Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

All hail the TV nostalgia web

As a child of the 1970s and 1980s (but mostly of the 1980s) I have a lot of fuzzy memories of what used to be on television in those days gone by when - pay attention now, children - the television had a mechanical tuner with four buttons labelled BBC1, BBC2, ITV and - most enigmatically of all - *. What did that star mean, I thought? Tuning to it only got a snowstorm, and as the snowstorm was only marginally less frightening to me as a toddler than the 'oooooooo' of the 1kHz tone with which the BBC often accompanied their testcards I didn't bother doing it more than once. The telly was, of course, rented from Radio Rentals and when it broke down - pay attention again, children - we'd get a man round to fix it rather than just throwing it out and buying a bigger one, which is what people mostly seem to do now. While the television, Radio Rentals (which merged with Granada and is now Boxclever) and the "Baird" brand which it carried (an overly grandiose use of the name of the Father Of Television marking what I think was a rebadged Ferguson) are all now long gone, I still remember the programmes I watched on it. Often I watched them while sitting far too close to the screen in defiance of playground rumours claiming that "the radiation will melt your brain".

Of course, as the years went by the star became Channel 4 and the television was replaced with a new one that had Teletext. I'd become enamoured with Teletext after reading about it and had finally got to play with it on a visit to Pebble Mill with the local amateur radio club, although my experimentation was abruptly curtailed once one of the BBC staff present noticed I'd switched over to ITV's Teletext service. The new set also had a big chunky remote control - the first of many, and at the time a magical device. Nobody expected at the time that in 20 years every living room would have about a million of the things. I believe prevailing wisdom at the time was that by then we'd be using voice control for everything.

It should be embarrassingly clear from the above that I acquired a lasting interest in broadcasting, and particularly in the bits of broadcasting you don't normally see around that time - how studios worked, cameras, continuity, galleries, apology captions and the like. In my later years at primary school I was regularly 'borrowed' out of lessons by teachers needing assistance with the arcane rituals surrounding the School Video Recorder and the School Computer. In retrospect I should have started billing them after the first few times I'd sorted things out so Class 10 could watch Maths In A Box.

When a few years later we got a video recorder I was in heaven - at last I could record bits and pieces of what I thought was Important Television for posterity, and muck about with things like (oh, this is a tragic confession) my own home-made VT countdown clocks, generated with a BBC Micro. I also took to taping bits of radio continuity and have a cassette somewhere still with a quite ridiculous collection of odd material - station jingles, Radio 1 (by then it was BBC Radio 1FM) startups, news intros, chart countdowns and other pieces of historical radio ephemera. That same tape also has a few rareties - there can't be many off-air recordings of the US Armed Forces Network and BFBS from Saudi Arabia made during the runup to the first Gulf War, but the marvels of FM propagation in the warm Arabian air meant that I could record this stuff during a visit to my folks while they were living in the UAE.

After doing my A Levels I managed to persuade the BBC's Transmission group to sponsor me through university, which included six weeks of summer work in Warwick every year. This was, as can probably be guessed, enjoyable as hell - after acting as an observer of the BBC since the age of about 1 I was now working there! Okay, so Transmission wasn't too sexy or glamourous as it involved a lot of cold hilltops in Dartmoor and Scotland, but at least it meant that when visits to London were necessary I could stomp around the hallowed corridors of BH and Telly Centre without being thrown out by Security. In the way that students do I then went on to completely bollix this up by dropping out of my degree (I thought I was doing engineering, but it was more maths than it was soldering irons and coax). Happily, BBC Transmission at Warwick were hiring people to act as operators in the new Technical Operations Centre, and as I was eminently qualified for the job I ended up spending a couple of years working 24/7 shifts in a job I loved - monitoring transmitters with evocative names like Angus, Rumster Forest, Skriaig and (less evocatively) Sutton Coldfield and getting people to fix them when they went wrong.

The only problem was that there wasn't much hope of advancement, and with the looming privatisation of BBC Transmission by the Birtists (a betrayal of hundreds of staff unparalleled in the Corporation's history) it would become harder to advance into jobs in other parts of the BBC, so the Beeb and I parted company and I went to become a sysadmin somewhere else. That was the end of my association with the broadcasting industry.

But now, courtesy of the joys of the web, it's possible to relive all this again through some of the excellently well-resourced nostalgia websites out there. I'm in awe of some of the material they've got hold of (is there an old ITV company ident these guys don't have?) and grateful that people such as me aren't hallucinating when remembering seeing a weird programme called "Maths In A Box" at primary school that somehow involved a guy travelling around in a very small box with various children and learning about maths.

The choice for proper nostalgia is the excellent, splendid TV Cream, which has the atmosphere of a bunch of people sitting around in a pub going "Hey, you remember Rentaghost?" a lot. If you want the theme from Nationwide, they'll have it. If you want to risk an epileptic fit by watching the titles from Cheggers Plays Pop, look no further. Want to reminisce about the time Swap Shop came to your town? This is the place to look. Behind the playful retro-crazy exterior, though, they also editorialise in an informed manner about television then and now, and make some excellent points which TV controllers today would be wise not to ignore. And yes, the world is a far worse place for the loss of Johnny Ball and Derek Griffiths from our screens these many years.

For a more serious tone, and especially if your interests are in channel idents and corporate identities, then TV Ark is the place to go. They have (as TV Cream point out) an amazing amount of material including a number of things which can't have come from the recording-off-the-telly route. If you want the full version of the music to LWT's idents from a few years ago, or to see what the Associated Rediffusion startup sequence looked like in the early 1960s, or to be reminded of exactly how scary the Yorkshire Television ident was to small children in the late seventies (that scary V thing! That blaring baa-baba-ba-baaa!) then it's all here. The ATV trumpety thing that was on before Tiswas, the legendary Thames mirror thingy, and just about everything from The Other Side including a comprehensive collection of BBC2 '2' idents and all the BBC1 globes you can eat. I'll stop raving now before someone calls the police, shall I?

I'd never claim that living in the past is a good idea, but reminiscing about the old days of television is an enjoyable way to pass the time and it's great that the web is there for people to share those snippets of memory, audio and video which represent the rich past of the British television industry. Before everyone had a zillion channels available, and when A Television Camera was a solid, boxy and hyperexpensive piece of equipment rather than a small box with a lens on the front bigger than itself television was still something special with which to be involved.

I have fond childhood memories of the time I was allowed to briefly play with a BBC studio camera as part of a vision to Television Centre (having won a competition in the Blue Peter annual) while a worried-looking cameraman stood next to me saying "Don't pan up onto the lights!" and worrying for his camera's tubes. I've still got my Blue Peter Competition Winner badge somewhere, too.

Posted by mpk at April 25, 2004 5:45 PM | TrackBack