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1952 - The Start without a studio.
When BHBS Hospital Broadcasts came
along we had several immediate advantages: we were local and able to bring
items of local interest to our audience (notably sport and interviews with
local entertainers), our signal quality was better than the BBC, and we
had the time to mention individual patients' names.
| Hospital Broadcasts started
with an idea by TOC H, a charitable organisation, that it should
endeavour to help patients in hospital, the idea was further promoted
by Rediffusion who had installed and controlled the landline
distribution of radio programmes around the City of Bristol. They saw
the provision of Hospital Radio in the City's Hospitals as a natural
progression of their service, and in a letter sent by their General
manager to TOC H proposed the start of a service. This was duly
reported in the Evening Post on the 28th January 1952. The first programme broadcast was
the match between Bristol Rovers and Shrewsbury Town on August 23rd 1952.
The first broadcast was relayed on Post Office landlines to five hospitals
with another joining the network the following week. Both the Bristol
Evening Post and the Bristol Evening World reported the event. This meant
that BHBS first started broadcasting from the sports venues themselves and
not from its own studio. |
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In Bristol the members of TOC H
led by Laurie Lucena went cap in hand to the two local soccer clubs,
and used his careful negotiation skills to come away with not only
facilities at the respective grounds but also with a donation of £50
from each club. So it was that when the 1952/53 season opened, six of
Bristol's hospitals were linked to the Rovers ground at Eastville by
post office land lines, and several thousand unseen supporters joined
the 23,000 crowd in the stadium enjoying the match. The original idea
had been gleaned from an incident at Fratton Park, the home of
Portsmouth Town Football club. When the ground became overcrowded, the
gates were locked leaving many thousands of fans outside the ground
unable to see the match. A young police sergeant sensed impending
trouble and climbed onto a wall to give a running commentary to the
crowd outside the ground. This act gave the policeman and a few of his
friends the idea of relaying commentaries to patients in hospital. And
so hospital broadcasts were born. |
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1956 - Rugby and Cricket
The next expansion to the
service was the inclusion in 1956 of rugby from the Memorial Ground
where our commentators sat in the midst of the crowd in the
grandstand. In the following year cricket commentaries began from a
commentary box mounted on the roof of the club house at the County
ground in Neville Road, the home of Gloucester Cricket Club.
Ball-by-ball commentaries on all home games became a regular feature
on the airwaves and by the end of the 50s we were broadcasting full
match commentaries of all the home games from Ashton Gate (the home of
Bristol City), Eastville Stadium (the home of Bristol Rovers), the
County Ground where Gloucester County Cricket Club played and also The
Memorial Ground, home of Bristol Rugby Club. Other sports were covered
by taping commentaries and then replaying the tapes from the studio,
including speedway from Knowle. Other sports later broadcast live
included those when Eastville stadium became the home of the Bulldogs,
Ice Hockey from the Mecca Ice Rink, and wrestling from the Colston
Hall (which was taped so that the edited highlights could be broadcast
later) and boxing from the Bristol Sporting Club in Clifton.
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| Celebrities
In July 1954, the Post Office put
up the rent on landlines that connected Bristol City and Rovers
football clubs to Rediffusion and 12 hospitals. The increase (to £400
a year) posed serious challenge to the TOC.H members of the Bristol
Hospital Broadcasting Society. After some deliberation, they decided
to make more use of the landlines by starting a recorded programme
called "Autograph Album". Then-Chairman Lauri Lucena
commented: "It started from a big hole! A very large hole was being
dug in the centre of Bristol in full view of the patients in the BRI
and patients asked about it. For the first programme, one of the
diggers was interviewed. We thought that a chap talking about a hole
might not interest the ladies so we bunged in a chap who measured the
fattest lady in the world for corsets etc. Brian Powell interviewed
them, made them sing or tell a story, and I stuck the patient's
Autograph Album under their noses".
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While every programme contained
interviews with national celebrities who were visiting Bristol, the
local touch was not forgotten with frequent interviews with the nurse
of the week and patient of the week. Topical local events were also
covered including live music when circumstances allowed. The programme
also kept a scrapbook which read like a who's who of show business in
the 1950s. Names that are prominent are Max Miller, Petula Clark,
Benny Hill, Morecambe and Wise, Billy Cotton, Terry Thomas, and many
many more.
The equipment used on these
early OBs was crude and simple by today's standards but nevertheless
the quality of programme produced was comparable to those aired by the
BBC. Each outside broadcast was usually recorded using one microphone
and a Grundig reel-to-reel tape recorder. The most difficult part of
the whole exercise was transporting the tape recorder to and from the
hospital. Very few of our members had cars and the only means of
affordable transport was the bus or a bicycle, a very tricky business
with the very heavy tape recorder balanced on the crossbar.
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Scoop
On the 13th April 1956 BHBS
broadcast its first scoop. The Queen was to visit Bristol on her way to
open the Chew Valley Reservoir. The BBC were covering the event, but,
because television did not start until 6.30 each evening, they would
record it for later use. They offered the live commentary to BHBS and,
with Laurie Lucena perched high on the old CO-OP building at Narrow Quay
to link the BBC commentary, the live BHBS broadcast scooped the national
media.
1967 - our first dedicated studios
are built at Victoria Street
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Over fifteen years after its
inception, Bristol Hospital Broadcasting Society (as it was then
called) moved into its very first purpose built studio. After years of
recording programmes in members' houses and in the back room at
Rediffusion, Bristol Hospital Broadcasting Service at last had a home
of its own. Located in an office block in Victoria Street, right in
the heart of the City with restricted hours of entry, it still seemed
like a palace.
The new studio consisted of two
rooms divided by a plywood partition. The larger of the two was used
as a studio and the smaller as a control room. At first the simple
equipment from the Rediffusion premises was used to produce record
request programmes. The outside broadcasts switching equipment was
still at Rediffusion and was switched by remote control from the new
studio. |
| In the new studio, all of the
programmers came together for the first time. Prior to this, the
Wednesday nights programmes had been recorded the previous evening in
the small studio in the Colston Hall and then taken over to Broad
Plain for transmission the following evening. Now, with everyone
together, we were able to expand.
The first move was to design and
build a studio console. The first custom-built BHBS mixer had ten
channels, used quadrant faders and contained a Ferrograph tape
recorder with a Quad tuner and amplifier, two Thorens TD124 turntables
and a talkback system built in. The desk was specially built in the
control room so when the time came to move in 1972 it had to be torn
apart to get it through the door. Of that desk, only the turntables
remain. |
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The Colston Hall Studio
The programmes by this time had
expanded to fill five evenings a week (afternoons, actually, as the
programmes started at 5pm and went on until 6pm). The Colston Hall studio
was now no longer used to record programmes and had in fact been
commandeered by the BBC which had formed a training orchestra based in the
Hall. They had also equipped a room at the rear of the Green Room as a
studio and installed an electric hoist for a microphone.
Until this time any broadcast that
we did from the hall had to be rigged separately for each event (a task
that took several hours) as a nylon rope had to be stretched across the
balcony and a microphone suspended from it. Thanks to John Hunt, an ex-BBC
engineer, we were able to use the BBC control room and all of their
equipment to relay our broadcasts to the hospitals. With this facility at
our disposal, the number of concerts relayed from the hall increased
tremendously and we were able to cover every concert during the concert
seasons.
1972 - Goodbye to Victoria Street
Studios
Less than five years after our move
into the studio in Victoria Street, we were informed that the rooms would
be required for someone else, and we had to look for alternative
accommodation. In this respect, United Bristol Hospitals - the forerunner
of the Bristol and Weston Hospital Authority - turned up trumps, and
provided us with our custom-made studio suite. Thus it was that at 6pm. on
23rd November 1972 the last programme was relayed from our Victoria Street
studio.
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The
Cottage Block studio complex was opened on the 12th January 1974
by the then Lord Mayor of Bristol, Alderman W.W.Jenkins. In his
opening address he said that, as a recent hospital patient, he
fully appreciated the service that we gave. He offered his assistance,
not just as a name on note paper, but as a member. He was invited
to make good on his offer in the summer of 75, when ill health
compelled Laurie Lucena to resign his position as chairman of
the service. Mayor Wally Jenkins stepped into the helmsman's position
and occupied the chair until 1985 when our present chairman Iain
Elliott was elected. Iain had joined the service in 1965 and had
been the station engineer for the past fifteen years.
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1974 - Cottage Block
After the move from Victoria Street
it took almost two years to get the new studio fully operational. The
studios in Cottage Block were based in rooms above Ward 17 of the Bristol
Royal Infirmary. The studios were very spacious and consisted of two
control rooms and two studios, backed up by a workshop and equipment room.
The larger studio was big enough to house up to 20 people in a discussion
programme whilst the smaller studio was a two-man affair.
| We had so many guests who had
been invited to the opening that we couldn't house them in the studio.
We divided things by having the Lord Mayor come to the studio to
perform the opening ceremony while the 36-piece band and our guests
were in the HTV studio several miles away. After his speech declaring
the studio open, which was relayed to the audience at HTV, the Lord
Mayor was driven to the studio and took part in the concert which was
relayed back to our studio and then on to the hospitals. The whole
operation was made even more complicated because Bristol City were
playing Blackburn Rovers at the time and Blackburn Hospital Broadcasts
wanted to listen to the commentary. This meant that, as well as
broadcasting an opening ceremony from two sites, we also had to
broadcast a football commentary to the other end of the country. The
studios were well and truly declared open! |
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In the early 1990s there were moves
to redevelop the central area of Bristol around the St James Barton
Roundabout and, as part of that scheme, the hospital would sell some of
its land to provide space for the new plans. Cottage Block was central to
these plans and we were warned that we might have to move but no firm date
or new site was forthcoming and with the onset of the recession, the plans
for this development were shelved. However, just as we were beginning to
feel settled, we were told that there were major plans for the Department
of Medicine to convert Cottage Block into research laboratories. The good
news was that they would provide us with a suitable site and build us a
new studio to our designs. The bad news was that they wanted the whole move
from suggestion to completion done in no more than three months!
1994 - The B.R.I Studios
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The designs for our new studio,
which was to be based on level five of the old BRI building, were
sketched out in March 1994 and we moved in on May 23rd 1994, less than
eight weeks later!!! The speed of the move was such that we did not
have time to build any of our new equipment. The studio was officially
opened by Roy Hudd on October 23rd 1994. The Special Trustees of United
Bristol Hospitals provided the funds to build the studio and provided one
of the new mixing desks, but we had to raise the money for all of the
ancillary items such as chairs, cables, curtains and many of the more
mundane items needed to make a studio work, as well as a second new mixing
desk. A sign of the times was the cost of replacing the studio desks. In
1970 we built the desk (which gave us excellent service for 24 years) for
£400. Twenty five years later we paid almost £6,000 for a replacement!
Surprisingly the turntables which were bought for use in the Victoria
Street studio back in 1967 are still going strong - 34 years later even
though they were now much older than many of our members |
BHBS Today
| Our programmes are mainly record
request programmes broadcast from our studio in the BRI. Our sports
commentaries come live from Bristol Rovers at the Memorial Stadium,
Bristol City from Ashton Gate and Bristol Rugby from The Memorial
Stadium. Each sports ground is fully equipped with a mixer and
two microphones. Live musical entertainment consists of weekly
classical concerts from the Colston Hall We supplement this with
recordings from St George's Brandon Hill. Every Sunday morning
we broadcast a service from the BRI chapel. |
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"And the winner is ..."
BHBS is proud to have regularly
won the British Telecom regional prize as the best Hospital
Broadcasting Service. The competition, judged on a 15 minute
compilation tape of all of our programme output, carries a prize
of £500. We have won the award in 1993, 1995 and 1996. We didn't
enter in 1994 as we were in the throes of moving studios and
in 1999 we were a runner up in the "best non-music"
category with our local news service. |
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