, Tony cautiously opened the door. Nobody there. He bent down to pick up the tray. His door slammed shut, locked. So there he was, nude holding his breakfast in the corridor. Reception would have a spare key so he walked down stairs and entered the dinning room full of the rest of us. Shocked silence. To his everlasting credit he slowly crossed the room pretending that there was nothing unusual. “Good morning everyone. Hope you all slept well. Nice day isn’t it”. Now nude in front of the receptionist who almost fainted. “I am so sorry to bother you but I have locked myself out of my room. Would you be so kind as to give me a spare key. Thank you” He then walked calmly back through the full dinning room. “Silly me. I locked myself out of my room. See you all later”. He got a round of applause.

Michael Custance

Nanny – Michael Custance, Part 3

It was the last episode of the first series. At dinner with actor Guy Slater and the writer Cary Harrison, (son of Rex Harrison – star of ‘My Fair Lady’), Guy announced that the BBC had just called and asked him to make a second series. Cheers all around till Guy said he wanted to start the series with doing the unforgivable, and kill the baby. Would Cary write it and would I direct the three episodes. Darned right I will.

Sadly during those years babies often died. We discussed how the baby should die. All sorts of diseases were discussed getting more and more unusual. I said why not just ordinary gastroenteritis. They had not invented penicillin then or at least they had but did not know how to use it. I know because my bother James had died of gastroenteritis aged five in 1947.

They gave him penicillin but in one large dose. It did not work. As we now know it has to be a course of treatment and not just one dose. I described how it effected my mother, my father and myself. The matter was left at that.

I had just got into bed when the phone rang. It was Carey, “Would you and your family mind if I based the three episodes on your brother’s death?” I said I would talk to my mother who was living in Gozo, even though she would probably never see it as she had no TV. She said, yes, if I was directing it. So that is what we did. I spent a weekend with Carey discussing the real events and the casting of my mother, father and self.

While shooting there were two moments that caused problems. My mother was not allowed to go near or even touch James as he was in isolation. She just had to watch him as he slowly died. She left the hospital and alone walked home, 13kms. To show this half conscious women treading slowly step by step over that distance I created a very long tracking shot with Anna Cropper playing mother staring at nothing, moving mechanically and way beyond tears. The head of BBC drama told me the shot was far too long and that nobody would do that. “My mother did !” “OK then”.

Another moment was when mother still dumb with shock was burning all James’s toys, books and teddy bear, everything of his was on a bonfire in the garden and myself standing aside watching. When we came to shoot this I got a deputation from the make-up and costume departments saying this was going too far. I had to explain that in the 1940’s it had to be done to sterilize every thing in the house. One of the teddies she burned was mine, but I never told her.

When the scenes crew were digging his grave the police suddenly arrived wanting to know what on earth they were doing digging a grave. A local woman putting flowers on her family grave had seen this strange gang of men digging away and reported them.

In the story the family Nanny was with were wonderfully mad. He was local Norfolk with a strong accent and an inventor. Everything in the house was automatic and didn’t work. There was a scene of wonderful spontaneous singing of old Norfolk songs with the family in the local pub which when shooting became a real ad lib event, not an acted one. The whole studio burst into applause at the end. I shot it in one take.

Michael Custance

Nanny – Michael Custance, Part 2

One story was with Nanny working for a posh family living in the Royal Crescent in Bath.

“Well Nanny how nice of you to come to us and a blue uniform too I do like blue now I will introduce you to baby and the others” “Others? I was told you only have one baby” “Quite right Nanny only one baby and 5 other children now come along to the nursery”.

One daughter was to be suffering from psychosomatic disorder and would wake up in the night screaming in terror. The young actress of just 8 years was quite brilliant. We were amazed that she was able to act like that at her age and at the same time have school lessons from a tutor between shots. She said with disarming simplicity “Oh it’s easy. When I am acting I am her and when I am not I am me”.

We cast Annabelle Lanyon as the older child aged 10. She was in fact 21, but looked much, much younger. In a restaurant one evening the waiter took all our orders and then turned to Annabelle saying “..and what would the young lady like, we have the children’s menu over the page”. Annabelle gently replied “oh that’s fine but I would like gin and tonic and then an entrecote steak, rare, with a large glass of your house red please”. Poor waiter, not his fault.

To shoot a scene of Nanny taking all of the children for a walk in the Royal crescent was a massive job. First we had to cover the road with peat to hide the yellow lines then employ loads of extras to stand in front of the parking meters but the biggest problem were the TV aerials which did not exist in 1936. We managed to persuade all the residents of that huge crescent to let us take them down and replace them with new ones when we had finished.

We could not record any dialogue in the park oposite because of the traffic noise and the police sirens so we moved the unit 200kms away to shoot the dialogue in the scene in Dartington Park near Totnes in Devon.

Nanny – Michael Custance (part 1)

In the days when I was a cameraman at Thames TV I met an actor called Guy Slater. We became and still are friends. Guy also created and ran the Horseshoe Theatre in Basingstoke. He then became a TV producer. So when the BBC asked him to produce a new series called ‘Nanny’ he asked me to direct 9 episodes of the first series and more in the second series. (years later Guy joined me to create the series ‘Small Stages’.)

“Created by the actress Wendy Craig ‘Nanny’ was a BBC television series that ran between 1981 and 1983. In this historical drama, Wendy Craig stared as nanny Barbara Gray, caring for children in 1930s England. When Barbara Gray leaves the divorce court she has no money, no job just an iron will and a love for children. “

Wendy was first noticed for her role in the film ‘The Servant’ playing beside Dirk Bogarde in 1963 where she won the most promising newcomer award. She was awarded a best actress award in 1969 and was awarded a CBE. Her TV fame came when starring in the very long and successful series ‘Butterflies’.

Years later I bought the rights to a novel by Dirk Bogarde, Voices in the Garden, and produced a film of it for the BBC.

When Wendy Craig submitted her proposal for the series to the BBC she used the pseudonym Jonathan Marr because she was afraid that if her true identity was known she would be dismissed as merely “an actress who thinks she can write.

The structure of the series was that Nanny went to work in a family with children for three episodes and then moved on to another family. Thus each director made a story of three episodes. I made three stories, nine episodes, in the first series and one story in the second series making twelve episodes in all. Guy asked me direct more but I feared being a ‘Nanny’ director for too long.