BBC North West 7pm junction first rehearsal, Studio N, Manchester - 1981

Here's a clip of the first rehearsal for a 7pm junction into BBC1 from BBC North West, Manchester, on 1st May 1981. On the night of the week when there was a thirty minute regional opt-out programme, and when Nationwide ended its transmission for that evening, just before 7pm, the regions used to transmit a junction, giving details of that particular night's programmes and the local opt-out for their area, tonight's being Home Ground. The rehearsal is being squeezed inbetween the end of Look North West and an item live into Nationwide, about worms. It's rather fraught as the Production Assistant is missing from the gallery and time is tight. You'll hear the Nationwide director Nigel, who's in Studio E, Lime Grove, London, ask for the feed from Leeds, which is coming through the local desk. The guy giving the information on the order of the sources and where VT is etc., is the TM (Technical Manager for the studio) Ron Lathom who wouldn't normally do this, but it seems that the young female director Jackie has been thrown in at the deep end..... During the rehearsal we hear a countdown into VT and see a trailer that was pre-recorded in Studio A for the Home Ground regional opt-out programme with Brian Redhead - a great, interesting guy and very friendly with all staff. Both Studio A and VT are some two miles away in New Broadcasting House (Studio N being in Broadcasting House, Piccadilly, Manchester), and the video and audio are sent between the two. At this point in time of the BBC, presenters didn't wear earpieces, so couldn't hear the Production Assistant's countdowns and cues and it was the FM (Floor Manager) who would cue the presenters by hand signals, as well as informing them of any changes. A couple of times you'll see the hand of Gerry Clarke the FM come into shot as he counts down and cues John Mundy the presenter - it was OK to see this in a rehearsal but obviously not on transmission. Then after the rehearsal you'll see cameras and the director getting ready for the worms item into Nationwide. However, in between the two the BBC world can be seen. This was located in a cupboard on the 4th floor of BH. The globe itself was about four inches high and had a monochrome camera pointing at it. The output was then colourised through a piece of equipment to produce the blue and yellow. However, the globe was made of plastic and the paint used for the oceans didn't stick very well. It was quite often that some of the paint flaked away to produce a new island mid-Atlantic/Pacific/Indian Ocean. So there was a regular painting session to fill in the flaked paint.... In this clip, my portable JVC VHS recorder has been connected to a wall point and the output of the selectable Vision Engineer's panel fed to it. So the engineer can select any source he likes and you'll not necessarily be seeing 'programme' all the time.... Apologies for the audio being left channel only.