RAC Rally – 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.

Chris Rowlands on the RAC Rally

Photo from Mel Stevens, no reproduction without permission

This photo is of Film Unit’s Chris Rowlands, when he was Editing Organiser. It dates from the mid to late 1980s and is from the RAC Rally. Chris would order in editing equipment to fit out a van to edit on location.

The following comments were left on the Pebble Mill Facebook page:

Ian Collins: I was the editor on CM2 working on the Rally in 1988. John Burkill was Producer along with the late John Smith if I remember rightly and Tony Rayner was the Director. I think LO22 was also involved but I can’t rennet where we were located.

Ned Abell: Remember CM2 parked nearly outside the Nottingham Albany rally headquarters..and the Laguna Tandoori 3 steps away after transmission with starters on the table!!

Malcolm Hickman: I did plan the radio links for the RAC rally which was starting in Scarborough. That would have been the late 80s.

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.

RAC Rally – photos by Paul Scholes

Photos by Paul Scholes, no reproduction without permission.

The photos are from the outside broadcast of the annual RAC Rally called ‘Rally Report’, which was produced at Pebble Mill for many years. The team would record and edit from the location, moving on each day, finishing the nightly broadcast and transmitting via satellite from the OB truck.

The top photo shows left to right: Chris Rowlands (film editor), Ken Pollock (producer), Jon Bentley (producer and now presenter of Fifth Gear), Gurpi Sani (post production engineer), Pete Shannon (editor). The lower photo shows Jon Bentley and Pete Shannon.

RAC Rally – photo from Maggie Humphries

Ian Churchill & Keith Froggatt

Photo from Maggie Humphries (Film Unit).

This photo is from the Lombard RAC Rally (probably from 1983), it features cameramen Ian Churchill (left) and Keith Froggatt (right). BBC Pebble Mill used to cover the RAC Rally each year, and produce a daily report from the Rally, called the Top Gear Rally Report.