Latest news with #PebbleMill
BBC News
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Pebble Mill recalled in look back at West Midlands' TV
"You'd go into the canteen, and the next table would be a load of wounded soldiers from a Poldark film."Midlands Today presenter Nick Owen MBE has been sharing his memories of Birmingham's Pebble Mill Studios."So many dramas came out of there… Pebble Mill was an absolute hub of activity in broadcasting. Both in gameshows, dramas and documentaries and all, of course, all of the radio shows that came out of there as well," he former studios were located on Pebble Mill Road in Edgbaston and were opened by Princess Anne on 10 June 1971. It closed in 2004. Many shows, including Call My Bluff, Telly Addicts, All Creatures Great & Small and Good Morning With Anne & Nick, were recorded there."It was a brilliant place to be, and it was very sad that that contracted into a much smaller operation," Owen said."Pebble Mill At One, I think, was the first ever proper daytime programme, and that was really special."When I first came to Birmingham… it used to be great to watch Pebble Mill at lunchtime. The fantastic music, helicopters seemed to be landing all around, and there seemed to be explosions and things going on. And big, big names on that show."Presenters over the years included Bob Langley, Tom Coyne, Marian Foster, Gloria Hunniford, Fern Britton and Alan Titchmarsh. Owen met a lot of famous faces while working on Good Morning With Anne & Nick."We had Margaret Thatcher on and Tony Blair. We had Tom Jones, Elton John – the list was fantastic. "I did some wonderful filming with Cher. Spent an afternoon on a bed at The Savoy with Cher. Me dressed in leather trying to be raunchy."So the memories of that are absolutely brilliant."When Owen first started working on BBC Midlands Today in 1997, the regional news programme was based at the Pebble Mill first aired on 28 September 1964, broadcast from a tiny studio on Broad 1971, it moved to the newly opened Pebble Mill Studios, and the first episode was presented by Tom Coyne. Dr Vanessa Jackson, who specialises in TV production at Birmingham City University, started her career at Pebble had three studios, but one of its' most famous locations was the bar – located in the BBC Club."That was a very important place because many a programme idea was brought to life at the BBC Club. Many a job offer was made. And they used to do a wicked cheese toastie," she said."It's the place where most BBC staff – after working on a programme like Pebble Mill At One – would come over the little bridge over the Bourn Brook and make their way into the club, which used to serve a lot of alcohol and very good food."Early in his career, Walsall-born Bob Warman, who presented ITV's Central News for 40 years, worked at BBC Radio Birmingham (now BBC Radio WM), which was broadcast from the Pebble Mill studios."The BBC Club was a pretty desperate place… When I came for an interview at the BBC with the then station manager – who was a chap called Jack Johnson, a wonderful Glaswegian man… He gave me a brief interview in his office and then said, 'Well, it's lunchtime, we better go to the bar.'"We went into this bar which was absolutely nose-to-nose – it was rammed with people – all drinking furiously at lunchtime. And I thought, 'Well, I better do the honours here…' so I said to Jack 'Can I get you a drink?' and he said 'Aye, I'd like a Bells please'."And I thought 'Gosh, Bells whiskey, at lunchtime', and I said, 'Anything with it?' And he said, 'Aye, another one!'"History Of TV In The West Midlands is available on BBC Sounds now. Follow BBC Birmingham on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
The Guardian
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Breakfast fads come and go, but at heart, is Britain a nation of cereal eaters?
At a party not so long ago, a friend told me that she was about to leave. 'I'm hungry,' she said, her eyes sliding towards the coats. 'I'm going home for a bowl of Weetabix.' I greeted this with some surprise, if not outright derision. Wouldn't she prefer a pizza with me? But already she was entering an ecstatic state. 'Weetabix is lovely,' she went on. 'Sugar, cold milk … ' Half a century of eating the stuff had taught her the optimum point at which to devour it, a fleeting moment she could judge by sight. Its biscuit-dryness had to be gone, but it needed to be soft rather than soggy. Her eyes half closed, she wantonly mimed pushing a spoon into this late-night ambrosia. I thought of this the other day, when Alan Titchmarsh, TV gardener and aspirant steamy novelist, informed the nation it should stop eating avocados on the grounds of their environmental impact (to summarise: many of those sold in the UK are grown on land that was formerly rainforest; their cultivation involves huge amounts of water in places where it's scarce; they must be shipped 5,000 miles or more to reach us). 'There's a lot to be said for cornflakes, Weetabix and Shreddies,' he announced, deploying the homely tartness that made him such a hit on Pebble Mill and Ground Force to deal with the 21st-century hipster breakfast of choice. Ha! Next time my friend refused a dinner date on the grounds that she would rather commune with a bowl of cereal, I would have no choice but to mention him. Several times. In my best (native) Yorkshire accent. To be serious, though, there is a circle here – for me, and perhaps for you. Titchmarsh's edict, a statement to which the Times devoted a leader column, plots the story of our lives in breakfasts. Once, after all, it was so simple: cereal, toast and tea came as standard; a full English was a treat if you were away for the weekend. But then, eggs benedict having already mounted its gooey putsch, about a decade ago things turned fully shakshuka. If it sounds spoilt to talk of the tyranny of choice in the context of breakfast, all I can say is don't you always feel slightly anxious when you utter the words 'just toast, please' at a hotel, as if you're somehow letting down your waiter? In my childhood, breakfast was only ever toast. Cereal was eaten first thing by kids in TV ads, but in our house it was reserved for post-school hunger, to be consumed in the moments between taking off your coat and Grange Hill. Avocados, of course, were highly exotic, even rare: in restaurants, they were the starter that succeeded (after decades) fruit juice or half a grapefruit. Did this exoticism lie behind the sudden craze, in the early 1980s, for avocado bathroom suites? I've always wondered about this. But either way, according to memory, they tasted much better then – by which I mean that they tasted of something, even if it was only the olive oil you lugged home from France in the Datsun and a little light social progress. When I was a student, I rarely ate breakfast: if I was up early enough for there to be a wait for lunch, a Mars bar would do it (I was like Prof Tim delay-your-breakfast-for-the-sake-of-your-gut Spector avant la lettre). In my twenties, I ate bad Danish pastries that were delivered to our desks in the newsroom via a trolley as compensation for the fact that we were indentured. My thirties were the restaurant years, when I spent far too much on what was by now called brunch. My forties, when I was newly and happily married, was the era of devotedly making bacon sandwiches for my beloved (OK, I still do this). And now, here we are, preparing to cancel avocados. Personally, I won't be bereft; I never got with the programme so far as smashing them goes. Yet still I salute their unlikely journey. In their huge stones, knobbly skins and propensity for causing hand injuries, I see an island nation desperately seeking sophistication. To pinch from TS Eliot, in our beginning is our end. In succession, breakfast dishes rise and fall. We turn back now to our Weetabix gratefully, tasting its particular nothingness afresh.
