Regional Pres Desks

The phone number is for an auctioneers: Henry Butchers, so presumably they either bought them from or were about to sell the equipment using them (they could just be old stickers of course the age of the phone number might not be relevant). The equipment those stickers are on are are camera controllers (hence the 'shutter speed' etc) so not ARCs, what 'Widescreen write down equipment is I have no idea.

Presumably it's write down in the financial sense - ie the technology's become obsolete, and the decision has been made to dispose of the equipment at less than its true worth. Are the RCPs perhaps for 4:3 cameras which were soon to be replaced by widescreen models?

Well assuming it's a set of panels from the regional news studio (and going by the network recall equipment it looks like it) then they wouldn't have been replaced for widescreen at Pebble Mill.

Maybe they were 4:3 units that the BBC bought from auction after being 'written down' from somewhere else

I am assuming its not a BBC Micro computer in this photo:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/51154315@N04/5869558197/in/photostream/ If not what is it?
If so what was it used for?

It certainly looks like a BBC Micro. Could that have been the computer that updated Ceefax? I seem to remember hearing that old BBC computers were used to update Ceefax for quite a long time after they stopped being made. Of course I could be mistaken

Yep - it's a BBC Micro, and that looks very much like an edit suite with a Sony edit controller and a Grass Valley 100 or 110 vision mixer.

BBC Micros were commonly used in BBC regional news edit suites to generate VT Clocks for the beginning of each item, with the item name, reporter name etc. and a countdown from 30, 15 or 10 to 3 or 0 for the beginning of each edited item.

Like the old "***MIDLANDS TODAY CUT STORY***" card that preceded most reports before The Mailbox?

Seen here:
http://ppfiles.meldrum.co.uk/files/215EMIDLANDSTODAY.jpg

Saying that, that particular example was from the SNG and may not have been a Micro...

Yep. That's a BBC Micro generated clock. You can see the Mode 7 graphics, which were the same as 80s Teletext as the BBC Micro used a teletext video generator chip for that mode (so it could do Teletext/Videotext aka CEEFAX/ORACLE and Prestel stuff)

If you look at the clock details, they're all generic rather than story specific, so the clock would have been on tape at the SNG and bolted onto every SNG story cut there. (Blank date fields, and rather than saying "Murder verdict" or "Country show roundup" in the title it says something generic)

Thanks for that, I did some stuff in high school for a parents evening on the BBC, Love it as a computer. - it was in Mode 7 and was a parent information thingie (technical term) for the school open day.
All writen in basic and had maps etc. took ages to write and was full of goto comands (the limit of my programming skills even now)

10 PRINT "Hello David";
20 GOTO 10

RUN

Why am I reminded of Look Around You?

That was the best bit of Saturday mornings down the local Boots in the computer section, back in the 80's!