BBC-MainBlockStudios

FORMATION

SIGNIFICANT EVENTS

Addition Of TC9

New material to be added here.

BUILDING LAYOUT

<< TCS&PP

Disclaimer

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Main Block Studios were the central significant part of the centre of Television Centre. Apart from it being very convenient to have the control rooms for all these studios located in one place the fact that they were laid out in a circle was a technical necessity in those days. For the equipment in each studio to work each one needed a precisely matched set of seven timing pulses distributed from a central point. Having produced beautiful vision and sound they needed to be recorded or distributed to the transmitters. If each of the studios received precisely co-timed pulses and were equidistant from those two collection points then it would be possible to cut and mix between studio outputs. A concept known a synchronous play in. As television was very often live in those days this was a significant advantage. As a contrast Independent TV companies were often geographically disparate and they did not have the luxury of synchronous play in and so when changing from one programme to the next they would fade to black, perform a non-sync cut where the scanning of the television display at home would roll for a second or so, and then they would fade the next programme up. TV Centre’s fundamental shape negated the need for this.