Photograph from Engineering Manager, John Abbott, no reproduction without permission.
Rigger driver, Ron Lane, standing proudly next to the scanner CMCR9, Pebble Mill’s CM1, which later became BBC Manchester’s North 3. The location is probably a Gardeners’ World outside broadcast, possibly at ‘The Magnolias’, Percy Thrower’s garden, where the weekly gardening show was recorded in much of the 1970s.
Photos by John Abbott, no reproduction without permission.
These photos are from an outside broadcast for ‘Gardeners’ World’ with the scanner CMCR9, which was Pebble Mill’s CM1, and later became Manchester’s North 3. The first photo is outside Percy Thrower’s garden. The second is of a rostrum set up for the ‘Gardeners’ World’ OB. I think that the dark shape in the foreground of the second photo is the flap on the roof of the scanner, which was for the inlet and outlet for the air conditioning unit, which was fitted above the cab.
Percy Thrower presented ‘Gardeners’ World’ from 1969 until 1975, when he was dropped by the BBC, because of a contract he entered into with Plant Protection, a subsidiary of ICI, to appear in some commercials.
Keith Brook (Scouse) has identified the right hand cameraman up the tower as Don Cooper and thinks that it’s Tony Wigley in the blue jacket to the right of the lower camera.
Copyright resides with the original holder.
This photo from the 1960s, shows a group of technical operators ‘relaxing’ on the set
of another soap produced at Gosta Green. This was called ‘United’ and was about life in a fictional football club. It was a total flop and hardly mentioned in BBC drama history at all.
Gosta Green (Gosta Green was the BBC studio in Birmingham before the building of Pebble Mill) did a lot of drama, but also general work – Percy Thrower’s gardening programmes and music items for the fledgling immigrants’ programmes among them.
Dave Kirkwood