Look North moves from New Bridge Street to the 'Pink Palace' in Fenham

It's January 1988 and BBC North-East moves into a new purpose-built building in Fenham. For years it had been based in an old hospital opposite the Laing Art Gallery, where facilities were far from ideal (you can see how low the studio ceiling was!). This includes some great behind the scenes shots of the old and new studios plus Mike Neville, Tom Kilgour and George House. The comment about the BBC world ident being 'stuck' after the move is a bit of a mystery because the programme begins with the computer-generated version of the BBC world.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• look north
• bbc
• mike neville
• newcastle
• fenham
• pink palace
• studios
• uk
• north east

[doubledeckers]

I notice that the Engineering Manager is lit perfectly with key light and backlight!

[TheWacoKid1963]

RIP George House

[northernanorak]

@akg451 The 1991 "smokey" world was from laserdisk. This one, the Computer Originated World or COW was solid state, produced by the box you can see being uninstalled at 2.44

[akg451]

ps - i like the comment about being over thirty. I was ( just ) under 30 when i last worked at BBC NE, a couple of years after that programme shown, it certainly didn't do me any harm to work and LEARN from older people back then.

[akg451]

I think when you say it was on laser disc you're getting confused with the much later set of BBC 1 and 2 inter-programme 'themed' idents that, given their greater running time but less frequent and less long-term use on air, would have been prohibitive to implement in the same way. These WERE therefore sent out from London as laser discs, having the advantage in that case of simple and cheap 'roll out' updating, this still being pre-big-FTP and PC-based playout days

[akg451]

oh dear... It wasn't a laser disc, it was stored on several boards of ROMs, i.e. static multi-frame store that looped. The upper animated section of the frame was supplied identical for all regions, with part of one board holding a section coded differently with the text for each region. Wasn't cheap given the cost of memory chips but had the supreme advantage of no moving parts.

[J97736]

I like BBC look north north east

[CiderGuru]

The "World" was played on a Laser-Disc machine. It wasn't a live CG.

[darrowby1972]

from 6:00 mins onwards. That dappy old buggers a barrel of fun eh kids?

[LuthansaTerminal]

The comment about the globe being stuck refers to it being stuck for the first programme on Saturday, this clip is from the Monday by which time it was sorted

[BlackflowerOmega]

@ivorbigunzz LOL so true, and not a bag of cocaine in sight ;)