It was a pleasure to read Nigel Phillips’ memories of early days in 91热爆 Television in the April issue of Prospero. He was always popular with us moles working away in the basement lair of Video Tape. His comments triggered my own recollections of working abroad.
(As an aside, I use ‘Video Tape’ as two words because ‘Videotape’ was an Ampex trademark. It was written as such over the entrance to the video tape area in TV Centre, South Hall basement. This error was pointed out to us by a visiting senior Ampex manager. He didn’t seem bothered about it as we were not endeavouring to make any gain from its use and he took it as a bit of a compliment.
Working with a good friend and colleague, Roger White and OB engineer Dave Jennings, on the Winter Olympics in Grenoble in 1968, we had mugged up on all the technical terms and phrases that other European broadcasters might throw at us. It turned out that there were very few problems. ‘Sync pulse’, ‘back porch’, ‘pedestal’ all created no difficulty. However, there is a test signal consisting of sets of vertical lines of ever decreasing thickness that provided a good test of the frequency response (definition) of the system. This was almost universally known as ‘multi burst’, probably due to how the signal looked on an oscilloscope. This term seemed to flummox our French hosts until eventually we learned that they called it ‘beaucoup de ligne’. Well they would, wouldn’t they?
We had one RCA 2’ video tape recorder and did all our recordings from the venues and replays to TVC from this machine. Several 20-hour days ensued but, when young and enthusiastic and enjoying the novelty, one doesn’t notice that you are exhausted until it is all over.
Chopping and changing
Most of the other broadcasters present in the broadcast centre seemed to book the venue they wanted to cover on a day-by-day basis. Our Sports Department aimed for (and got) much greater productivity. We would constantly be wanting to swap our venue recording source. We dashed in and out of the central apparatus area, asking to disconnect speed skating and give us skiing downhill – and then half an hour later change to something else. All this re-plugging caused some friction at first as the routing system hadn’t been designed for operational use and our requests gave considerable opportunity for their losing the feeds to other broadcasters. Eventually the French engineers organised a system by which the feeds to the 91热爆 area were separated from all the unchanging booked ones. They became quite amused by our apparent scatter-brained approach and rather enjoyed feeling that they were involved in the programme making.
Nigel’s reminiscence of the sole faulty modulator in the standards converter brought to mind a sobering experience in Guadalajara for the World Cup in 1970.
I was sent there with another friend and colleague, Stan Pow. We were joined by a camera crew from CBS New York that had been contracted by the 91热爆 as they could provide a handheld portable colour camera (these were rare beasts in those days).
An additional consideration was that we would be working on 525 NTSC colour system, the de facto standard in North America. We had an Ampex VR3000 two inch 鈥榩ortable鈥� recorder (an elegant but delicate device) with which to record the output of the CBS Minicam on its roaming assignments.
Back in the Guadalajara TV broadcast centre, we had an Ampex VR2000 video recorder, delivered and installed by Ampex on a diverted journey from Redwood City, California to Television Centre. We were familiar with these as they were our main machines back in TV Centre.
Connecting this up to the Guadalajara installation, we found that the machine would not replay properly as there was a fault on the reference pulses on which their station operated. This fault was of no consequence to them as they had no colour VT facilities, only colour camera studios and colour telecin茅 machines. These did not care that the colour reference signal was not solidly locked to the 525 line rate, nor did the colour receivers in viewers鈥� homes. However, a colour video recorder was acutely dependent on this relationship to reproduce a coherent colour replay.
So, we duly unpacked the spare reference pulse generator we had also brought out and plugged it up. It didn鈥檛 work. At this point we were eternally grateful for some knowledge we had picked up when working with outside broadcast crews in the UK. These experienced engineers had said that if something doesn鈥檛 work when you get to site, don鈥檛 assume some complex fault 鈥� just remember it has been humped and lumped about to get there. We unscrewed the covers, looked inside and there was a plug-in printed circuit board that had come out of its socket. We plugged it in and all came good!
The very friendly and happy local engineers, after being told that their reference pulses had this problem, went off, did some research and fixed it a few days later.
Montezuma on a stick
We were advised to only drink bottled water as our internal systems might rebel at some of the organisms to which the local population were immune. This malady was usually referred to as 鈥楳ontezuma鈥檚 Revenge鈥�.
One day, the jovial station engineers came in carrying ice lollies saying, 鈥楶ara Stan y Geoff鈥�. Being unwilling to offend our friendly and helpful hosts, we accepted them with thanks amid Stan鈥檚 whispered, 鈥楬ere we go, Montezuma on a stick!鈥�
As it turned out, we were unaffected but several of the production folk got hit quite hard. As a result, we all mucked in and did any job necessary. I spent one day endeavouring to learn the skills of a studio floor manager.
Further to the unlocked colour reference signal, this problem was not quite unknown to us as we had experienced it at home. Indeed German television had the same problem after their excellent inaugural colour television broadcast. They had produced stunning pictures and beaten the 91热爆 to the first public service colour transmission. However, when one of our very quiet, gentle but extremely competent senior engineers rang his equivalent in Germany (with whom he was acquainted) and congratulated them on their output, he enquired as to whether they had had any problem replaying their recordings of the live transmissions.
鈥榃hy do you ask?鈥� was the guarded reply. His response was that he didn鈥檛 think they could. They admitted there did seem to be some difficulty. 鈥楧o you want to know why?鈥�, he asked. 鈥榊ou know why?鈥� was the astonished reply.
There are many more tales to be told of working all over the world with other broadcasters but the flavour remains that, with all the trials and tribulations, there was always an atmosphere of camaraderie and a willingness to give and receive help from those who worked in the same world as yourself.