BBC1 North West Final Regional In-vision Closedown

The junctions and closedown by the English regions ended on 12th September 1980 – London did all the junctions and closed down the channel at night from then on for the English regions, however Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales continued their own junctions and closedown – and here we have the final North West region transmission with John Mundy from BBC Studio P, Broadcasting House, Manchester, where the junctions and closedown came from. Studio P was a self op. studio located on the 4th floor of BH, amongst radio studios from the 1920s, when the upper floors of the building changed from being a bank to becoming BH Manchester for the BBC’s north west region’s radio programmes. Studio P had one camera, a desk in front of the presenter with various sources coming in (TK, VT, slide scanner, etc) and was about a third the size of a normal-sized living room. The presenter self-operated the cutting to the various sources and you’ll see John Mundy’s arms move at some point to do this. The slides also show the desk. The clip is all pretty well self-explanatory, and the slide sequence will give a good idea of the operating conditions. The camera used to be an EMI 2001 but this was moved to Studio N eventually and a cobbled together Philips handheld camera used, with a film lens. The quality was never very good with this camera and to make matters worse there was an autocue in front of it too. That’s why the camera output in this clip looks so soft and the black level sat up.Our thanks to David Norris, BBC Cameraman for the recording.