Central Television
Shots of Broad Street building • Birmingham [various dates]
Some images of the old ATV/Central Television building in Broad Street Birmingham, which was due to be demolished in 2006.
Stuart Rose, a former Central employee, spoke to us about his time at the station:
"For a year, I worked in the ProdFax area of Central, mainly copying programmes from a variety of tape formats to D2 cassette for transmission in the recently-commissioned LMS. A bit like a big video jukebox.
"My Central career mainly involved assisting the editors of local programming and promotions. Once a week, an afternoon was spent with 'Proms Directors', selecting highlights from a pile of forthcoming ITV programme tapes and recording them onto two D2 video cassettes. These two tapes would then be taken into the large, five machine VT suite along with another tape, prepared by the graphics department, containing anything tricky that couldn't be created with an Aston and DVE on the day. The proms director and editor would then create the 10, 20 and 30 second versions of promotions to be screened at a variety of times on Central: 'Coming Up Next', 'Next Week', 'Coming Soon' etc etc. The voice-overs were added in a separate sound suite next door. Some promos were left blank and unvoiced and could be played back into the ITV network for other regions to add their own graphics and voice-over."
The edit suites that Stuart mentions can be seen at the bottom of this page.
Photographs: Simon Betts; Louis Raynor; Stuart Rose..
Stuart Rose, a former Central employee, spoke to us about his time at the station:
"For a year, I worked in the ProdFax area of Central, mainly copying programmes from a variety of tape formats to D2 cassette for transmission in the recently-commissioned LMS. A bit like a big video jukebox.
"My Central career mainly involved assisting the editors of local programming and promotions. Once a week, an afternoon was spent with 'Proms Directors', selecting highlights from a pile of forthcoming ITV programme tapes and recording them onto two D2 video cassettes. These two tapes would then be taken into the large, five machine VT suite along with another tape, prepared by the graphics department, containing anything tricky that couldn't be created with an Aston and DVE on the day. The proms director and editor would then create the 10, 20 and 30 second versions of promotions to be screened at a variety of times on Central: 'Coming Up Next', 'Next Week', 'Coming Soon' etc etc. The voice-overs were added in a separate sound suite next door. Some promos were left blank and unvoiced and could be played back into the ITV network for other regions to add their own graphics and voice-over."
The edit suites that Stuart mentions can be seen at the bottom of this page.
Photographs: Simon Betts; Louis Raynor; Stuart Rose..
Above: what was presumably the old ATV reception area [February 2006].
Above: Central reception at Broad Street [February 2006].
Above: the rear of the studios [February 2006].
Above: Bridge Street entrance [left] and Central far ramp [right] [February 2006].
Above: Central entrance - far view [left]; exterior of canteen [right].
Above: OB van ramp and workshop entrance [left] and on the steps facing down [right].
Above: reception area [left] and entrance looking down from the steps [right]
Above: signs on exterior of building.
Above: studio three at Broad Street.
Above: the props room.
Above: reception area [1997].
Above: Aston 4 Character Generator [left] and Quantel DL6000 Digital Library System [right] [1997].
Above: 1997 - monitor bank and controls.
Above: studio equipment [left] and projection room equipment [right] [1997].
Above: shot of the Central buildings [c. 1994].
Above: Edit 2 - Machine Room. Here you can see the BVH3100 1" C Format VTR (with vacuum-assisted threading), 2 Sony BVW75 Betacam SP and in the rack on the LHS are two Sony D2 (Composite Digital) machines - probably DVR 10 or 18, like the one on the RHS which belonged to another suite (which spent a lot of time editing down fifty minute episodes of 'A Country Practice' to fit a half hour slot). Edit 1 next door was similar, but I seem to remember it having more 1" C VTRs, one of them being a Marconi MR2B. [Stuart Rose].
Above: Edit 2. Starting on the left you can see the Aston 4 caption generator, Abekas A53 DVE, Grass Valley 200 vision mixer and Paltex edit controller and sound mixer. The VT editor sat in the middle of this desk and had a monitor stack that gave him a clear view of each VTR's output, the vision mixer output and the final result on the recording VTR. Equipment used here was all wired analogue composite and as an engineer, I am pleased to see comprehensive waveform monitoring in both the control and machine rooms. The promotions director sat in the chair on the right with a good view of the monitors and also took care of the Cox VT Clock keyboard, ensuring the production numbers, titles and durations matched the material that followed. [Stuart Rose].
