Bakerlite.co.uk
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Bakerlite.co.uk
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Cyprus 2000 Continued Week 1 Sunday My flight arrives on time and in no time at all I was being conveyed speedily up the new Larnaca - Nicosia motorway in a CyBC 4 X 4. I was duly delivered to the Holiday Inn which, in a previous existence had been the Kennedy Hotel where I had stayed in ’86. Even the girl on the front desk remembered me!
Monday …….was a public holiday (again) for CyBC employees as Cyprus’s National day had just fallen on the Saturday previous to my arrival. This gave me a preparation day, thus Mr. Mike Baker was picked up and 4X4’d’ to Television Centre Cyprus style. It all looked pretty familiar to me, which was at the same time, both re-assuring and disappointing. There was a brand new ever so bright building, which transpired to be the new Studio 3, the main reason for me being there. 24 metres by 23 metres, very high and very nicely air conditioned.
Like some other Broadcasters, CyBC had shed quite a lot of staff in recent years, mostly of the over 50 age group who were happy to take a redundancy payment and an early pension. Any bells rung? The good news for me was that new blood was on board, some young, keen able people who needed some ‘instant’ lighting experience. I had spent quite a lot of time finding out what CyBC had in the way of ‘kit’ and more to the point, what it didn’t have. So I was shown to the room which was to be my sovereign base for two weeks. Fortunately, most of the red cross parcels that I had requested from our sponsors, had arrived. The bare walls of what was normally the Trade Unions meeting room were soon transformed with colourful charts and posters from Lee Filters. Literature from ARRI, DeSisti, ROSCO, LEE Filters and VARILIGHT were unpacked and sorted into neat piles for distribution. My laptop computer seemed happy enough with the local power supply, (230V, 13 amp plug tops!) all my training files and photographs had arrived, there was an overhead projector, a white board. Things were looking good. Akis Theodosiou, whom I had met at Wood Norton last year, was the manager in charge of the studio resources, and he showed me around Studios 1,2 and 3. Studios 1 and 2 did not seem to have changed since my visit of ’86. Unlike a vintage wine, however, there was little sign of improvement. The clapped out 2K’s and extremely dodgy pantographs were still there. And does any reader remember sputniks? I remember Tommy Mottram and John Spicer using them in Dicky Road Studio in Manchester in the mid 1960’s. They are a very wide angle fresnel source, with sticking out feet that look like the antennae on early Russian satellites.
Studio
2 had an even more basic grid, with a few soft lights on ancient pantographs. It
is a long shoe box shape studio in which many sets are crowded. Sports and
current affairs programmes jostle for space and lamps. The
lighting density is low and totally inadequate to do justice to the sets. The
standard of maintenance of the lamps is consistent with Studio 1- not good. Studio 2 with a very basic lighting grid and many sets Studio 3 is brand new, and not yet completed. But, it has to earn its keep, so it is used every day for programmes. CyBC has had to take a battering from the competition in recent years, several new independent stations now are up and running in the island, so they are trying to fight back.
It
has some lighting barrels, a bit long for my taste at 4 metres, and certainly
too far apart at 4 metres spacing. The lamps were mostly Desisti, a mixture of ADB 5K, and Magis 1200 watt fresnels. Botticelli 5K Softlights (without egg
crates) provided contrast control. You will notice, as I did, that there is no
way of achieving differential height within the length of a lighting barrel.
(Incidentally, the distortions of the picture are a result of merging three wide
angle pics on my computer.) Studio 3 is new and not yet fully equipped
CyBC has a live Saturday night show of about 2 hours duration whose set lives in the area presently serviced by lighting barrels. It does this on a drive-in basis with its O.B. unit. The designer of the set, who no longer worked for CyBC (!) had built it to be almost self illuminating, such was the mistrust between design and lighting departments. Acres of shiny, brushed aluminium with a myriad of built in pracs, none of which were through dimmers! It wouldn’t have looked out of place at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. The rest of the studio is crammed full of drama and sitcom sets. These impacted on my plans at an early stage, I had wanted to do my talking in the mornings and practical/workshop sessions in the afternoon. However, Studio 3 was generally busy making the aforesaid dramas and sitcoms in the afternoons, so it was jaw, jaw in the hot sticky afternoons and practical sessions the following morning when everyone had probably forgotten what I had been talking about the previous day. Any lecturer will tell you that talky talky is best done before lunch when you are assured of most attention. Post prandial activity should be of the hands on variety. But wait, I hear you asking, how were these sets in the barrel less part of Studio lit? From the floor, I reply. But not in the way that you or I would do, with flag stands, reflectors, magic arms and grip gear. There were a multitude of small fresnel lamps perched on top of the sets in positions that were totally unrelated to light sources. A veritable stadium full of soft lights on stands were spread across the mouth of the set. Not quite Eastenders. The sets themselves had small, reeded type windows, which don't exactly lend themselves to being used as a lighting source. There was not enough room outside the windows to either put lamps or to give a believably lit backing. This was design economy on a grand scale. I had seen enough for one day. Back at the Holiday Inn, I had a swim in the pool and spent much of the evening contemplating the changes that I would have to make in my course to reflect what I had just seen.
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