IBA Engineering Announcements

Occasionally something reminds me of the old IBA Engineering Announcements programme which used to appear once a week (Tuesday's was it?) after TVam and before the regional contractor took over button three on the telly. These were strangely fascinating, slightly scary (in that they appeared to be something I shouldn't be watching) and always nerdy. Looking back on them now they are well made, deeply sincere and obviously from a very different era of broadcasting, where people seemed to be expected to pay attention, set up their television properly and woe betide if you fiddled with settings you didn't understand.

So, how were these transmitted to the network? Did the IBA at Winchester have a transmission facility, which became the origination of the ITV network for its once weekly transmission, did TVam transmit it (given that the post office had all the transmitters networked from them at the time) or did the IBA send their programme to each region and expect them to transmit it for them?

The announcement before the video always went, "And now, from the IBA at WInchester, Enginerring Announcements for the Radio & Television trade".

I think the IBA had a transmission facility at Winchester, that linked in originally to the ITV Network, and later to Channel 4.

It was certainly played out from Crawley Court, but quite how it got around the country may have changed over time.

Originally, it formed part of the trade test sequences which were originated at each main transmitter, so it's very likely it would have been fed straight to the transmitter rather than going through the regional contractor's MCR.

In its later days, it fitted into the switching break between TV-AM and the regional contractor coming on air, so it's likely that again the TX sites had a feed from the IBA (possibly via the Channel 4 circuit as it was on both channels, although the 405 line sites were still on air at this time) and switched to that while the main feed was being reconfigured by BT.

I have heard claims of a regional continuity announcer popping up to apologise for the loss of sound, which implies that it was going through the regional contractor, but then we have heard from Tony Currie that Black Hill had announcements he recorded available on cart (for the ILR promo after closedown) so it's not inconceivable that the TX sites had standby generic apology announcements too.

Incidentally, this document sometimes comes up when talking about Crawley Court and Engineering Announcements:

http://tx.mb21.co.uk/features/ibadigitallink/iba-digital-link.gif

I've seen pople cite that as showing that Engineering Announcements got on air via an SHF link into Crabwood Farm and then into Chillerton Down on a routine basis. I take a slightly different interpretation based on the final paragraph, that they sent one programme to Chillerton and back on the new digital link simply to prove it could be done, then fed the returning signal into the distribution in the conventional way.

By the way - Transdiffusion have recently uploaded a sound recording of the first Engineering Announcements under the auspices of the IBA, following the ITA's transformation

https://soundcloud.com/transdiffusion/first-ever-iba-engineering-announcements-monday-12-june-1972

If it was played from Crawley Court then 'transmission facility' is probably pushing it a bit, all they'd have needed was a VT machine and a line, by some route, to the (BT) Tower. There's no reason it couldn't have been driven up the M3 and played from Thames or C4 if need be (provided it was on the correct format)


The production facilities at Winchester were probably basic too, from clips on YouTube it seems they only had a video camera near the end. It's basically a 1980's PowerPoint presentation

They were almost always LIVE with up to date info, I remember watching and references were sometimes made in Winter to previous night storm outages and unscheduled maintenance due later that morning. Seems an eternity ago, long before the internet. The BBC's comparative multiple daily announcements were often referred to to get much more up-to-date info out too.

Another anomaly in the early 1970's was the on-air distribution of new networked commercials at 0830 on Monday mornings. Ostensibly for the advertising industry to see what was being debuted, but off air recording for rescheduled network programmes was frequent especially by the smaller ITA contractors.

I thought the idea of Monday's Newcomers being used for distributing adverts was pretty much debunked? It was purely for the benefit of the advertising industry.

There was, however, a weekly over the air playout of ads to Channel from whichever of the South/SouthWest stations they took their dirty network feeds from at the time, complete with leaders/clocks.

Having actually witnessed the production of the IBA Engineering Announcements, can I make a couple of observations? Firstly, the facilities at Crawley Court were superb. The IBA required manufacturers to supply equipment to them for evaluation before they could approve its use in contractors' studios so they had a fully working playout centre with VT, mixing desk, grams, carts, audio tape, caption generators, telecine, slide scanners and everything else necessary. The programme was made live, although all the pictures had been set up and pre-recorded the day before. There were usually a lot of graphics, especially TX Service Area Maps, because the IBA wanted to prove themselves better than the BBC whose SERVICE INFORMATION bulletins were always very static affairs, using slides and a colourizer. Besides, the IBA suffered dreadfully from envy - the BBC made programmes and the IBA didn't; so their one effort at making telly had massive resources thrown at it!! A copy of Test Card F (with the simple ident IBA in the ident panel) was sent down the line but to where I am no longer very sure. For the tiny handful of IBA staff who made the programme it was the highlight of their week. Sometimes the presenter Peter Ashforth would interview Pat Hawker, and these were recorded on audio tape and when transmitted they put up 35mm static slides of the two men together. I still have these slides. I was given the Revoxs and vision mixer when they were no longer needed and only slung them out a couple of years ago.

Monday's Newcomers was, however, NEVER used to play out commercials to the contractors. Never.

Mr Currie, thank you as always, your description of this has answered my questions and I am delighted to hear Crawley Court had as full an MCR as I like to think it deserved. I can well imagine the staff looking forward to their opportunity to make a networked programme. Good on them. Would Crawley Court MCR ever have come into use as an emergency playout facility for a contractor in some state of emergency? An early form of what we now call Disaster Recovery?

Some recollections here about it having a role in providing a caption for those transmitter sites which could not originate their own during the 1979 strike
http://tvforum.uk/forums/post634594#post-634594

Crawley Court is still in operation, not only is it the HQ of Arqiva it has quite a dish farm out the back: http://www.satmagazine.com/cgi-bin/display_image.cgi?2104100613

A small update there if I may Tony, whilst I'm sure the IBA made sure they were well equipped for the programmes they made there was no requirement for equipment manufacturers to send kit to the IBA for evaluation other than for their own edification. The IBA published a technical specification which major equipment items, individually and in a programme chain, had to comply with and it was the responsibility of the individual ITV contractors to ensure that it did in their premises. A lot of the contractors used the ITCA specifications which were generally 'tighter' than the IBA's.

As I'm sure you know the IBA would visit the contractors premises on a routine basis to ensure a random selection of kit and programme paths met their specs.

Also while they may have had excellent kit eventually, in the last edition Pat Hawker (I think) reminisces about the Heath Robinson nature of early editions, with borrowed equipment.