An incomplete history of London’s television studios | Hacker News Reader

An incomplete history of London’s television studios

tvstudiohistory.co.uk

30 pointstimthorn6 comments

I was lucky enough to see inside the BBC shepherds bush facility a few years before it closed. (It's still The BBC but its a shadow of its former self as I understand it.) Blue Peter was filming and you could see down into studios from above, through glass and the locations used for news and weather were unbelievably crude, bare breeze lock behind the greenscreens.

They also had very strong, armoured doors, certainly was quite well isolated from strangers with an urge to grab a microphone and were buried in the core of the building. I got the impression they had half an eye to "This is the BBC. At this very time, unstoppable nuclear rockets have been launched toward London.. "

Broadcasting house in central london was similarly odd, Spartan in places but more polished in others. The BCS headquarters were nearby and I think it's rather telling computing basically ate broadcasts lunch.

People get very cross about the sculpture. Eric Gill was a nasty sexual predator.

The Shepherd's Bush building was pure 60s. Like the GPO tower it defined the swinging London image for decades.

Vacuum tube TV cameras needed amazing amounts of light. The studios were boiling hot.

The occasional Blue Peter features where they showed the production process and visited the various backstage locations at TVC were always my favourites. I'm now a member of the RTS and get to attend various events about how particular programmes are made (most recently Eurovision) but they enabled my one and only trip to TVC on a session about virtual studios, back when they were new.

> They also had very strong, armoured doors, certainly was quite well isolated from strangers with an urge to grab a microphone and were buried in the core of the building. I got the impression they had half an eye to "This is the BBC. At this very time, unstoppable nuclear rockets have been launched toward London.. "

I think the BBC Studios of Last Resort are:

https://www.subbrit.org.uk/sites/bbc-wood-norton/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_Norton_Hall

PS: It’s not just that Gill was a predator, the sculpture itself features a child - it’s pretty much all kinds of wrong, but it’s built into the fabric of the building which is itself ‘listed’ (a preserved historical site).

Towards the end (~2004) television centre was looking pretty dilapidated. A friend and I managed to sneak into the production gallery — he played the role of tour guide and I was a visiting dignitary from a prominent equipment manufacturer — and we had a good look around the back of all the cable routing racks.

My goodness! Some component had been leaking an oil mist over everything for years and that had in turn picked up all the dust and hair etc that wafted in and out all day and night. It looked like a student kitchen cooker hood.

I don’t know why it was allowed to get so dirty. Perhaps there just wasn’t any capacity to have downtime on these cabling units to clean them, or maybe someone tried once and took BBC1 offline?

Interesting fact (or perhaps urban myth?) about Television Centre is that it was built in a circle so that the cable runs from each studio would have the same path length:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/medias.photodeck.com/b1226a66-e42d-1...

Amazing site. The fate of the South Bank studios makes me sad though.

> The entire building including the 24-storey Kent House and all the studios were to be demolished, to be replaced with a 31-storey tower containing mostly luxury apartments and a token amount of ‘affordable’ housing.

A pretty damning indictment of the BBC management and their handling of television centre. It seems short term thinking has taken over everywhere.

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