Phil Franklin – What Was Pebble Mill?

Early PSC cameras – Ikegami

Photos by John Burkill, no reproduction without permission. John Williams on camera, Steve Saunderson assisting, Dave Baumber on sound.

Producer Phil Franklin in foreground, John Williams on camera.

Phil Franklin

The pictures were taken on the RAC Rally in 1985 in Clipstone Forest, near Nottingham, on the morning of Tuesday the 26^th of November. The cameraman is John Williams, the assistant is Steve Saunderson, the sound recordist is Dave Baumber and the producer, Phil Franklin.

The camera is almost certainly an Ikegami HL-79D and the recorder would probably have been a U-Matic in the bag over Dave’s shoulder.

The live transmissions, usually 10 to 15 minutes after 2300 hrs, were done by OB truck CM2, which was based at Rally Headquarters in the Albany Hotel in Nottingham, so Phil Franklin and VT editor, John Burkill were probably taking a short trip out to see a rally car in a forest. There was one mobile edit van, which was built for the rally, and it followed the event round the country and fed cut items back to CM2. The attached pictures of a machine rigged in CM2 would seem to confirm that the PSC format was U-Matic.

The Ikegami camera was developed for news gathering but was quickly adopted for handheld studio and OB work.

At the time, PSC style shooting was still done mainly on film, but this was the start of the transition to video. There were lots of experiments with different cameras, recorders and crews and this was one combination.

True PSC didn’t really take off until the Betacams and Digibeta came along, a bit later. They had the recorder built into the camera, making it much more like a film camera in terms of handling and the sound recordists made a sigh of relief.

The Ikegamis were used extensively at Pebble Mill for music acts and on jibs for drama. When the first one arrived, there was such excitement that it was used before the necessary adapter box to use it with TV36 cable was ready, outputting its pictures down a BNC cable. So the building’s sync pulses had to be synchronised with the camera (rather than the other way round) to avoid a picture roll every time it was cut to. This reached ridiculous heights, James French remembers, on a gardening item at the back of Pebble Mill for the live Pebble Mill at One. Not only was the building synced with the camera but the whole BBC network was synced to the building. There was a large cardboard sign attached to the Ikegami saying, “DO NOT SWITCH OFF!”

Thanks to John Burkill and James French for writing this post.

Angela Rippon presenting Top Gear

Copyright resides with the original holder, no reproduction without permission

Here is a screen grab of Angela Rippon presenting the first ever episode of the motoring magazine show, Top Gear, stood outside BBC Pebble Mill, from 1977. An excerpt of this episode is included in the following BBC show, Back in Time for the Weekend, episode 3, The 70s: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b071c07m/back-in-time-for-the-weekend-3-the-70s

Here is the Radio Times entry for an early episode of Top Gear, from July 1978, courtesy of the BBC Genome project: http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/53d7caaca2db42e9af4b102cb6bb061b. You’ll see from the text that the programme was much more consumer and safety conscious than the current iteration of Top Gear:

“Top Gear with Angela Rippon and Barrie Gill
Rippon on the Road
The big holiday rush begins this weekend and many drivers plan to travel through Friday night. How dangerous is this practice? What are the stress factors and what are the signs of fatigue? Angela finds out for herself by night driving to the West Country. Twenty people are killed and over 200 seriously injured each week yet these figures could be cut to one tenth if we used our seat belts. Should we leave it to persuasion or is compulsion the final answer?
Director PHIL FRANKLlN Producer DEREK SMITH BBC Birmingham

Rally Report

Rally Report was a BBC 2 series dating from the mid 1980s to the late 1990s, consisting of coverage of the Lombard RAC Rally of Great Britain, which was held annually in the autumn. The show went out each evening, and was quick turnaround. It was presented by Top Gear’s, William Woollard, from Rally headquarters with previews, live stages and twice nightly reports. It was shot on location, edited and transmitted from site. It was often a challenging production logistically. Tony Mason, presented the Rally stage reports. Rally Report was unusual as a sports programme, not made by BBC Sport. In later years it was renamed Top Gear Rally Report, to emphasise the fact that it wasn’t made by Sport, and that a lot of the Top Gear team were involved.

The producers included Phil Franklin, Brian Strachan (until 1986) and Tony Rayner with the executive producers including Derek Smith, Dennis Adams and Tom Ross.