One of the less well publicised jobs at BBC Television – The man with the gun

BBC Television Centre in London. Big studio doors. Big airborne problems.

Yesterday, someone asked me if working as a researcher on BBC TV News’ early teletext service CEEFAX was my first job at a TV company.

No. It was my third.

My first was working as a Services Clerk in Central Services at BBC Television Centre.

They looked after the physical maintenance of the building and things like furniture and carpets. Not glamorous.

If people had problems with their radiators or lights or paintwork or phones, desks, windows or rats & mice and much more… In fact, if you had any problem with any of the fabric of the building or the stuff in your office… the central department you contacted was Central Services where two clerks answered the phones and four other people farmed out the problems to the actual people who could sort them out.

I was one of the two clerks who answered the phones.

I think maybe it was no coincidence that Terry Gilliam – who was one of the Monty Python team based at Television Centre at the time – called the rather bureaucratic plumbing/electrical maintenance organisation in his film Brazil Central Services.

I worked in Central Services for one year during which the BBC carpenters, electricians and general maintenance people were (from memory) about 30% understaffed (and they were – possibly not unconnected – about 30% underpaid too). During my time, there was a three-day week and there was an infestation of mice on the third floor. How the little bastards got up there, I don’t know. And I don’t mean the people who phoned in to complain.

It was very busy.

After that first non-programme-making job at the BBC, the high pressure deadlines of programme making were a dawdle in comparison.

People tended to shout at you a lot because things didn’t get done quickly.

I remember justly-famed BBC producer Dennis Main Wilson (Till Death Us Do Part apart many other shows) throwing a fairly-justified strop in the office one day, flouncing out and attempting to slam the door behind him but it had a Briton spring and so closed in slow motion with no noise. At least that one door worked in the building.

One of the things which had to be sorted out was the occasional problem of pigeons and other birds in studios.

The studios at Television Centre had big scene dock doors – like a film studio. They often had to be left open. Birds occasionally got in. Not often, but sometimes. Usually pigeons.

If you had a TV show in the studio, you did not want a bird squawking or flying around or shitting on the performers and set during the recording or – even worse – during a live show.

Studios are big. They have high roofs. It is virtually impossible to get a bird out quickly, if at all.

So what do you do? What did we do?

The answer is we phoned Rentokil, who sent a man round sharpish with a rifle and he shot the bird. He had to be a skilled marksman. Because the roofs of TV studios are covered with tens, perhaps hundreds of lights and there are electric cables everywhere.

For the sake of the nation’s entertainment, many a bird has been shot.

It is, perhaps, one of the less well publicised, yet vital, jobs in television.

Why I was dragged into a cellar in Essex and a gun shoved into my mouth

The first time I met Comedy Cafe owner Noel Faulkner was shortly before I got dragged down into a basement in north east London and had a gun shoved in my mouth while former boxer, hairdresser, comedian and now EastEnders actor and film director Ricky Grover shouted at me, “You’re a fucking cunt! You’re a fucking cunt! I’m gonna fuckin’ blow yer fuckin’ head off!”

He was not a happy man.

In fact, he had ‘lost it’ – his eyes were blazing at me, his voice had gone up in pitch, he was sweating and shaking with uncontrollable anger.

Noel Faulkner was supposed to be directing a documentary at the time, though I think he and the crew were left upstairs when I was dragged downstairs.

Your memory strangely forgets some details when you are being threatened with a bloody death by a large man who knows from professional experience how to hurt people.

In the sadly largely-reviled movie Killer Bitch, I played the part of a charity collector who was, I felt, unfairly gunned-down in the street while collecting money on the pavement for Help For Heroes. I was shot in the face by a rather grumpy character played by Big Joe Egan (although, off-screen Big Joe was extremely charming and I am sure will go far on Irish charm alone).

I am, alas, not in Ricky Grover’s new movie Big Fat Gypsy Gangster – a major casting blunder by the normally spot-on Ricky – but I was in a showreel version he shot several years ago to raise money for the project. At that time and, indeed, until very recently the movie project was called Bulla: The Movie and I played the part of a bank manager who was, I felt, unfairly brutalised by Ricky’s character Bulla.

“Can’t I play a more sexy role?” I asked Ricky at the time. “Is there no dashing romantic role for me?”

Ricky replied with, I felt, unnecessary honesty: “I’ve always thought you looked like a bank manager, John.”

I tried to take it as a compliment.

So that was how I ended up in the basement of a disused bank on some suburban Essex high road in north east London with a gun being stuck in my mouth – I think it might have been Woodford Green.

I have never seen the footage, but I think I carried it off with the style for which I am known.

The character I played is not in the actually-shot version of the film, although there is a brief similar scene in a bank vault towards the end. Perhaps Ricky is saving me for a romantic role in his next film.

But there is the thought lingering in dark recesses at the back of my mind that perhaps he cast me because he had always wanted to degrade me and stick the barrel of a gun in my mouth.

There are worse things which can happen to you in the wonderful world of film making.

Noel Faulkner has been replaced by an American.

An unsettling story about an illegal gun and “an awful lot of firepower out there”

In a recent blog, I mentioned that mad inventor John Ward – a man of often admirable creative eccentricity – used to have a gun licence for several weapons. It was not something I ever found reassuring.

He now tells me this true story…

_____

One evening in the early 1990s, before the Dunblane massacre, I was at my local shooting range. It was not unusual for members to bring guests.

The evening went on its merry way with members blasting away at paper targets and seeing who had the best score. Then, at the end of the night, as we were clearing up to go home, a guest who had been watching asked:

“Does anybody mind if I use of the target area?”

No-one did.

So he went to the boot of his car, dragged out a bag and walked back to the shooting area which was a wall about twenty feet high and twelve feet wide made from old wooden railway sleepers because, as well as being a ‘stopping point’ for all the bullets fired in its direction, it ‘soaked up’ the bullets and prevented any ricochets.

The guest unwrapped his weapon and it was a German MP 40 machine pistol – also called the Schmeisser sub machine gun – of the sort that is a staple of World War 2 films when the German side is shown with automatic weapons – think Where Eagles Dare. It is the cheaper-made model that derived from the MP 38 but, for all that, it still killed folk efficiently.

Its magazine holds 40 rounds of 9mm ammo. It is not a sporting gun by any stretch of the imagination and, as such, was/is a banned weapon on these shores for obvious reasons and can only be legally owned by a very few people or dealers who hold a Home Office Section 5 Licence.

So we stood there with our mouths wide open and the silence was deafening. Our guest then inserted a magazine into the forward section of the MP 40, cocked the weapon, turned to us and said:

“I’m not sure how this is going to go as I have had it years and I’m not sure what noise it gives out.”

With that, we put our fingers in our ears – we had already cleared away our ear defenders/ear muffs – and… BBBBBBBBBBBBRRRRRRRRRR as our guest emptied a full magazine of forty 9mm bullets at the target area in about ten seconds – much like Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood in Where Eagles Dare in fact!

As the smoke cleared, he turned to us and said:

“Well! – that seemed to go alright, didn’t it?”

And, with that, he took the magazine out, thanked us, proceeded to put it back in the bag with the gun and took it to the boot of his car and drove off.

Afterwards, oddly, nobody could recall just who had brought him along as a guest…

For the next few weeks, I scanned the newspapers to see if there had been any ‘bank jobs’ done locally but there were none.

That was almost twenty years ago.

All this was and is illegal and, if caught with an MP 40, one’s future holiday arrangements might be arranged by Her Majesty for the next twenty years, but the streets of this country are nowadays awash with far more of this sort of stuff than ever before.

There is even more firepower in the MAC-10, which has 32 rounds of 9mm held a stick magazine housed in the pistol grip – a .45 calibre option was/is also available. The MAC-10 can empty its magazine in about 2 to 3 seconds flat.

It was put on test by the SAS but they refused to adopt it as it was inaccurate unless  – I quote – “you were having a fire fight in a telephone box”.

The MAC-10 is now a common fashion accessory among British drug gangs.

There is an awful lot of ‘firepower’ out there, perhaps some of it nearer than you might think.