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My Friend Flicker

Published 5th February 2023

Life / TV Presentation

The other night, I was sitting in a anonymous playout suite in West London, in charge of an anonymous channel. It was around 1am. Some people are surprised to learn that there is, in fact, plenty to do in a darkened playout suite at 1am. Thoroughly checking the next day’s schedule is one of those things. It’s better to find out you have a problem with your 3pm programme a full twelve hours before it airs, rather than twelve minutes.

So there I was, watching a programme – yes, an anonymous programme – which was going out in a few hours’ time. In general, we watch the opening minute and the closing minute of each show, to make sure all is well. Opening minute, fine. Closing minute, fi… hang on, what was that? A brief flicker on the end credits? What caused that? It wasn’t the credit squeeze, was it? Or the monitor wall having a funny? Let’s run it through again.

No, it’s still there. Hmmmmm.

I load the material up on the desktop PC in the suite, and step through the offending section frame-by-frame. There we have it. A single erroneous frame in the end credits, where the moving background jumps ahead unexpectedly.

A single erroneous frame. A flash frame, in fact. Completely 100% unintentional; just an editing error, rather than any kind of deliberate nonsense. But nonetheless, there it is: a sodding flash frame. I spend months and months researching and writing about them at home, and then one pops up at work too.

I need a new hobby. One that has nothing to do with my job. In fact, one that absolutely, categorically does not involve any kind of screen.

Knitting, maybe. Or orienteering. Cheesemaking?

That-cher

Published 24th November 2022

TV Presentation

I do love reading stories by people who worked in the BBC Presentation department in times gone by. Especially all the hair-raising tales about breakdowns or near-misses. What always strikes me is how while some things have obviously changed over the years, many other things have stayed exactly the same. Believe me, I speak from experience.

For instance, take this page of stories, on the Tech-ops History Site. I’m not yet in a position to tell many of my stories, but versions of most of those things have certainly happened to me while I’ve been directing BBC One and Two. Why yes, I am in therapy right now, why do you ask?

But one particular story stands out. In just a few short words, it builds up a real image of a dreadful piece of transmission, on a supremely important day when BBC1 needed to get things right:

“Margaret Thatcher resigning and having to go the News off an intro from some idiot presenter on a daytime prog in Birmingham who said ‘Now for news of Margaret Thatcher’s resignation, here’s Moira Stuart…'”

In my head, I could see it clearly. News are supposed to be the ones actually breaking the story. A daytime presenter is not supposed to gazump the national newsreader and tell the viewer first. It sounds like a hideous piece of television, at least from a professional point of view.

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Relative Time Dilation in an Amazingly Compressed Space

Published 18th October 2022

TV Comedy / TV Presentation

It’s Tuesday 21st November 1989 at 9pm, and the Red Dwarf episode “Marooned” is broadcast on BBC2 for the first time.

What was I doing? I have no idea. It was presumably a school night. I don’t think I even knew what Red Dwarf was. My Dad always watched the Nine O’Clock News at this time anyway. I had no rights over the television by that point in the evening.

The moment passed, unnoticed. By me, anyway.

*   *   *

It’s Friday 15th April 1994 at 9pm, and the Red Dwarf episode “Marooned” is broadcast on BBC2 for the third time.

What was I doing? Something very different than in 1989. This was the famous1 repeat season, where BBC2 showed every single episode of the first six series of the show.2 A lot of fans got into the series through this set of repeats, and I was no different. I quickly became obsessed with the show.

I was, however, only 12, verging on 13. My Dad still had a monopoly on the television, and still always watched the Nine O’Clock News. Luckily, I had a plan. I’d manually set the video recorder going downstairs, then rush upstairs to my bedroom to watch the episode… on an old black and white telly. It wasn’t as good as watching it in the living room on the proper TV, but it would do. And I could always watch the show downstairs later using my video. Which I did.

Endlessly.

*   *   *

It’s Saturday 14th June 2014 at 9:55pm, and the Red Dwarf episode “Marooned” is broadcast on BBC Two for the sixth time.

Lots has happened since 1994. I’ve long since been subsumed into Dwarf fandom, or at least, one particular corner of it. At this point, I’d been writing for fansite Ganymede & Titan for over a decade. But I’m not sitting watching the episode at home. And not just because I now own the episode on DVD.

Three months earlier, I’d finally got the job of my dreams: working in BBC presentation, in charge of originating most of the BBC’s domestic channels. And I just happen to be in work that evening. But unfortunately, I’m not doing BBC Two right now. I’m on another channel.

Luckily, just like when I was 12, I have a plan.

At 9:50pm, I gently appear at the door of NC2, the BBC Two pres suite. There is a very experienced director in the chair. The most experienced, longest-serving director we have, in fact. I ask if he minds if I sit with him for the next five minutes. He’s fine with it. I pull up a chair.

I watch, as I Love 1988 ends. The director runs a couple of trails: Shopgirls, Tigers About the House. Then there’s the ident; a special one, for BBC Two’s 50th anniversary. Duncan Newmarch, the duty BBC Two announcer, opens his mic and speaks: most continuity announcements are still done live. The director counts down through the ident. At 0, the picture fades down, then up again, and “Marooned” is on air, for the next 28 minutes and 35 seconds.

And two decades apart, two different parts of my life join together, briefly. Watching the same episode of Red Dwarf… but from opposite sides of the TV screen. And my teenage love of the show, and my brand new adult job, were now properly linked. Forever.

Sometimes, I’m aware enough of what’s going on around me to make sure a piece of personal history actually happens, rather than letting it slip from my grasp. Just sometimes.

With thanks to Christopher Wickham for the endlessly useful Red Dwarf BBC Broadcasts Guide, and Pip Madeley for inexplicably but brilliantly having the above video to hand.

  1. In Red Dwarf fan circles, anyway. ↩

  2. Minus “Psirens”, due to Craig Charles’ legal situation at the time. ↩

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A Bunch of BBC Studio Schedules 1965-66

Published 13th February 2022

TV Presentation

Sometimes, this site indulges in a complicated analysis of TV shows. And sometimes someone just sends me in some scans that are interesting, and I immediately bung them up. Both approaches are valid. After all, how else would you know how much the rhubarb crumble cost at Wood Norton in 1971?

From an anonymous donor, then, here is a bunch of studio schedules detailing what was recorded in various BBC studios at the tail end of 1965, and the start of 1966. It is not in any way comprehensive, but it is in every sense fascinating. I’ve put the odd note here and there, but I’ve deliberately not said much; the whole joy of these schedules is flicking your eye across them, and seeing what programmes catch your eye.

(Presenting these things is never easy online. Click/tap on each image for a larger version.)


25th – 31st December 1965, TC1/TC2/TC3/TC4

The Doctor Who episode recorded in TC3 on the 31st December was Episode 10 of The Daleks’ Master Plan, “Escape Switch” – one of only three of the twelve episodes which still survives.

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All the News That’s Fit to YouTube

Published 9th February 2022

Life / Meta / TV Presentation

Content warning: sexual assault, but no graphic details.

Yesterday’s article about Smashie and Nicey: The End of an Era brought up a problem that I have to contend with every so often. And that problem is: how to deal when a real, horrible thing suddenly intrudes on the silly kind of nonsense I usually write about on here. In yesterday’s case, what was supposed to be a shaggy dog story finding out how a production team adapted a newspaper, turned into a story about a 21-year-old woman being brutally stabbed to death by her husband.

When writing the piece, I had to figure out how to tackle that. Did it make the article inappropriate to publish? Did it at the very least require a warning? In the end, I decided no to both. The story is shocking, but was also ultimately quite short, with no gruesome detail beyond mentioning “multiple stab wounds”. Being over-sensitive can be just as awkward as not considering things enough. I decided to let it stand as it was, and while the piece does actually end as a joke, it’s a joke that acknowledges the awkwardness and hopefully puts everybody on the same page. A joke with a point.

But it did remind me of another issue I had a few years back. It’s something I never wrote about at the time; there is no way of discussing the actual case in question, for reasons that will become apparent. But a conversation on Twitter reminded me of it, and I think it’s an interesting thing to discuss in terms of the problems you can easily run into with examining old telly. So let’s try to examine it… without actually linking to the video in question.

Because this is a case of jigsaw identification.

The video I wanted to write about was a news bulletin. It was a news bulletin with something particularly interesting about its production, which is why I wanted to write about it; the actual news stories were mostly irrelevant to my point. But throughout the bulletin, there was a story about a woman who had been abducted, and then rescued. There was plenty of information given about the abduction: the woman’s name, place names, and the details of how it ended. It’s very, very easy to research what happened with this story after this news bulletin aired.

And when you do that, the woman’s name – so prominent in the bulletin – disappears. And it disappears for a very obvious reason: because she was raped during her abduction. This fact isn’t mentioned during the news broadcast – as much as anything else, it’s too soon for that information to come to light. But once it did, and the rape itself is reported, the woman’s name is entirely excised.

When I found all this out at the time, I was horrified that I’d managed to piece this together. These days, perhaps I’m a little less shocked; given that part of what I do on here is to drag out obscure things, I guess it’s not a surprise that I’d accidentally touch on stuff like this. But it’s a reminder of how easy jigsaw identification is, and you don’t have to be a journalist writing about current criminal cases to mean you have to be careful about it. You can run into these issues even just writing stupid things about old TV.

It’s also a reminder that we’re really not supposed to be able to see that bulletin, here in 2022. It was meant to be watched at that particular moment in time. I’m not saying it shouldn’t have been uploaded; far from it, in fact. But the intent with that piece of reporting was not that any random person would be able to see it in 2022.

There are historic videos and articles like these everywhere online. They’re not intentionally doing anything untoward. But you can piece together all kinds of things using them that you really shouldn’t be able to. I’m not sure there’s an easy solution; any potential “fix” could create a problem ten times worse.

But it’s why, even when writing about old telly… you have to be aware of certain things you might not expect to have to deal with.

The Button

Published 7th February 2022

TV Presentation

When I worked in Channel 5 transmission, a long time ago now, there was an old lag. The kind you often find in TX. He’d been doing the same job for absolutely years; if I recall correctly, he’d worked on Channel 5 ever since its launch in 1997. Nothing fazed him, or at least seemed to faze him, which is the same thing. He was the kind of person you wanted to soak up every single last bit of knowledge from.

One day, we got talking about mistakes. Specifically, on-air mistakes. In my line of work, we’ve all made them. That horrible moment where your heart sinks, as something stupid happens to the channel you’re supposed to be protecting the output of. It’s a horrible, awful experience; you go home feeling like absolute shit. Sometimes you’re still thinking about it days later. I still have flashbacks to a mistake I made in 2014.

But I’ll never forget what this old lag told me, as a way of putting it all in perspective.

“Just imagine a button. Your job is to press that button at a certain time each day. That’s the only thing you have to do. Nothing else.”

I looked at him. “Yeah?”

“One day, you’d forget to press it.”

I Never Tossed Off

Published 12th July 2021

Film / TV Presentation

What is the best way for a teenager to watch John Hughes’ Weird Science?

I first saw it on a black and white portable TV in my bedroom. Maybe a black and white portable TV isn’t the ideal thing to watch Weird Science on. But the important thing here was that it was in my bedroom. Which means there is one scene absolutely seared into my mind, yes?

Lisa in the doorway

I mean, yes, that scene meant a great deal to me growing up. But my visceral memory watching Weird Science for the first time isn’t actually that shot. My memory is of the ridiculous hacking scene which precedes it, the big ACCESS DENIED sign, and then… this:

Skull from the hacking sequence

I can still remember the shiver that went through me as I glimpsed that horrific visage. The fact I was watching it in black and white made it even worse, if anything. I was absolutely terrified. And anyone who has hung around on Dirty Feed for any length of time knows exactly why. Clearly, my brain linked that skull with a certain life force symbol in Knightmare. Put into that context, I don’t even feel like I was being a wuss. Unexpected skulls which remind you of something you’re already scared of, when you were hoping for something naughty instead, would surely freak anybody out a bit.

Oh, OK, fine. I was also being a wuss.

*   *   *

When writing these pieces about my TV memories, I always try to nail down a date. Sadly, I’m not sure I can really do that here. I suspect the BBC network premiere on BBC2 in December 1989 is too early – I would have been eight years old. This BBC1 showing in November 1991 is possible, as is this August 1993 showing. It could even be later, I have no real idea.

But I can give you one date: Saturday 10th July 2021. That was the date I sat in NC1 – BBC One’s control room – and transmitted Weird Science to the nation myself. Three decades or so after watching it as a kid, I was on the other side of the TV screen, playing out exactly the same thing. Every time something like this happens, it completely blows my mind. It’s not something I ever could have conceived of happening, all those years ago. Two ends of my life, suddenly joining together unexpectedly.

The skull didn’t bother me this time round, mind. And as for Lisa… we’ll draw a veil over that one. Though I will admit I got excited at one point. Extremely excited.

Well, who wouldn’t? I got the end credit VO to fit perfectly over the instrumental section of the theme, so it didn’t crash any of the lyrics. That’s enough to get anyone tumescent.

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40.

Published 23rd May 2021

Life / TV Presentation

I was born on the 23rd May 1981, at Peel Street Hospital in Nottingham. Six months later, that hospital closed for good. I don’t think the two instances were linked.

Third child of the family, I weighed 3.73kg, and popped out at precisely 2:46pm. Which means we can ignore the rest of the gory details, and figure out the really interesting thing: what was on BBC television at precisely the moment I was born?

On BBC1 was Grandstand – specifically, the build-up to England v Scotland at Wembley. Meanwhile, over on BBC2, the afternoon film The Wonder Kid (1952) had just started. Make up your own jokes.

*   *   *

I am blessed with an absolutely fucking diabolical memory. My entire childhood exists as ever-disintegrating glimpses of quarter-remembered events.

But TV was always there. I distinctly remember running around the school playground with a camera, shooting the ongoing football match. I mean, I didn’t have a real camera. We couldn’t even afford Sky at that point, let alone have the money for something like that. I had to improvise. This improvisation consisted of a plastic ice cream tub, with stickers all over it for the buttons, and a toilet roll tube sticking out the side for the lens. This was placed on my head, so I could look through the tube. Sadly, this did not make Kerry Carter immediately fall in love with me.

I also distinctly remember watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit on Central… and then catching it again a year or so later, and noting that the shoe dip scene seemed to have been further cut. “Why would that happen?”, I wondered, not realising that it was the start of a lifelong obsession.

Then, there was Going Live! A show which got me out of bed early every Saturday morning – for half the year, at least. That show was mine, and Trev and Simon were the best thing in the world. I may never fall in love with a TV show in quite the same way again.

And one day, I noticed something interesting. A certain name showed up in those end credits. Erm, my name.1

Going Live! credits - Camera Supervisor John Hoare

Even at that age, it got me thinking. What would happen if I wrote into the show, told them that my name was the same as that guy who did the cameras, and that’s it’s what I wanted to do when I grew up? Surely they’d have me on the show, and I’d get to meet everyone? Wouldn’t that be amazing?

I never did it. I’m not exactly sure why. I mean, I can tell you that I was a lazy little shit. I also thought that thousands of letters would be sent into Going Live! each week. I suspect I didn’t think it was worth trying. These days, my gut feeling is that it was more likely something amazing might have happened than I expected at the time, but who knows, really.

So I never got to go anywhere near the Going Live! studio, unfortunately. I had to settle for lurking behind the camera at a Nottingham OB for one of the ITV Telethon programmes, and yelling out excitedly when I saw the Central logo on the camera. I distinctly remember the cameraman turning to me, and giving me an indulgent smile. To be fair, that was great too.

But none of this – not even the ice cream tub camera – meant I really thought I’d ever work in television. As much as it was a huge part of my life, working on the other side of the screen seemed somehow completely impossible. Anyway, I was obviously going to end up as a computer programmer or something. No, not a software developer. A computer programmer, that’s what it was called.

*   *   *

Six days after I was born, on the 29th May 1981, the Did You See…? team filmed a segment going behind-the-scenes in the BBC presentation department. Delightfully, somebody has uploaded this segment to YouTube. And at 5:49 into the video, we get to spend a bit of time in NC1, where BBC1 network originates. Warwick Cross is your network director, and the man in charge.

I find watching that video an incredibly weird experience. Because sitting in Warwick’s chair is where I find myself, 40 years later. Some of the job is different these days, and I could write a book about exactly what. But that’s all for another day. Instead, I want to draw your attention to the following.

The hunch forward. The hum to the theme tune. The tiniest hint of world-weariness. None of that is changed, 40 years on. I do all of them. The genetic memory of how to be a network director lives on.

And as for what I might be transmitting on any given day? Who knows. Maybe football on BBC1. Or an old film on BBC2.

Some things never change, 40 years later.

  1. With thanks to Mark Simpson for the screengrab. This particular edition was broadcast on the 4th February 1989. ↩

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Having a Breakdown

Published 5th December 2020

TV Presentation

I’m sitting in the control room of one of the most important television channels in the country, and something is about to go very wrong.

The next programme is live, you see. And live programmes take a fair amount of setting up. I need to know what lines the programme is going to come in on, so I can cut to the right source. I need to know which talkback circuit the production uses, so I can talk to them. Then I need to call the PA, and go through all the necessary details: what time they’re on air, what time they’re off air, who is presenting, how the programme starts, how the programme ends, do a clock check… all the usual stuff. This can all take a fair bit of time. For safety, I really should have contact with the production at least 20 minutes before air, and preferably longer than that.

But I’ve forgotten about it. Just too busy chatting to my announcer. And suddenly, it’s three minutes to go on the current programme, and I realise: I have done nothing.

I frantically jab at the talkback panel in front of me, in a desperate attempt to contact an engineer to get the lines. A voice barks out in reply. But for some reason, I can’t understand what they’re saying. The English language is suddenly a mystery to me. I turn to the routing panel next to me. Maybe I can guess the lines, get the talkback up, save the situation. I do a bit more frantic jabbing.

The panel crashes.

The world clouds around me. The countdown on the monitor wall in front of me ticks down, faster and faster. I’m running out of time, I can’t rescue this, I’m going to fall off air, purely because of my own stupidity. How did I lose track of time so badly? My entire life has collapsed.

And then, of course, I wake up.

*   *   *

The above has never, ever actually happened to me. Forgetting to talk to a live production isn’t really the kind of error you can easily make in transmission. But it’s a recurring nightmare of mine. I’ve lost count of the times that I’ve had it.

And it’s not just me. Practically anybody who works in live TV has their own version of this nightmare. Thousands of brains across the country, betraying their owners. As though the job wasn’t stressful enough.

Bastards.

Five Nice Things

Published 3rd November 2020

Internet / Meta / TV Comedy / TV Presentation

I’ve had it up to here with Twitter. This is not an in-depth article about the perils of social media. It’s just a simple statement of fact. I’ve had it up to here with Twitter.

I could list the many reasons why I’m bored with it right now. People coming into your mentions and explaining your own jokes back to you is a big one. People piping up with the ludicrously obvious take, when you’ve tried your hardest to tweet something more interesting, is another.1 The constant stream of unpleasant news is a third. I know the world’s going to shit, I am literally paid to put news bulletins on air, and monitor them closely. I don’t need to be told all this stuff in my free time as well. It’s just too much to cope with.

Then there’s the thing which pushed me entirely over the edge yesterday: making a crap joke about “nations and regions” in terms of television playout, only for someone who doesn’t even follow me to pipe up with some nebulous political point against me. And when I tried to politely explain I’m talking about something technical rather than anything wider, they block me. I got enough of this kind of aggressive, bad faith shit in the playground when I was 12. Right now, I don’t feel like willingly putting myself through it as an adult. I am bored of other people making their neuroses my business.

So for now, I’m deactivated.

Of course, it won’t last. I’ve not stormed off for good. Lots of people who I really like talking to, I only actually know on Twitter. And speaking entirely selfishly, Twitter is where I get the vast majority of hits for Dirty Feed from.2 At some point I’ll be back, like a dog eating its own fetid puke. But the longer I can take a break from it, the better for my mental health. So if you wondered where I’d got to, there’s your answer. I’m just trying to do something more useful for a bit.

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  1. If you worry you’ve done that to me… you probably haven’t. The people who come up with these obvious takes are entirely oblivious. ↩

  2. This article will be read by virtually nobody. That’s fine. You’re special. ↩