September 22 2010
Roger Harvey (RDH) RIP
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August 11th 2010
Grahame (Henry) Gibson RIP
December 4th 2009
You may notice a change in the appearance of the Visitor’s Counter on the main page/s. Mid afternoon today I had just finished uploading the pictures from yesterdays excellent Christmas Lunch at Surbiton, when I noticed that instead of the counter there was an error message. Further investigation that two counters had in fact died – both old cgi scripts. In the end I just replaced them, but we’ve lost the official visitor count, which was in the mid 66,000s. I have guessed at 66500 for the restart!!!
October 16th 2009
The latest addition is a Scroll of Honour collected by Denis Wyatt following the great leaving in June 2009. I’ve also added emails to the Contacts where provided. It would be nice to see some of the newly enrolled “Oldboys” (or girls) at one of the Lunches throughout the year. Our next is at Guildford on November 5th so that might be the ideal opportunity to come along and meet a lot of old friends.
June 24th 2009
I’ve just added Bob Abraham’s Obituary to the website. A sad item to read, as are all obituaries, but it does bring back memories of the Moscow Olympics in 1980. The security was very tight – VT had a mini rebellion over cameras (film) being x-rayed every time we entered or left a building, but Bob spent the entire games with a photograph of a gorilla on his Olympic ID. The VT movie, “Carry on Cosmos” captured the moment when Bob gives the IOC President, Lord Killanin, with a BBC pin (left).
And, although the material has a chequered history, Ikegami > VPR20 > VPR2 > VHS > DVD you can just about see the gorilla in the circled area of the second picture on the right.!
May 3rd 2009
VERA lives!! I’ve just received this from Tony Carter.
Hi Chris – you might remember that some months ago I emailed you to tell you that the name of VERA lives on at BBC Westminster. I took a couple of pictures of it last night for you to see and although it’s not terribly spectacular, it is at least good to know that it’s always referred to as VERA and appears as such on the touchscreen routing panels.
Basically, it constantly records a special feed of News 24 (now called News Channel) at Westminster. It’s recording the TVC studio output with Astons but minus the embedded onscreen clock, so that if News Channel ever have to do an emergency evacuation, the last hour of the News Channel is available to maintain channel output.
There are two recorders, one in Millbank TX and the other in the Millbank Record Bank, hence TX VERA and RB VERA on the router buttons.
The machines themselves are both Packard Bell EHR 2080 Hard Drive recorders, and incredibly, even though they record 24/7 with the hard drive thrashing away constantly, they just seem to keep going!
No men in white coats painstakingly adjusting things on VERA 2009 alas, it just sits there unattended year in year out, but on the couple of occasions it has been used in anger, it did keep News 24 running until they could recover!
March 21st 2009
While doing a regular check of the Links page recently, I noticed that the Museum of Editing, Jack Calaway’s site, had disappeared. This was a fascinating site describing some of the ‘devices’ that were used in the early days of editing. As well as Datatron, CMX and Convergence (the ECS103 -“beep … VTRs not in sync” – unforgettable if you experienced it!) there is a fascinating page on the editing of “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-in”. Thanks once more to the Internet Wayback Machine I have recovered 99% of it and restored the item on the Links page. Sadly Jack died eighteen months or so ago, and I have been trying to contact names of collaborators mentioned on the site, but to no avail. So, as a tribute to Jack Calaway who many of you may well have met, it is restored to its original state.
January 9th 2009
A belated Happy New Year to everyone! Regular readers will recall the discovery of the majority of the lost Direct TV from Alexandra Palace website in the Internet Archive in September last year (September 9th’s entry is the start of the tale). Subsequently I managed to fill in some of the missing pieces (December 14th entry) and thought that was the best I could do.
Just before Christmas I received a letter from Arthur and, after contacting him, received a CD-ROM with the last complete vesion of the whole site. This has now been uploaded with its original format and navigation, so go and explore!
December 24th 2008
First of all, to all those of you of a ‘certain’ age…… MERRY CHRISTMAS VT! and, to everyone who doesn’t know the phrase, Happy Christmas and the very best for 2009! The picture opposite is from the “Blue Peter Book of Television”. It is part of a photograph of the Blue Peter presenters queuing for a cuppa in the Tea Bar outside TC3 (Red?). However, the face in the back of the queue is also very familiar – it’s Doug (Parsons). Quite a surprise and rather nice to have a shot of him – even if it is a bit grainy. The only other picture of him is a blurred frame in Alan Edgington’s 8mm filmof the area.
December 14th 2008
Thanks to Patrick Collins and Nigel Finnis, I think I should be able to fill in the missing bits of Arthur Dungate’s AP website that was salvaged in September. Also I hope to add more Lime Grove pictures in the new year.