Little and Large. Autumn 1988. Studio One. That was the first time I set foot in the hallowed halls of the BBC’s Television Centre. My dad had got tickets to a Little and Large recording. It was a Sunday night and I was 13. The night’s recording was okay at best. Sid Little fluffed some lines and I was mesmerised by how shiny the set was. Actually, it was only the off-screen machinations that I can only remember now – those Dalek sized cameras all emblazoned with a faded italicised “BBC” and the unseen faces from the gallery controlling every moment like Greek Gods whose chess pieces resemble now two comics from the tail end of the Northern club scene’s heyday.
Of course I had sort of been in TVC for years before that. Mentally I had been imagining myself making a chocolate sponge with Janet Ellis in the Blue Peter studio, playing with Goldie’s puppies on the Blue Peter lawn (in a pre-euphemism age that was something ten year olds could actually do), dancing with Nik Kershaw in the Top of the Pops studio, being one of those million tapdancers Roy Castle Bonnie Langforded with on Record Breakers or at least being on the phone to Sarah Greene shouting “left, left, splat” as Saturday Superstore foresaw the XBox generation with some then nifty graphical interactivity with Five Star’s latest album as a prize incentive. I may have even have penned a letter to Jimmy Saville so that some classmates and I could visit a haunted house. On that less salubrious note it turns out that possibly TVC itself was indeed the house of horrors (for some at least). But for the rest of us who can now say with relief that Jim did not fix it for us, the nearest we got to White City’s gleaming beacon of broadcasting was getting the engaged tone when trying to phone a question into The Boswell’s from Bread on Saturday Superstore. Actually, my eleven year old self did get on the BBC’s daily TV magazine show Open Air. I asked Julia Smith (EastEnders creator) whether it had been her favourite show to produce. She was as clearly disappointed in my soul searching mode of enquiry as I was that Open Air was not actually broadcast from Television Centre, but – heaven forbid – Birmingham.
Television Centre always felt like a second home, a sort of televisual embassy bound by political neutrality and a creative haven for all lost souls and fans of Points of View. If something horrible should happen to my home or family, I imagined I could at least get on a train to London, find my way to Wood Lane and TVC would shelter me amidst Sue Cook’s blazers, Selina Scott’s knitwear and Simon Groom’s sheep. And if that didn’t work, I could at least phone up. I knew the number. 01 811 8055 was not just Going Live’s phone-in number and the Children In Need pledge line. It was the only phone number every kid in Britain knew – before of course it was cruelly re-cast as 0181 811 8181, 0207 811 8181 or heaven forbid 0845 Give Us Your Views Now.com.
TVC was as much a character in the BBC’s ouevre as Basil Fawlty, Del Boy, Gordon the Gopher, Claudius, Russell Harty, The Two Ronnies, the Doctor and that odd couple with the matching anoraks from No Place Like Home (look it up). TVC denoted home from school and weekends. It was a babysitter you didn’t mind being stuck with. Saturday mornings were Sarah Greene and Mike Read frollicking about the forecourt of TVC all in the name of kids television. The Two Ronnies would dim the lights on a Sunday as Barbara Dickson would lean against a Studio One lampost to sing Another Suitcase in Another Hall. And on slow news days The Six O’Clock News would let some militant lesbians in so that Nicholas Witchell could sit on them and make the world just that bit safer for us impressionable kids as Blue Peter‘s Mark Curry traversed TVC’s corridors on an errant quadbike or penny farthing as crew members raced for cover.
Flash-forward a few years and I return to TVC as “staff” with a BBC pass and everything. Working for BBC Comedy, I was able to experience all those BBC jokes and cliches, all those BBC canteen jibes and over-judicious concierges giving Basil Brush so much grief (though it was a recent thrill to drive through those hallowed gates, let alone be let through them). However, what I encountered was still a thriving hub of production, a busy and industrious environment knuckling down and getting on with it – despite an evident “media course” mentality and vile sense of “accountability” kicking at the heels of content and production. But why does everyone of a certain generation want to work in “media”? Because Television Centre made us. It beckoned us in every day. It forever told us where it lived (“Wood Lane, W12 7RJ”). It took great pride to showcase its studios, dressing rooms, switchboards and broom cupboards. It was both Oz and White City – with roads paved not with yellow bricks, but Blue Peter badges, Food and Drink recipe sheets, Points of View correspondence and Russell Grant’s knitwear patterns. But the TVC I experienced was also creaking round the edges. Parts of what Terry Wogan affectionately christened “The Concrete Doughnut” were falling apart. It was cheaper and easier for shows to rent out Pinewood Studios rather than nip downstairs. And just like the alleged Golden Age of British television of the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps TVC too was not meant to last. Cliché aside, it was impossible not to get lost. Or it was impossible for me to not get lost when trying to find BBC Comedy Room 3167 a (South Wing). And the Blue Peter garden was not actually that big nor possibly even a garden.
But you would also nip in a lift and help a newsreader balancing her toddler and scripts. You would see the enthusiastic queues of “the public” waiting in the rain to get into a recording of Never Mind The Buzzcocks or Last of the Summer Wine. You would see actors and presenters necking a latte with their make-up protectors still in place. You would clearly see the retro-cool 1970s fonted signage and BBC livery.You would hear news academics discussing the future of the Middle East in the gents. You would see panel show presenters perched on the stairs apologising to the guests they were about to annihilate. It was what all of us imagined a television centre to be.
TVC was about coming home from school and knowing you were watching the same kids TV show from Studio Two that your mates were watching, rather than some syndicated 28-part cartoon on CBBC you can choose when you catch it. TVC was the epitome of broadcasting to the nation – with the nation watching as an engaged mass. For good or bad, shows like The X Factor get such solid ratings as they operate on the same notions of mass engagement – of knowing everyone is watching at exactly the same moment as you. As much TVC forever showcased its corridors and studios, its output was not yet reduced to forever demanding we all text in with our views, our opinions, our reactions. The “public” were not yet a tiresome co-star and cost-cutting alternative. Yes, we had Nationwide and That’s Life carefully balancing decent content and human inanity. But now the dinner wallpaper that is The One Show will have Tony Curtis or Michael Caine on the sofa and have no qualms in interrupting tales of Marilyn Monroe in order to “roll some VT” on what The One Show thinks is the nation’s favourite litter tray. And if we are not being forever asked to Watch Again, the only corridors we now see are not in TVC but corporate and laminated ones full of wannabee gastro pub owners nervously awaiting Masterchef’s verdict on a duck breast their dying nan advised them to make. The streets of West London are no longer the haunts of The Good Life or Dennis Potter dramas, but Rogue Traders Caught On Camera Driving on a Duel Carriage-way Without an MOT. As a viewer, it now sometimes feels like prime-time slots which once dripped with sitcoms and fierce dramas now resemble the back-pages of Loot with an exhausting obsession with family trees, antiques and getting your plumbing done properly. TVC used to make dramas about the Borgias, not transform tower block spare rooms into vestiges of Renaissance Italy for a fiver. Yet sometimes folk who are looking for another heyday are overlooking exactly what is going right now. Would anyone even suggest the likes of White Heat, Getting On, Call The Midwife, Wallander, Last Tango In Halifax, Sherlock, Dead Boss, Doctor Who, Horrible Histories, Dancing On The Edge, Merlin, The Girl, Restless, Africa, and the superlative Olympic coverage are examples of a TV behemoth losing its touch?
In an age before branding became more important than content, Television Centre was the only media monolith we knew. Yet that icon is now about to be a gravestone, a relic of progression and a victim of the public purse that once paid for it having to tighten its strings. In the television of the future, TVC will only ever be seen when BBC Four mocks up a matte CGI shot of an actor playing Jonathan Ross entering the Stage Door for a drama about Sachsgate. But are these are gripes about output and nostalgia overlooking how the BBC is and always has been made up of many iconic homes. Its’ new London face is even its old London face. The 1930s era Broadcasting House is once again spearheading the BBC in the capital, with a new home for its News service already in place and quite a 21st century sight it is to behold. The BBC approaching its centenary with a pride and confidence is surely more pressing than the closing of one building built over fifty years ago. And whilst moving the Blue Peter garden to a Salford rooftop holds less cache than the garden ever did and every drama and comedy seems to be over-keen on Manchester or Cardiff, time and television must move on. Whereas British telly may have once forgotten anyone north of Watford, great pockets of comedy, drama and factual television are now dotted throughout the land. The BBC Comedy of the 1970s may well have been called BBC Surbiton. But now we have BBC North and BBC Scotland producing great funny fare. The BBC is about its programmes, not its buildings. The BBC has always been made up of a rich cast list of broadcasting edifices. Alexandra Palace, Lime Grove, Pebble Mill, Bush House, Maida Vale and Elstree Studios have all housed the corporation and new hubs will emerge and old ones will get switched off. But it is the shows that came from these media stables that is why the BBC is the world’s most recognised television corporation. So why the outpouring of sentiment over TVC? Maybe TVC just represented a different era of audience engagement with television. It was more parochial, granted. But then so was the BBC. And so was Britain. However, it did have the production of content as its core DNA. And if content is to be at all part of the BBC’s survival, then any building that is not wholly necessary maybe does need an end credit “you have been watching” bugle call.
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