On the seventh floor, they had a training officer and an office that was divided into booths. They had these training machines then, which were microfilm. The training officer had written programmes about the technical aspects like lighting and lenses, and general theory about TV – colour didn’t exist then – and you were expected to do each module and pass each module. You were given a test. When you’d got a spare few minutes, you went up to the training room, pulled out a module and sat and learned it. It was fantastic. So from knowing very little about television, I got a really good grounding in the technical aspects – lighting, portrait lighting and all that kind of stuff. At the end of nine months, they delegated you to somewhere they wanted an engineer – albeit a very junior one. I worked mainly in studios: maintenance, videotape, telecine, outside broadcast, radio links – getting the signals from outside broadcast in – and then ended up in a videotape department
