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Cheeseford Virtual Archive TV Advent Calendar day 15 Welcome to transmission control at Cheeseford Towers. 'scuse the mess. On the right is my trusty late-model GPO 746 (so late it says BT on the bottom), and on the left is my daughter's favourite toy. It's the one in the middle that concerns us. It comes from Kent House (aka the London Weekend building on the South Bank of the Thames) and was part of the communications network between transmission controllers at the various regional ITV stations. Now, with all of ITV played out from two sites (Chiswick and Leeds), the network is redundant, and these glorious red batphones were skipped, apart from those salvaged by staff, one of whom sent me this example. I have considered plugging it in and telling "that cow in Network 1 to shut up", but what if it works? And yes, I know it's BBC, but who cares. Not sure what I'm on about? Show, don't tell.

Posted by Louis Barfe at 12:45 pm Ian Wegg said...

That's great. He definitely says "cue the roll" the second time!

I don't imagine that sort of talkback happens today. I watched this year's Royal Variety Performance and the whole thing seemed to be entirely automatic. Motorised cameras panning and flying with no reference to what was going on below. It was like watching a set of CCTV cameras in a shopping mall.

24 December 2010 at 17:03 These are my people
