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Turkish De-light 1999 contd.
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The BBC training took over. I made a
list of things that were essential, necessary and desirable, in that order, for
this particular trip. It seemed appropriate that I should see, and ideally take
with me a tape of the Beeb’s General Election Studio coverage, with me. I thus
carried out a two pronged attack. Wood Norton promised to get hold of a tape
which would be with me in time. Hmmmm. I didn’t doubt their sincerity, but in
good old belt and braces style, checked out my very own branch of the Beeb in
Cardiff. “Yes”, the news librarian said sweetly, “you can come in and see
the programme on Beta, but we can’t let you take the tape out of the
building”. Well, I am a freelance after all, need to know (and see) and all
that. So I did, and very exciting it was too watching pictures of a long dead
election programme, I can tell you.
The following day, as I was working my
way down the list of essentials, I heard a motor bike roar up the drive. Now
that was a bit of a surprise, cos I don’t know anybody who has a motorbike.
The milk comes on a float, the paper with a boy and a dog….. I digress. It was
a motor cycle courier of the kind who rush about London’s crowded roads
delivering this and that to Offices, Embassies and Airports. He lifted his visor
and smiled slightly wearily at me. Was I…..
yes I was……here is a package for you. Feeling a video cassette
through the bubble wrapped envelope, I knew that the Beeb had come up trumps.
Did he want a coffee? Well, yes, but most of all, could he use the bathroom? I
know that this was his first visit to the Principality and perhaps he wasn’t
sure about the natives, but I wasn’t going to turn him away after a couple of
hours crouched over his throbbing (purring?) BMW. Over coffee and biscuits he
told me of his strange approach to my home, via a route that could only have
been devised by AutoRoute.
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My VHS tape arrives from London Town
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Within the half hour, he had left by a
somewhat more logical route to his home city, and I could settle down to watch
the video out of the plain brown envelope. It was remarkably similar to the
programme I had seen in a darkened room the previous day, and no less
captivating. Now this is my opportunity to justify the enormous amount of money
I had recently spent on a digital camera. I had regaled admirers with the
virtues (of the camera) of being able to ‘instantly’ process the pictures on
my P.C. (when it wasn’t being an expensive paperweight) and print them out at
home, thus bypassing the trek into town, twice, to take, and to collect.
It actually was useful, ‘and I say
this most sincerely folks’ to print out shots of that long dead election onto
hard copy. It was useful when I spoke to Geoff Beech, the L.D. who had lit the
show, to the set designer at TRT, and to me, as I saw that maybe there was a
chance that I could re-create the ‘look’ of the show, maybe, 1000 miles away
from TC1. Needless to say, I spoke to Geoff, and his recollections added to my
snaps in forming a ‘lighting plan’, in my brain, at least.
During the remaining few days prior to
my trip, I developed a taste for ‘World’ news in my paper, Turkey in
particular. It seems that the Foreign Office had put parts of Turkey on a list
that meant: proceed with caution. It wasn’t the bit of Turkey that I was going
to visit, so I mentally put it on the ‘back burner’. Less settling was the
news that a Turkish Airlines plane with all its crew had perished in southern
Turkey just a few days prior to my trip on its way to Kosovo to bring back
refugees.
Ankara also had an excellent English Web
site which actually put me back in the right frame of mind, with talk of
restaurants and unmissable night life.
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