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This week I headed down to Wood Lane in West London to visit the BBC’s Research and Development user testing lab for our feature on binaural sound.
I travelled there by tube, and, as I came out of White City station, looked across at the now largely deserted Television Centre, surrounded by scaffolding. It is being transformed into flats, a retail park and updated studios, while retaining its iconic doughnut appearance.For decades, it was at the centre of my life.
In the BBC club in the 70s and 80s, I gazed at the Gods of Light Entertainment who went there at lunchtime, before visiting the viewing galleries of their studios from where, apparently unaffected by the alcohol they had just consumed, they delighted the nation.
I remember Marty Feldman and the Python crowd and legendary producers like Dennis Main Wilson, who had produced Hancock. I sometimes wished I had the gift of making people laugh instead of telling them what they should be worried about.
It was there that I met leading international figures like President Nixon, Governor George Wallace and, of course, the handbag swinging Margaret Thatcher.My main base was down the road in the inappropriately named Lime Grove. The lime trees had long gone before I arrived, although the house set up by Charles Dickens for “fallen women” was still standing.
Lime Grove Studios had formerly belonged to Gainsborough Pictures and Rank Films and was later home to the BBC Tonight and Nationwide programmes, and Panorama, among others.We often walked the short distance to TC when we were using the studios there, or attending Programme Review, or being told off by our bosses.
In the great BBC crises of the late 70s and 80s we made use of the circular nature of the building, and its windows, by going to a 6th floor office opposite to those occupied by the Director General and the Chairman. From there we could see who was being hauled over the coals, and who was advancing up the very greasy pole. And it was in the basement hospitality rooms that we celebrated successful programmes or conducted anguished post mortems, or fell in love.
By contrast the Research and Development department is in an anonymous block across the road from Television Centre, squeezed in between the railway line and a scrap metal yard. It is an unlovely building but inside there is table football, essential to creative thinking, and the user testing lab is full of comfortable settees and chairs and a staggering number of loudspeakers. This is where we recorded this week’s Feedback feature on binaural sound.
Listen to this week's programme
Find out more about Surround Sound and Binaural Sound
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Roger Bolton
Roger Bolton presents Feedback on Radio 4
