T he baize-green fairways of last month's European Open golf tournament
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at Sunningdalc were crisscrossed with miles of spaghetti-like television cables. The BBC Outside Broadcast team was in town.
Like Ariadne. we followed the miles of cable round the hospitality tents and down a pine wooded track before suddenly hitting the BBC "village". A travelling circus of trucks. vans, and transmitter masts had set up camp in the clearing. At the centre of the cluster was "the mother ship".
From the outside. this ordinary-looking 38tonne tractive unit and trailer did not look like Europe's only 32-channel mobile colour television studio. Inside, however, it bristled with screens, banks of slider controls and video loops. Crash it. and you could destroy £2 million-worth of machinery in one fell swoop.
The 12.2m trailer is pulled by a Leyland Daf turbocharged T45. and travels constantly. Known to the BBC as the CMCCR. the rig's full title is the Central Mobile Colour Control Room. Once positioned on site, the trailer's side walls slide outwards to increase the interior studio space considerably. A thousand cables seem to link it like umbilical cords to the rest of the control units, gensets. monitor rooms and other assorted vehicles around it.
The BBC runs nearly 1,000 commercial vehicles and the main OB units are worth roughly., £1.5 million each, They often take 18 months to build and are the result of delicate and diplomatic juggling acts by transport manager John Rowlinson. rigging and transport services manager Bob Burton and the demands of the editors and producers.
"We go right to the absolute weight limit every time" says Rowlinson. "We have to, to get everything in." The way in which the transport men at the BBC truck depot in Kendal Avenue, just off the A40, plan how to get everything in is rather like a Heath Robinson cartoon brought to life.
A shelving frame is erected to mimic the overall body shape, and rolls of cardboard and tape are stuck in to simulate where everything will nt. Strangely enough, it works.
Golf is a major outside broadcast for the BBC. A course like Sunningdale will take up as many as 13 cameras and if the trucks and their interiors are not planned properly and thins go wrong, millions of pounds worth of air time can be lost.
At the end of last month the outside broadcast trucks went in a single week to cover Choir of the Year Chepstow races, a big rugby match in Devon. Question Time, the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool, a Noel Edmonds road show, motor cycling at Cadwell Park and a play at Stratford-upon-Avon.
How on earth does the OB department plan it all? Men like rigger foreman Joe Henshall have the answer. He will walk a golf or racing course, months ahead of the broadcast, and plan which cables to use, in what lengths and where. He finds out how many gangs of men (or units) will be needed and books the necessary vehicles and trailers. He sorts out mobile toilets and thinks about where the OB village will be situated. Water for the caterers is something to think about too.
About 12 hours of TV was broadcast from Sunningdale and Joe was the man to blame if the cables went down. "Spiked golf shoes are a real nuisance for us," he says. Engineering manager Peter Wright remembers the black day at Brands Hatch when a cable which had been spiked let in water during a downpour. Naturally, the cables fused and the pictures went down — just as the big race roared off the grid, of course...