Stuart Gandy – Page 11 – What Was Pebble Mill?

Plan of Pebble Mill Basement – John Madin

Negative, Basement Plan, 1971. This digital resource is available under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0 license, with kind permission of the Birmingham & Five Counties Architectural Association Trust, thanks to the Architectus project (part of the Jisc Content Programme 2011-13).

Plan of Pebble Mill’s basement from 1971, by architect John Madin.

The following comments were left on the Pebble Mill Facebook group about the basement:

Stuart Gandy: ‘We had an engineering store room down there. It was right beneath studio A, and quite a trek to get to up some steps and down some others. It was quite an Aladdin’s cave of stuff that had been pensioned off never to be seen again. Every now and again attempts were made to sort it out and it was at it its best just before we moved out!’

Peter Poole: ‘The echo plate room was down there. Also two sub-stations to ensure mains power. If this failed batteries would give a limited supply until the generator started.’

Andrew Hewkin: ‘I went down, with permission, after most staff had left, to see if there was anything worth salvaging. There were literally thousands of sound effects discs, some 78s, many 7-inch. Enough to fill several skips, which is probably what happened.’

Diane Reid: ‘Used as a music location on more than one occasion’

Charles White: ‘it was always rumoured there was a nuclear bunker down there, and a shooting range, true or false ?’

Peter Poole: ‘I fully explored the basement and found no evidence of a nuclear bunker.’

Giles Herbert: ‘The range was not purpose built: It was the passage that ran under to corridor from the bottom of the goods lift by Studio A scene door and ended up near the steps up to the approach to the loading bay outside the security office.’

Torvill and Dean at the 1984 Olympics

This article is from Pebble Mill News, March 1984. It tells how a Pebble Mill single camera crew comprising of Eric Wise, Roger Guest, Bill Youel and John Allinson, brought Torvill and Dean’s, Bolero performance to 17.5 million viewers of the Winter Olympics, when the six Yugoslav rink-side cameras gave disappointing coverage!

The second article is about Nigel Pargeter’s drinking habits in The Archers.

Thanks to Robin Sunderland, for sharing this newsletter, and keeping it safe in his loft for many years!

Here is a link to a clip on YouTube of Torvill and Dean’s gold medal winning performance. Notice that consists of just one shot! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcCj0xfO3H8

The following comment was left on the Pebble Mill Facebook group:

Stuart Gandy: ‘Wow, how amazing that Robin has still got this after all these years. Funny thing is memories come flooding back, I can remember myself and my engineering collogues standing in TAR reading that very article back in 1984 and thinking what a coup it was that a Pebble Mill team got this coverage. Good stuff.’

BBC Leave Form

This was the standard BBC Leave Form, for staff to request holiday.

Staff used to get around 25 days annual holiday a year. ‘Compensatory’ leave, was accrued by working extra days, for example if you worked at least 4 x 12hr days in one BBC calendar week (Sunday to Saturday), and came in to work on the 5th day, then you were entitled to an extra day off. ‘Additional’ leave was given for various reasons, e.g. you used to get 2 days off for moving house, and the same for paternity leave, and long service leave was earned at the rate of 2.5 days a year, after you’d worked for the BBC continuously for ten years. You earned 20 hours extra leave for each year over ten you’d worked. Long service leave could be carried over, and couldn’t be taken for periods of less than a week. It meant that you could take a very long holiday of a couple of months or longer, if you’d worked for the Corporation for a long time.

If you were paid weekly, then you could get a cash advance, from the Cash Office, to get your pay in advance.

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

Stephen Martin: ‘You had to give your “leave address”. There was no escape.’

Stuart Gandy: ‘Those were the days when we actually had a cash office. Very useful it was too for cashing personal cheques (I think you were allowed up to £50, but my memory is fading a bit on that point!) as in those days cash machines were not that common and the nearest bank to Pebble Mill was quite a long way away.’

Ruth Kiosses: ‘Talking of the cash office, what about the purchasing forms in multi coloured layers? We could only pay cash at Makro because finance were so long settling bills they refused our purchase forms. We had a hole put in our Makro card if I remember rightly? This labelled us as bad payers!’

Marc Price: ‘Wasn’t there also a form of leave called “Bisque”? It was leave that couldn’t be refused by management or something like that?’

Ruth Kiosses: ‘And gardening leave? I’m sure my boss had that once?’

Ray Lee: ‘Any overtime could also be taken as Comp Leave. Overtime was normally paid at 1.25T (irregular hours contract) but if you took comp leave instead you were paid the 0.25T balance and accrued comp hours at the 1T rate.’

Pete Simpkin: ‘Yes Marc that’s right, usually for desperate times like sudden bereavements etc and remarkable for the fact that the system was respected by most staff. Incidentally I seem to remember there was a spectacular payment if you had to work on Christmas Day, at one time there had to be two engineers on duty at every studio centre which had a control room for the Queen’s Christmas Day Broadcast so most people had at least one of these payments during their career.’

Link 125 cameras

Link 125 camera on Pebble Mill at One

Copyright resides with the original holder, no reproduction without permission. Thanks to floor manager, Eurwyn Jones, foreground in this photo, for sharing it.

The photo shows the Link 125 cameras during a rehearsal with cook Michael Smith, on Pebble Mill at One, circa 1981.

The Link 125 cameras replaced the EMI 2001 cameras, which were extremely popular with cameramen. The Links did not enjoy the same popularity.

The following comments were left on the Pebble Mill Facebook group about the camera:

Keith Brook: ‘Luckily for me I left before the Links came in. My ex-colleagues told me how bad they were and how difficult it was to focus. If you wound up the peaking, the camera noise became a white fog over the whole viewfinder. If you turned it down, the focus was likely to be soft, but you couldn’t tell. Engineers chose cameras and cameramen had to make do with what they were given. Despite far, far better cameras being available from Japanese manufacturers, the BBC had decided to ‘do the patriotic thing’ and use a British company. Fortunately, the Links didn’t last long.’

Matthew Skill: ‘The patriotic thing being to use a camera company that hadn’t been around that long compared to the real camera-makers…? And then to eventually indirectly/inadvertently drive same late-comer company to the wall as it tried to satisfy BBC requirements for a ‘modern’ studio camera (130) to replace the 110s and 125s. A curious tale all round….’

Stuart Gandy: ‘That’s certainly true what Keith says about the Links. After the crispness of the 2001’s, they never seemed sharp. There was also an odd condition that could happen that resulted in a strange slight loss of focus in the middle of the screen, which became known as the ‘teardrop’, because of its shape. The cause was never fully explained, but I think adjusting the registration controls fixed it – for a while. Even now, I remember the words of the late Mike Lee, when he would come across the line up area and say quietly, ‘we’ve got a teardrop’.’

Developments at Pebble Mill 1984

Thanks to Peter Poole for sharing these pages about technical developments, including a new dubbing and sypher suite, and Studio B control room refurbishment, at Pebble Mill in the internal BBC Engineering Newsletter from 1984/5.

The following information was added on the Pebble Mill Facebook group:

Keith Brook: ‘The original 1/4″ location sound was transferred onto special 16mm separate magnetic, sep-mag, film. Now, the film and the sound were the same ‘size’ and could be edited together by the film editor. If it was drama, for example, you’d end up with a complete film and dialogue track but minus the music, sound effects, wild-track and so on. You would them make a second, or third, sep-mag track that had the music, effects and so on, all in the right places but with extra lead-in and lead-out.

Dubbing was where you took that 16mm film, its matching 16mm dialogue track, the other tracks and put them on a huge machine that kept everything in sync. You would then run the whole lot through a sound mixer onto a final track, fading the effects in and out according to a dubbing script that matched the frame counter.

SYPHER was a video system and is a BBC acronym for ‘SYnchronous Post-production using Helical-scan video and Eight-track Recorder’. Essentially, it worked like film-dubbing, but the 8-track sound machine was kept in sync with the video player by time code rather than mechanically as in film. Again, once you had the dialogue track and all the other bits in the right places, you would have a final ‘dub’ where you put it all together onto the audio track of the video recorder. The clever bit with SYPHER was the motorised faders on the sound desk which, again using timecode, would remember their settings at each moment during the final dub.’

Stuart Gandy: ‘Good memories of those times. This was during a period of 3 – 4 years of major refurbishment of the studio and VT areas. From the vision viewpoint in the studios , it was the change from the stalwart EMI 2001 cameras to the Link 125.’