Alan Ringland, he dropped one of the biggest clangers before I started doing it, on 42nd Street, he cut the song out! The… the biggest mistake I might have made, and it was my own fault, was… where the films… you’d have a running time for the film, and especially at weekends or on a Sunday, they didn’t sell all the commercial time, so we had odd films, they were called COIs (Central Office of Information) like driving… just the odd little 30 seconds, 10 seconds – but this particular Sunday there was about seven or eight minutes short of unsold time. I only worked the five days, Monday to Friday, and this particular Friday, one of the Fridays, I got involved with the lads, everything work-wise was finished, everything tidied up, I got back to work at about five o’clock or something like that, and there was a message they needed this cartoon for Sunday, there’s a feller. Now, he had a big cupboard, and there must have been about 1,000 cartoons there of Tom and Jerry, Road Runner, all these things. And what I’d done is I’d timed them all and wrote the running time on each one so whenever they wanted… because it was always last-minute stuff, “Oh, we’ve not sold time, we’ve got to fill for six minutes 20 seconds.” “Right, okay.” So a chap who was in charge called Bert Dye, who was in charge of the film dispatch bit then, all these were kept in his room because there was no room in… my room was on the front of the main building there, so only a small edit… you couldn’t keep all this rubbish in there. So we used to just look through and get a cartoon that would be the nearest time, which was this particular one. Basically all it was doing, you just have the standard leader on the head and backspacing on the end to run out, which I did. But… 99 times out of 100, just to make sure, you would view it to make sure what the quality was like, because you used to get a lot of scratched prints in those days, nobody bothered like it is now, so you just used to check it and if it was bad you’d say we can’t play it. Anyway, this one went out, I didn’t check it, which I should have done, and it was all in French, wasn’t it? One cartoon out of all the lot! So it went out on a Sunday afternoon, I didn’t know anything about it until I got in on Monday and Bill Lloyd, who was in charge, first thing, called into the office… we used to get on all right and all this, you know… and he said, “I’ve had a presentation. A cartoon went out yesterday – how come it was in French?” I said, “Oh, it wasn’t, was it?” He said, “Yes.” So I told him, there’s no point making up excuses, I told him exactly what had happened like, and 99 times out of 100 you would have got away with it, because the timing was right. It was Pepe le Pew or something like that. And it was just, “Just be more careful in future.” In fact, I found out later, after it had gone out, the announcer actually said, “And that ends our programmes for French-speaking people,” or something. So that was about the biggest mistake I’d made, I can’t think of any more. There must be some more minor ones.
