Before I begin this month’s instalment, I have been criticised by my good friend Philip Lea, the donkey man from Grand- Madieu, for not including him in these articles. So… PHILIP LEA. There.

In the late sixties, I was working for the Rank Organisation in Pinewood Studios. I could see a problem looming on the horizon. Front office politics, always a problem in show business, were becoming serious, and my department appeared to be on the chopping block.

Furthermore, Rank had always been coupled with 35mm film because that was used in the cinema. But now videotape had arrived and programme makers wanted to use it because of its flexibility. Also, with the advent of the digital age, videotape could be copied from generation to generation without losing its image quality. This could not be said of film: three or four generations away from the original negative and the picture began to look very iffy indeed! Some smaller companies and specialist libraries had begun to transfer their film material over to videotape, but initially this was an expensive project and there was no guarantee that the format would continue to be popular (although look at it today.) In addition to all that, customers wanted the convenience of buying their material already on video, without incurring the expense and hassle of using transfer suites. So gradually, I began to see that there was little future in the large film-based libraries of the type we saw at Pinewood, MGM, Denham, Shepperton and so on.

So, tending always to be a half-empty man, the gloom began to set in. The big advantage of working out of a large studio complex was that one made many contacts and good friends around the industry. And so it was that I got talking to a man who was to change my career and in doing so, became a very good friend. Maurice Raine was a gangling, tousle-headed and eccentric character who had been a mainstay at the old Associated-Rediffusion television station housed in the Kingsway in London and when there was an amalgamation of companies in 1968, and Thames Television was born from an almost incestuous union of Associated-Rediffusion and ABC Television, Maurice became the archive researcher for all the schools output for Thames.

Eccentric and outlandish Maurice might be, but his mind was like a razor: he could mentally research the material called for in a script and locate most of it before others had sharpened their pencils. Because of this ability, he had been promoted to Head of Research and he offered me the post of Schools researcher. I jumped at the chance. To be back in close proximity to the cameras and microphones that I loved so much was intoxicating.

It was also damned hard work. Each strand of schools broadcasting had thirteen programmes in a school year and we had six or seven strands running at once, from the most junior programmes like “Seeing and Doing” to programmes matched to A-level studies. I have just checked that out on a calculator: I was working on something like ninety 20- minute programmes simultaneously. Some, of course, needed virtually no input from me: “Seeing and Doing” might require some shots of pretty baby rabbits or piglets….

Some programmes at the senior end were very demanding. In a series on the background to the 1939-45 war requests could be as varied as specific aircraft on bombing raids, comments made by bombed-out residents, even once, Hitler at his office desk, wearing spectacles. It was well known that the Führer had decreed that no pictures were to be taken of him showing this disability, but there is a tiny scrap of film showing him with glasses on the end of his nose poring over maps.

Because of the nature of the output, accuracy was everything. One just could not cheat on schools’ programmes, although I must admit, occasionally the temptation was pretty strong. And there was a great deal of stress involved. There were many times when I awoke in the middle of the night, thinking: was that the sound of a Spitfire I used or was it a Hurricane? Some clever-clogs would be sure to know the difference… Did I really write Arctic when everyone knows it should have been Antarctic? Too late now to agonise.