BBC1 Pres Nostalgia | The Noddy Room

Fascinating short film. The sights and sounds of some of our childhoods. And a few familiar voices.




And, meanwhile, in 1984 when BBC1 was on strike, the news was moved to BBC2, albeit in brief format. Does anyone know what BBC1 actually aired during the 84 strike? Test card for 24 hours? Or some music perhaps?

I think it was just a simple white on blue caption with music.

They might key'd in photographs as back drops, (like they did in December 1978)?
The IBA made white text on a blue background iconic for apology captions😎

Yes, I remember seeing an apology caption along the lines of “there is an industrial dispute” with a colour photo/slide as a background. The text was in a similar “teletext-style” font to the IBA’s crash captions. How would this text have been generated , ie what equipment would have been used?

In both cases internal 'home brew' equipment. The BBC's character generator was called Anchor I think. Mr Technologist of this parish can give chapter and verse. The IBA had similar equipment at the transmitters that had a number of preset captions that could be punched up by remote control.

Both organisations had a department that built kit that wasn't available on the commercial broadcast market, and as privatisation and outsourcing became a thing, the staff from these formed quite a few little companies that carried on into the 00s producing kit for a worldwide market

https://www.bbceng.info/additions/2016/anchor-1972.pdf

And a longer article on ANCHOR
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/archive/pdffiles/engineering/bbc_engineering_84.pdf
And update on clock .....
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/archive/pdffiles/engineering/bbc_engineering_87.pdf
Thus has the story of Pebble Mill ...

The mid 70s was a time when some very clever people left the BBC and Thames/ABC etc to
Design an build the equipment fur a larger industry ...companies like Avitel for video DAs ,
Drake for audio and then comms systems like Trilogy who also did PAL coders.
As did Cox ..( who also believed in SECAM) who made mixers ..
and Probel who were set up to make mixers but started making matrices/routers ...
as well as DAs and of course Snell & Wilcox with all sorts of clever video processing ,
And Quantel and Questech with DVE and more ...
all with extensive overseas sales .....
and of course Sony Broadcast was set up in Basingstoke ...
some did not make the transition to full digits .. like BBC equipment department
but other like Crystal Vision arrived ....
And had great success in the USA with SDI DAs etc and now into ST2110 ..
And Characters like MC Patel are still going strong with Emotion.

Nowadays in the IP / files world we still have industry leaders like
Bruce Devlin,Andy Rayner Simon Gauntlett, Andy Quested
And the operations engineers like Andy Beale, Chris Johns etc ...

I meant to also state above that the BBC played some old favourites over their “industrial dispute” apology caption in 1984. In fact, a copy of Bart that I still have on a dusty C90 cassette was recorded that day.