ABC vs BBC

 Tom Jeffrey in his oral history.

The biggest difference I noticed was the way in which they treated people.  Um in the ABC and I don’t know if it still applies, it could well do, if you are young and ah you know on the lower ranks of you know producing or being a Floor Manager or something, you were held down.  It was like that comment about you know, well you’ve got two options, go to University or go overseas.  It’s easy to say and but not easy to do.  Very little encouragement was given and ah they’d always pick on you for doing things wrong but never encourage you to do things right.  And if you and it’s like getting too big for your boots.  And this happened to me later, not quite the tall poppy syndrome but just making sure that you knew that other people had power over you. In the BBC what I noticed was they encouraged talent ...

the other difference I suppose that I noticed was that um they did treat the program people quite differently.  I mean it was run by, the place was run by program people for program making to reach an audience.  The ABC was very heavily controlled by the Admin, by Admin people.  They may have been in programs years and years and years ago, but they have, they seem to have become Managers and Administrators rather than program makers.  Ah that was a difference.  

And the other difference which was a very minor thing, was that when they started to use video tape at the BBC, they actually used to cut the tape and and fix it together.  And they used a little contraption with a bottle of old iron filings.  If they wanted to make an edit they poured the iron filings down which would show them where the frame bar occurred and then they’d put this little piece of metal down which had a slit in it, across the frame bar which would be devoid of iron filings because of the magnetic, there’d be no magnetic stuff there.  And they’d cut with a razor blade down this slit, then they’d get two bits of stuff and and they’d make the next edit point and then join the two bits of tape together.  And while I was there they actually started to think about electronic editing of video tape which we had started to do just before I left to go to England.