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Coronation

It was originally thought that cameras would breach the solemnity of the occasion; however, they were permitted after the personal intervention of the Queen, and panned away only for the anointing, as the most sacred moment of the ceremony. It is estimated that over twenty million individuals viewed the programme in the United Kingdom, an audience unprecedented in television history. The coronation greatly increased public interest in televisions.

The early years

The British Broadcasting Company broadcast its first radio bulletin on November 14 1922. Televised bulletins came later on 5 July 1954, broadcast from leased studios within Alexandra Palace in London, however newsreels had been in use for some time - shown at cinemas and other places of public gathering - and these had been adapted as Television Newsreel programmes, which before the advent of news coverage proper had run on the BBC since 1948.

The BBC celebrated 50 years of Television News on July 5 2004.

1950s

Television news, although physically separate from its radio counterpart, was still firmly under its control - with correspondents providing reports for both outlets - and that first bulletin, shown on the then BBC television service and presented by Richard Baker, involved Baker providing narration off-screen while stills were shown - and this was then followed by the customary Television Newsreel.

-Still photograph-

It was revealed that this had been due to producers fearing a newsreader with their facial movements could distract the viewer from the story in question. On-screen newsreaders were finally introduced a year later, in 1955 (namely Richard Baker, Kenneth Kendall and Robert Dougall) just three weeks before ITN's launch (on 22 September).

Mainstream television production had by now moved out of Alexandra Palace to larger premises - mainly at Lime Grove Studios in west London - taking Current Affairs department with it, and it was here that the topical early-evening programme Tonight (hosted by Cliff Michelmore) started on 18 February 1957. Prior to this, in the same studios, Panorama had been inaugurated on 11 November 1953.

Later in 1957, on 28 October in central London, radio launched the morning programme Today on the Home Service.

-EVN-

-Visnews-

The first transatlantic cable was laid in 1956. It was opened for use at 6pm on 25th September that year

1959 saw Cablefilm being used .... http://www.tvhistory.btinternet.co.uk/html/cablefilm.html ....rise of sats in 60s http://web.archive.org/web/20050101041549/www.bbctv-ap.co.uk/news.htm

In 1958 Hugh Carleton Greene had become head of News and Current Affairs, and set up a BBC study group whose findings, published in 1959, were critical of what the television news operation had become under Greene's predecessor Tahu Hole. The solution proposed was that the head of television news should take control (away from radio), and that the television service should have a proper newsroom of its own, with an editor-of-the-day.

1960s

On 1 January 1960, Greene became Director General and under him big changes were afoot not only for BBC Television, but also for a new department within it - BBC Television News. A newsroom was created at AP, television reporters recruited, and given the opportunity to write and voice their own scripts - without the "impossible burden" of having to cover stories for radio too. The aim was to make BBC reporting a little more like ITN which had been founded in 1955 and praised by Greene's study group.

Also in 1960, Nan Winton the first female network newsreader appeared in vision on 20 June, and 19 September saw the start of the radio news and current affairs programme The Ten O'clock News.

On a lighter note -insert-TW3-

24 Hours February 1966 [5]

The World at One (WATO) began on the 4th October 1965 on the then, Home Service, and the year before News Review started on television.

News Review was a roundup of the weeks news, first broadcast on Sunday 26th April 1964 and harking back to the weekly Newsreel Review of the Week (produced from 1951) to open programming on Sunday evenings - the difference being that this incarnation had subtitles for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. As this was the decade before electronic caption generation, each "super" (superimposition) had to be produced on paper or card, synchronised manually to studio and news footage, committed to tape during the afternoon and broadcast early evening - thus Sundays were no longer a quiet day for news at AP. The programme ran until the 1970's - by then using electronic captions, known as Anchor - to be superseded by Ceefax subtitling (a similar format), and signing of such programmes as See Hear (from 1981).

On Sunday 17 September 1967 The World This Weekend launched on the then, Home Service, but soon-to-be Radio 4.

Preparations for colour began in the autumn of 1967 and on Thursday 7 March 1968 Newsroom on BBC Two, moved to an early evening slot, became the first UK news programme to be transmitted in colour - from Studio A at Alexandra Palace - News Review and Westminster (the latter a weekly review of Parliamentary happenings) were "colourised" shortly after.

Much of the insert material was still in black and white however, as initially only a part of the film coverage shot in and around London was on colour stock - and all regional and many international contributions were still in black and white too. Colour facilities were also technically very limited for the next eighteen months at AP, as it had only one RCA colour videotape machine and, eventually two, Pye colour telecines - although the news colour service started with just one.

Black and white news bulletins for BBC 1 continued to originate from Studio B on weekdays, along with Town and Around - the London regional opt-out programme

The final news programme to come from Alexandra Palace was a late night News on 2 on Friday 19 September 1968 in colour. BBC Television News resumed operations the next day with a lunchtime bulletin on BBC One (in black and white) from Television Centre, where it has remained ever since.

This move to better technical facilities allowed Newsroom and News Review to replace back projection behind studio reporters with CSO.

And it also allowed all news output to be produced in PAL colour, in preparation for the "colourisation" of BBC One from November 1969 - the studios were capable of operating in NTSC too for the US as the BBC sometimes provided facilities for overseas broadcasters. During the 1960s satellite communication had become not only possible, but popular, however colour field-store standards converters were still in their infancy in 1968 and we would have to wait until the 1970's for line-store conversion to do the job seamlessly.

1970s

The decline in shooting film for news broadcasts became more prevalent, as ENG equipment became less cumbersome - the BBC's first attempts had been using a Philips colour camera with backpack base station and separate portable Sony U-matic recorder in the latter half of the decade.

1980s

John Jockel sound recordist

By 1982 ENG technology had become so stable that an Ikegami camera was used by Bernard Hesketh to cover the Falklands War - winning him the RTS TV Cameraman of the Year award and a BAFTA nomination for his "footage" - the first time that the electronic camera had been relied upon in a conflict zone by BBC News, rather than film. BBC News won the BAFTA for its actuality coverage, however the event has become remembered in television terms for Brian Hanrahan's reporting where he coined the phrase "I counted them all out and I counted them all back" to circumvent restrictions, and which has become cited as an example of good reporting under pressure.

Two years prior to this the Iranian Embassy siege had been shot electronically by the BBC Television News OB unit with Kate Adie reporting.

The early eighties saw the introduction of a common theme for the main news bulletins though by the end of the decade, each had established individual styles with differing titles and music, although the weekend and holiday bulletins were similar in style to the Nine O'Clock News.

Newsnight, the news and current affairs programme still running to this day was due to be launched on 23 January 1980, although trade union disagreements meant this was postponed by a week.

The first BBC breakfast television programme, Breakfast Time also launched during the 1980s, on 17 January 1983 from Lime Grove Studio E. Presenters including Frank Bough, Selina Scott and Nick Ross helped to wake viewers with a relaxed style of presenting.

TW3

the incumbent BBC director-general Hugh Carleton Greene (brother of novelist Graham Greene), who had taken up the office in 1960, was determined to steer the Corporation away from the cosiness of the 1950s towards a harder, sharper future. He conceived the idea of a weekly TV programme that would 'prick the pomposity of public figures' and charged Ned Sherrin, the producer of Tonight, a lightweight, early-evening current affairs magazine, to go away and make it happen. (TW3 was hence the product of the BBC's current affairs department, not light entertainment, much to the latter's chagrin.)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/guide/articles/t/thatwastheweekth_7776280.shtml

Alasdair Milne and Donald Baverstock

http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/T/htmlT/thatwasthe/thatwasthe.htm

Nationwide (TV series)

http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/series/NATIONWIDE

Went more days a week 31 March 1970, 01 April 1970, 02 April 1970, 03 April 1970

Nationwide (9 Sep 1969-23 Dec 1981)

Throughout this period South East news came from the Nationwide team, with little differentiation between it and the national part of the programme. In the early 70s, when Nationwide only ran from Tuesday-Thursday, there was a programme called London This Week which aired on Mondays and Fridays; and around 1976 the Friday slot was taken by Young Nation, dedicated to teenagers. South East regional news was non-existent at all other times - daytime, weekends, bank holidays, and even the entire Christmas and New Year period.

In 1982, the BBC started to take the South East more seriously as a region...

http://www.tvradiobits.co.uk/tellyyears/may1982.htm

http://www.tvradiobits.co.uk/tellyyears/april1968.htm

Barbara Mandrell

neé Grenville-Wells

born July 15th 1920 died 1998

..... FIRST woman television newsreader in Britain when she made her debut on September 2nd 1955 reading the 12 o'clock news for Independent Television, five years before Nan Winton read the news for the BBC. However she remained a newscaster for less than a year when management decided that it was ' not appropriate for women to be associated publicly with war stories, disasters and tragedies'. Thereafter she worked as a scriptwriter and copy-taster. She retired from ITN in 1980 and began a new career writing guide-books to European countries

telerec

Because television is a field rather than frame-based system, however, not all the information in the picture can be retained on film in the same way as it can on videotape - thus two separate telerecording techniques were developed to deal with this. 'Skip field' recording missed out every other field of video, recording one video field to one film frame. However, this meant that half the information of the picture was lost on such recordings, and the alternative method, 'stored field' came to be preferred - this merged the two fields into one frame of film, giving a much sharper and generally more satisfactory result.

http://bp2.blogger.com/_UfF0-tl2t28/RY0bAsTVnOI/AAAAAAAAAEI/UQVN57TykF0/s1600-h/405telerectvmirror.jpg

The Coronation that Never Was..... by Arthur Dungate

The actual Coronation occurred on Tuesday 2nd June, but on the previous Saturday morning, the whole service in Westminster Abbey was rehearsed, and it came up the line to AP and was telerecorded. We were fascinated watching it on the monitors and it was most odd to see the Duchess of Norfolk apparently being crowned Queen of England! I think some important artifact was omitted so that it wasn't actually legal, and she didn't become Queen for three days.....

During the rehearsal of the service, the E.I.C (Engineer-in-Charge) of AP came into CTR and turned off all the monitors, saying it was supposed to be secret. But as soon as he had gone, our S.Tel.E (Senior Television Engineer), Dicky Meakin, turned them on again, as he wanted his staff to know what was happening.

Afterwards, the 35mm negative of that telerecording was thrown away (no print was made)..... and I actually had some reels of it, too..... If only I'd had the foresight to have kept a bit.....

Of course, had I done so (and been discovered), it would have been a most serious matter for me. But today, with a more enlightened outlook, what a find for the archive it would have been! But, it is lost forever.

http://web.archive.org/web/20050101041557/www.bbctv-ap.co.uk/nocoron.htm

HD 1936

High-definition television: a system of television in which the number of scanning lines into which the complete picture is divided is 100 or more.

British Standard 205-1936, sub-section 108 (not yet superseded as far as we know)

http://www.bvws.org.uk/405alive/info/quotes.html

Lobby Lud

"Holidaymakers hanker for bygone elegance" article about Lowestoft for Lobby picture

The original 'Lobby Lud' was William (Willie) Chinn, who in 1983 was rediscovered, aged ninety-one and living in Cardiff. - died May 1084

http://web.archive.org/web/20010715163927/http://www.lowestoft.net/introduction/sage1.htm http://www.lowestoft.net/introduction/sage6.jpg

A special train service, the "Lobby Lud Express," was created to take Londoners to the resorts Lobby visited. - "College Literature" v.12 1985 - "KOLLEY KIBBER"—NEWSPAPER PROMOTION IN BRIGHTON ROCK by Michael Routh - page 80 & 81

http://www.hexkey.co.uk:/lee/log/2002/04/03/#1017788400

1920's There were diversions and people were desperate for all kinds – crosswords, games and puzzles and the sudden popularity of the whodunnit, full of arcane clues and red herrings. Agatha Christie compounded her own fame as a writer by her well-publicised and mysterious disappearance in 1926. The whole country was absorbed by the search for her and even more intrigued by her discovery, largely unexplained, in a Harrogate hotel. The Westminster Gazette’s inspired invention of ‘Lobby Lud’ in 1927 to cash in on this national obsession with mystery proved one of the most enduring features of seaside holidays between the wars. As we hear, Lobby Lud was a bit of a lad, much more lively and full of bravado than Graham Greene’s later homage to Lobby, the sad and dyspeptic Kolly Kibber in Brighton Rock (1938).

Police box

http://web.ukonline.co.uk/freshwater/menupa.htm

http://web.ukonline.co.uk/freshwater/papost.htm http://web.ukonline.co.uk/freshwater/postpa1.htm http://web.ukonline.co.uk/freshwater/pa450a.htm http://web.ukonline.co.uk/freshwater/pakiosk.htm

Lime Grove/Late Show

Final live prog from studio D on Friday 14 June 1991

Recording Monday afternoon 17 June for Peggy Ashcroft obit [6]

31 July - Lime Grove Studios (building) closed [7]

Last Dramas

HENRY IV PART 2, Recorded on 1995-09-22

http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/programme/LDPT955Y_A

DEATH OF A SALESMAN, Recorded on 1996-03-12

Episode 1 http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/programme/ESBU262T

Episode 2 http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/programme/ESBU263N

Episode 3 http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/programme/ESBU264H

Episode 4 http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/programme/ESBU265B

Episode 5 http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/programme/ESBU266W

[Elstree_Studios#Sale_to_the_BBC]

In August 2007, the BBC put the EastEnders studio and and £150 million of other outside operations up for sale. - -