Television Centre

Always been massive.

sports fan in terms of of watching things and going to games and lots of different sports and loving it all and I think it was just something my mother said to me when I when I was about 15 or 16 I was kind of watching a game and sort of just basically parroting my own absolutely terrible hopefully there's no recordings of anywhere of recording something of of what I would be saying if I was kind of analyzing the game she's like you know what you should really think about this and I thought oh don't be silly because it's just it won't be an option for me um and then obviously you sort of get into doing sort of student radio and and then and the student newspaper which no one reads but you think you're dead important when you're at university and I think we won an award so I went to some industry events and then sort of realized that if you start chatting to people there might be ways to sort of get into it And then just started right at the bottom, sort of labelling up tapes when we were back at Television Centre before the sort of Media City move.

And then gradually at that point, kind of just, you know, found my way into it.

But I never really thought it would be something that actually would end up happening.

We'll see, I guess.

It is, of course, Halloween, and if you were with us for our ghost watch earlier, may I reassure you that it was just a story, and all's well here at Television Centre.

Get off me!

He's at the phone lines.

It uses the genuine number of the old BBC TV centre that viewers can call in on 018118181, I remember from Swap Shop.

And meanwhile, in the live location is Sarah Green, another big face on TV in the 90s.

And the programme basically sets up, it's going to be a ghost watch with an expert in the studio.

absolutely.

You could establish immediately that Sarah Green was alive and well in 1992.

Because one of the things was they flashed up the BBC TV Centre number throughout the whole thing.

And if you got rang early enough, there would have been a recorded message saying, this is a fake show, please leave your ghost story as a message and we might include it in a programme in the future.

But Volk had a different idea.

Sitting in Bam Gardner's office at BBC Television Centre, he suggested a radical change.

Why bother with episodes one to five? Why not, as he put it, do the whole thing like episode six? Forget the weeks of investigation.

Forget the gradual introduction of the characters.

Short of putting arrows on the screen, how much more obvious could they have made it? And Richard Broke had his own frustrations.

Years later, he explained that his comments on Bite Back weren't really aimed at the angry parents sitting opposite him.

They were aimed at the sixth floor of BBC Television Centre, the offices of senior management, the people who'd known what was being made, the people who'd approved it, and who now appeared remarkably keen to distance themselves from the result.

An internal inquiry was ordered by the BBC's managing director, Will Wyatt.

But Volk had a different idea.

Sitting in Baumgardner's office at BBC Television Centre, he suggested a radical change.

Why bother with episodes one to five? Why not, as he put it, do the whole thing like episode six? Forget the weeks of investigation.

Forget the gradual introduction of the characters.

Short of putting arrows on the screen, how much more obvious could they have made it? And Richard Broke had his own frustrations.

Years later, he explained that his comments on Bite Back weren't really aimed at the angry parents sitting opposite him.

They were aimed at the sixth floor of BBC Television Centre.

the offices of senior management, the people who'd known what was being made, the people who'd approved it, and who now appeared remarkably keen to distance themselves from the result.

Oh, it's you.

It is, of course, Halloween, and if you were with us for our ghost watch earlier, may I reassure you that it was just a story, and all's well here at Television Centre.

Halloween continues on BBC Tuna, where the marathon Vault of Horror is now showing Stephen King's Creepshow.

Detroiters.