Our speaker at the September general meeting, Alex Leger, had spent 36 years working in the BBC, mainly as a producer for the Blue Peter programme, which incredibly you can still see on TV today.
He’d developed an interest in Blue Peter whilst an engineering student at Loughborough University, but it took a spell in the army and several attempts before he got an ‘attachment’ position at BBC. Chance opportunities then eventually took him onto the Blue Peter programme.
Alex told us so many wonderful and amusing stories, brought to life by video clips. In 1977 for example the much loved John Noakes was filmed climbing 169 feet to the top of Nelson's Column. When he'd scaled the tricky overhang at the top, the sound man had recorded an ‘unusable comment’ from John as he got there. So he had to do it all over again. John always looked for a joke in his presentation.
Another memorable moment many of us could remember was Lulu, the rogue baby elephant. Totally uncontrollable, the little animal, peeing and pooing, dragged his poor keeper round in circles to hilarious laughter.
Blue Peter was always keen to push the boundaries. Alex told us, whilst filming the eruption of Mount Etna in 1983, suddenly confronted by a roadblock of molten lava, his carefully pre-prepared script was blown out of the window. The presenter's report had to be spontaneous. A big risk in those days - film stock was too expensive to be wasted. But it worked.
And new technology ushered in another milestone. Cameras began to go digital in the 1980s. They got lighter and more portable so producers started to become cameramen too. We saw some great footage that Alex had taken himself of gorillas in Uganda.
But for Alex, 36 years in the business was a long time. TV production is mainly a young person’s field. And when the BBC Television Centre in West London was sold in 2012, Alex decided to ‘get out before he was found out’, as he put it. He now does around 40 talks a year, to organisations like ours, and on cruise ships. And what a brilliant speaker he is!