Thursday, 4 February 2010

The Beginning

For me, the beginning isn't the BBC Mark III, it's the rotary fadered predecessor of everyone's favourite desk, the Mk II.

It was the mid 1980s, and on the advice of the Careers Officer I'd written to the Lancashire Evening Telegraph, published 6 days a week in Blackburn. My letter asked the paper for work experience; you know the sort of thing, could I go in and find out about being a journalist. The Telegraph didn't reply, so I wrote to BBC Radio Lancashire, and it wasn't that long before I was invited in to meet Dave Sanders who produced and presented "Sanders on Saturday" a four hour dash around events happening across the county every Saturday.

Dave agreed to let me come in the next Saturday to make brews, run errands and be a bit of a dogsbody. I was shown how to find something in the gram library, which had a sort-of-working catalogue system and then was taken through to the Ops Room.

Walking through that door changed my life.

I was struck by how wonderful it was that the person operating the controls was changing what came out of the radio. This was amazing stuff. Cigarette smoke hung in the air, overflowing ashtrays balanced on top of tape machines and disembodied voices crackled out of speakers. It all looked impossibly complicated.

Over the course of a year or so I was fortunate to be shown the ropes by Dave and Chris Yates, the Programme Assistant who presented Saturday breakfast, tech-opped SoS and then drove the sport show. That must have been a busy shift. They were very generous with their knowledge and taught me the basic mechanics of desk driving and the jackfield.

There were four full height bays. You couldn't do anything fancy on a MkII station without throwing a yard or two of double enders at the wall. If you wanted to record anything apart from desk output you got out of the chair and plugged it up. Split transmission? OK, but plug it up yourself. Carefully.

That was the beginning for me. A grasp of the basics of radio ops, an understanding of how things should be done. I learnt the skills, and importantly the culture, of BBC local radio.

It was BBC local radio in mono, but that would soon change.

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