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Member LoginButch Calderwood ACS
An excerpt from the book Same Shit Different Day by Robin Campbell-Huff about Butch Calderwood's start in television. The setting is London, 1954 and they refers to the British Broadcasting Corporation
1954: They put me in Television Engineering.
Lime Grove Studios, LGS in BBC talk was very unstudio like. 3 studios on the first floor and 2 on the fourth floor, a residential street at the front with an indoor swimming pool & a little coffee shop of sorts that we called Fagin's opposite & a busy railway line behind. And it was in Shepherds Bush, West London. To this day I believe that BBC chose premises for their names - White City, Palace of Arts, The Langham, Pebble Mill, Alexandra Palace - the list goes on.
Television had begun again in 1946 after the war. The BBC Television Service had started in 1936 and stopped when war was declared in September 1939. Television sets were well over two hundred pounds, a lot of money in those days. We worked between Lime Grove Studios and Alexandra Palace, built as an exhibition palace in 1872 when Victoriana was at its worst best. It was the site of the first electronic television station broadcasting regular programming There was also a busy car auction operation in one area of the Palace & a skating rink in yet another. The BBC had closed up shop at Alexandra Palace, aka Ally Pally, on the first day of the war because the Germans would have picked up the tower signal locating London perfectly. Instead, the tower beamed back the German's own signal, which confused them no end.
The pre-war equipment had valves as big as wine bottles and in the basement rolls of fabric, wigs and costumes still lay about where they had been left in 1939. I was the new boy and proud as Punch as I invited Susan-Janet on a tour of Ally Pally. Five or six times I invited her, but she never showed up.
The equipment was the Marconi-EMI 405 fine system which had been installed in 1936 and having a rebirth for the television news bulletin. Ally Pally was the whole set-up; transmitters on the ground floor, 2 studios and Central Control Room on the first, aerials on the roof. Telecine, telerecording and all the other sections fitted in where they could.
The Marconi-EMI gear was based on the Standard Emitron camera which had a four valve amplifier & an optical viewfinder linked to the taking lens; this meant that the view finder showed a colour image, upside down & reversed. A little tricky when panning. There were 4 cameras in the studio but the control room only had three monitors. One for ‘off air’ then preview 1 & preview 2. The camera arrangement was such that the picture was in a 'keystone' format. In the control room all the gear was rack mounted; ie. along a wall. The waveform (love that expression) of each picture was distorted & an operator had to work on it - tilting & bending it was called. The operator tilted and bent each waveform until they were level & the picture looked right. This man worked on Preview 1 and the next man, who sat on a higher chair so he could see over the head of the first tilter & bender worked on Preview 2. Enter the Boy from Oz! I had the easy job - I sat on an even higher chair to see over the 2 heads had only one knob to play with. I adjusted the level 5% above black level on the picture going to air. I seem to remember that I did this by guesswork. It was called 'lift' & I was the lift operator.
The programme control area was in a gallery built above this control room & accessed by a steep ladder. Some of the equipment in this gallery had an exotic name - the Programme Fading Apparatus. For full details I suggest you read The Marconi-EMI Technical Manual, M.E.M.I System of Television, London Television Station, Item 12.0. JUNE 1939. I have that manual on my bookshelf.
The control room was lined with copper sheeting to cut down interference from the transmitters on the floor below & one of my jobs was to polish the copper strips on the doors to ensure a perfect seal.
One evening I helped set up a 5,000 watt lamp on the balcony lighting the public park below. It was an ant’s nest, people doing things in the bushes that I couldn't think about if I walked past the girl's dormitory.
'This may have been amusing from the Palace's point of view, but not so amusing from the Park's point of view,' my memo read next morning. Chastisement was so very cool and so very British.
In 1955, I left Television Engineering and became the film department first trainee.
from Australian Cinematographer - Issue 7 - December 1999