As I soon realised, my job as a BBC newsroom sub-editor in London in the nineteen-sixties could be no more than a dimly interesting stop-gap.
Basically the work, though carried out by people of considerable intelligence and experience, was little more than secretarial. A senior editor would bring me a printed news-agency news story and read out, in his own words, the bits he wanted to incorporate in the next radio news bulletin. I would then dictate his words, as accurately as I could remember them, to a typist, who would pass them back to the editor.
If the result differed in any way from what he had said to me in the first place, it would be returned to me for correction. Then I would pass it back to him. It was a tedious process, with no scope for creativity, and it continued on a punishing time schedule involving three-day stints lasting from ten in the morning until ten at night. As your reward you were then given three days off, followed by an even more soul-destroying three-day stint from ten at night until ten in the morning, with a further three days off in compensation.
The night shift, which was spent assembling the early morning news bulletin, was even drearier than the day one. If you were lucky you could rest your head on your desk for a few minutes and snatch some sleep, but this tended to be interrupted by the crotchety night editor, a man called Beevers who accused you of slacking.
The one break in the monotony was the opportunity each morning to hand the bulletin, story by story, to the news reader. If the reader happened to be the famously jovial Frank Phillips - who would remind you never to refer to the chief constable of Kent in case he tripped over the pronunciation - all was well. But the icily aloof Alvar Lidell’s rebukes were less harmonious. Hating it if a sub-editor stood directly behind him as he read, he would ominously switch off the microphone and order you to shift position to where he could see you. For me the best moment of the morning came when, at 10am, I was released from Broadcasting House and could stroll down to Piccadilly for coffee and croissants at Fortnum and Mason before heading home to bed.
Yet I made friends during these endless months in the galleys, as Verdi described his early life as an opera composer, and one of them was a quiet Irishman called Brian Parker, an associate of the novelist JP Donleavy, author of The Ginger Man, and a fascinating source of information about Dublin’s literary life.
But it was not enough. Dreams of returning to Holland began to obsess me, and so did the lure of working more creatively in the London office of The Scotsman which, on the corner of Bouverie Street, fulfilled my ambition, now stronger than ever, to become a Fleet Street journalist. Though I was aware that it would mean a drop in salary - the BBC at least paid rather well - I decided to approach Alastair Dunnett, by then The Scotsman’s flamboyant impresario of an editor, to see what he could offer.
10 August 2014
You account of the BBC's shift system reminds me of my days at the end of the 1960s when, as a Programme Operations Assistant trainee (an odd title for what were essentially glorified studio managers), I had an 8-day shift cycle working on the overseas services in Bush House which at that time broadcast in something like 45 different languages. Day one started at 08:30; day 2 at 10:30; day 3 at 14:30 and day 4 and 15:30. The following day was off but at 22:30 we'd start a night shift broadcasting the early morning news around the world starting in Japanese and ending in German. We then had the rest of that day off followed by two others.
ReplyDeleteOne of the glories of Bush House was the canteen in the basement where I was introduced to many dishes, mostly Asian, for the first time. Another was the fact that during the night shift many of its galaxy of tiny studios were vacant much of the time. There was also a lot of free time. So it was easy to pop over to the record library, select a recording and then tape it for my ever growing tape collection - all courtesy of the BBC!