Children's BBC Broom Cupboard

Have just contacted one of the announcers of that era, who says: "This happened many times. When Kids were in the broom cupboard there was a dual switch that fed the on air clock and the camera - called Clock/Camera and of course in those days we cut our own slide/clocks/sym to air and so when you took over from Kids at 1730 one of the checks was to make sure they'd put the camera back to clock....the camera was always on, it was just up to the anno to make sure it wasn't going to come up on the desk."

I remember seeing it happen a few times when I was a kid - it was quite scary!

fight! fight! fight!

I think it was named after Pat Hubbard, the head of Promotions.



Excellent! Have you done anything with them? (apart from emptying out all the fag ash and hair?!)

He's lost the NC1 one, apparently

http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/knackers/behind.html

A quick question for those in the know about the broomcupboard - was the preview monitor to the side of the presenter part of the set or did it serve a purpose?

I remeber Andi Peters talking about it missing once but it was later replaced with two screens before the old one returned.

In later days before it died, They had a portable sized TV during Toby Antis' reign

It was rigged specially for the in-vision sequence and then put away again. All the announcer's normal monitors were in the stack facing them.

Dan, thanks for that. Never saw it or heard it mentioned before, which is surprising given that it would have been a major on air error.

Broom Cupboard site is now back.

I may be wrong on this, but did 'Broom Cupboard'/OOV presentation ever fail itself , because every time any programme went down, you could always get the 'Broom Cupboard' / OOV output to air?

I remember when Phil was doing 'Take Two', it was the last show of the series, & he actually did 'Broom Cupboard' at the same time!

I remember him saying something along the lines of 'Well I hope we don't have a breakdown, while we do Take Two, because I'll have to rush back to the Broom Cupboard, do the anno, then when it's fixed, rush back to the studio!'

Also ISTR a sequence of him walking from Broom Cupboard to Take Two studio. (I'm guessing it was one of Pres A or Pres B, because he didn't walk far!)

Anyway moving on from the booth itself...., I'm sure we all remember Ratz - the 'virtual reality' cat during Toby Anstis's reign. Introduced the first Live and Kicking. Terrible replacement for Edd the Duck! Didn't last long if I remember, then (after the Broom Cupboard) we were treated to years of that stupid Aardvark!

Always a shame they didn't do a "meet the announcer" feature, but at the time I didn't realise the significance of the Broom Cupboard. Tommy Boyd, by contrast, would regularly interact with "Mr Voice" Paul Veysey (?) on CITV.

Thinking back, any idea who the annos were you saw in vision? What did they look like?

A joke from the Gopherman there.
Take Two was pre-recorded. Right at the end of the first couple of series, they used to show a montage of Phil messing up his links - some took 6 or 7 takes to do.