The Tales of Television Centre (BBC Four, this Thursday)

How do there get the paint back off? and wont it destroy the flooring?

Floor polisher, and I doubt it will leave too much wear and tear. Or they just paint over it?

Is it not the peel-able paint that the BBC developed that they used?

The reason they paint the floors is because the camera pedestals can travel over paint a lot better and smoother than carpet or a platform


It's water-based, it's just washed off.

The end of the video shows the paint coming off.

The more modern video shows some interesting features of TVC as it was back then - at the 2 minutes to on-air stage where you see the transmission light flashing that was a facility that the presentation area had, they could remotely flash the lights in studios to give them an extra stand-by warning. Apparently that worked not only for TVC but most main BBC studio centres. There was also similar interlocking of the phone system in pres so that if the director had a studio selected on one of the OS lines there was a one-press button to connect whatever studio that OS was connected to.

Interesting to see autocue/prompter in use on BP in the 90s, wasn't that introduced in slightly controversial circumstances because certain presenters turned out not to be able to learn scripts as well as they might?

And also interesting to see that the fader style of vision mixer was still in use in the TC1 gallery in 1974, I don't think that would have lasted there for much longer, they were replaced by the kind of mixer that was seen in the 90s clip, with banks of channels that you mix between rather than each channel having its own fader. Except in continuity where announcers found one fader per channel easier to handle in a self-op situation.

As I understand it Biddy Baxter didn't allow anyone to use Autocue, it was only after she left that it got introduced to the programme

Didn't the main block studios have proper drainage arrangements for getting rid of the washed off paint, whereas some of the later additions didn't? That's why TC7's floor is painted but N6 is some kind of vinyl or lino.

Thought Yvette Fielding was the one, I thought I read somewhere.

Strange actors had trouble remembering lines?

Most BP presenters were.

I've also heard of a studio floor paint referred to as Pebble Mill Peelable - is that a different solution developed for Studio-A at the Mill?

Haven't watched the TVC documentary yet, though I did watch the 1974 BP Special, which I much enjoyed. Although I was barely a few months old when that show went out originally, it was amazing how familiar that programme seemed - proof if anything that the style of the show did not change at all in the years leading up to when I started regularly watching it.

I think the quadrant fader vision mixers (a BBC design) lasted a lot longer than you might think (well into the 80s), and as someone has already pointed out, the ones in Con1 and Con2 were in use until 1995.

Yes very, and rather scary, because I do remember that edition !!

One thing that is noticeable is the entire 10 mins, and therefore the final 10 minutes of that programme was a pre record. Noakes and Purves throw to Lesley Judd from a set covered in cards and other clutter, seconds later the wide shot shows everything bare. Then later you spot the studio clock displaying 2:50.

I think the end credits might have been cut live, over the top of the VT playout, as the (rather miserable looking VM Shirley) doesn't appear to be cutting/mixing anything, and there are no captions visible on the monitor stack ?

Blue Peter's a CBBC programme, isn't it?

Just to be meta, I watched Tales from Television Centre in Television Centre. I had to leave at 10, and it was a bit odd walking through a nearly-deserted building - the only folk I saw on my way out were some cab drivers waiting in stage door reception. It wasn't too dissimilar to the closing sequence of the programme, really.

(The only thing on last night was 8 out of 10 Cats in TC8)

If only they still had Commissionaires. The security guards they employ now are a miserable bunch.


Apparently the older faders meant you could fade up multiple cameras at once - used to great effect by Top of the Pops.

Yeah Biddy gave in to autocue shortly before she left, and I think it was Yvette that prompted it (she was only 18!).

It was a bizarre expectation of the presenters to have to memories everything, particularly as some of the scripts were so clunky. That 1974 show sounds really awkward when Noakes says something like "it's Petra's 12th birthday, and I really do think she's looking great for such an old lady" - but when he's recalling it, it sounds so weird and stilted!