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The National Life Story Collection

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The National Life Story Collection Ann Meo Page 1 This transcription was provided in 2015 by the AHRC-funded ‘History of Women in British Film and Television project, 1933-1989’, led by Dr Melanie Bell (Principal Investigator, Leeds University) and Dr Vicky Ball (Co-Investigator, De Montfort University). COPYRIGHT: No use may be made of any interview material without the permission of the BECTU History Project (http://www.historyproject.org.uk/). Copyright of interview material is vested in the BECTU History Project (formerly the ACTT History Project) and the right to publish some excerpts may not be allowed. CITATION: Women’s Work in British Film and Television, Ann Meo, http://bufvc.ac.uk/bectu/oral- histories/bectu-oh [date accessed] By accessing this transcript, I confirm that I am a student or staff member at a UK Higher Education Institution or member of the BUFVC and agree that this material will be used solely for educational, research, scholarly and non-commercial purposes only. I understand that the transcript may be reproduced in part for these purposes under the Fair Dealing provisions of the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. For the purposes of the Act, the use is subject to the following: The work must be used solely to illustrate a point The use must not be for commercial purposes The use must be fair dealing (meaning that only a limited part of work that is necessary for the research project can be used) The use must be accompanied by a sufficient acknowledgement. Guidelines for citation and proper acknowledgement must be followed (see above). It is prohibited to use the material for commercial purposes and access is limited exclusively to UK Higher Education staff and students and members of BUFVC. I agree to the above terms of use and that I will not edit, modify or use this material in ways that misrepresent the interviewees’ words, might be defamatory or likely to bring BUFVC, University of Leeds or my HEI into disrepute. Ann Meo Page 2 BECTU History Project Interview no: 384 Interviewee: Ann Meo Interviewer: Duration: 01:32:24 [00:00:00] Recording of Ann Meo, approximately twenty-fifth of May, 1996 in France, talking about her days in television. When I was in sound, in radio, I did a tremendous lot of editing and mucking about with tape and everything went round, either to left or to right on things that turned like wheels, and then as time went on… Reel-to-reel. No, but I mean the controls you used, you turned them in what was in fact a natural movement because everybody had screwed a bottle top on or done something like that, and then by degrees when television began to come in they started having things like this. And I just do not believe that you can get as sensitive a movement, whatever you’re doing, going up and down a sloping board like that as you can when you open the old-fashioned pot, which you could do very, very delicately. And I used to say to these young chaps in television, ‘I don’t know how you can do it with those awful things you have to push up and down’, and they used to look at me open-mouthed and say, ‘Why, what used you to do?’ And they literally didn’t know, you know, that in the old days when you wanted things to be louder you turned it up to the right and when you wanted it softer you turned them down to the left. That’s the sort of stuff we want to hear about. And then the other thing that astonished me was the first job I did for the BBC was to edit the entire recording of the Test Match at the Oval – well you’re a cricket expert – what was the very famous Test Match in about the ‘46/47, something like that? With Hutton and… Ann Meo Page 3 Could it have been ’53? No, it was earlier than that. It was Hutton and Compton I think. Anyway, they had done this revolutionary thing for the BBC, they had recorded the whole match on steel tape, which was on reels about two feet across, huge things. And the only way you could edit it was with an acetylene welder. [laughter] And I was shut up for weeks at Maida Vale editing this enormous five – what was it – five days of cricket on these terrible reels and they used to fall off the reels occasionally and you’d get miles and miles in a terrible… clanking tin tape and I suppose ought not to say it, but there was a terrible man who was the technician, I won’t say his name, but he would have been had up for sexual harassment, as they say now. I didn’t care, but oh, he was a nuisance. And I had these two huge machines and every time I wanted a bit I used to say to him, ‘Stop it there, now play it back, now cut it there and join it up’. And he used to get a thing like a pair of pliers, chop it in half and put it on the welding thing, zzz, zzz, and join it together. [laughter] And all those things are now sitting on terrible old vinyl recordings somewhere in the archives and I hope I made the right decisions, but I don’t think I missed any of the real high points. But a more extravagant way of trying to create an archive, I can’t imagine. So what sort of speed would those tapes go through, these great metal things? Very slowly. I don’t remember what they were classed at, but they must have been something less than thirty… they went round slower than thirty-three and a third. Mm. Imagine they were fifteen or something. Those huge discs that were made for, what was it called? The Transcription Service, you know, the things that were sent abroad. But it was all very unhandy. How did you get into television in the first place? By accident, like everything else. I went to see Mrs Carrington, I think even by marriage no relation to Dora Carrington, but she was the appointments officer of the University of London and I happened to discover that they had bought a house in Gordon Square which Ann Meo Page 4 used to belong to Adrian Stephen and I was down there and I thought, oh good gracious, they must be, those offices must be in the bedroom where I used to stay when I went to stay with Judith. And just for a joke when I discovered Mrs Carrington was in one of them, I went in to see her and I said to her, ‘Your office is in my bedroom’ and she said, ‘What do you mean?’ and we had a bit of a chat. And I said, ‘And in any case, I need a job’. And she said, ‘Oh do you? Yes’ she said, ‘of course the trouble with you is you’d be an ideal employee but you don’t look well on paper’. [04:57] And I said, ‘No, I know I don’t. Anyway, never mind, I’m going to go off to do…’ whatever I was going to do, and five minutes after I left the office she had a call from the Encyclopaedia Britannica who were looking for somebody who might be able to write quiz questions, because the television industry had been told after the Carl [Charles] Van Doren scandal that no longer should quiz questions be written in the house, they must be done by a respectable exterior body, and they’d asked the Encyclopaedia Britannica to do it, who of course had grabbed at it and said yes and hadn’t got anybody to do it, or at least they had, but, you know, nobody who had the right qualifications. And so I went down to see the Encyclopaedia Britannica and found this amazing sort of amateurish cock-up going on [laughter] and there was a very, very shrewd managing director, who said, ‘Yes, I think you’re just the person we want’ and within about twenty-four hours I was installed in an office and told to write quiz questions. [laughter] Oh! There was a frightfully nice boy called Francis Celoria doing it and he’d been the archaeology editor – why they chose him, God knows – he’d been the archaeology editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and he’d just been fired into this seat, you do the quiz questions. And he was a terribly nice, terribly intelligent boy but he had no more idea of what he was doing than fly to the moon, and he was fearfully nervous, he was always clutching his fly buttons. [laughter] Anyway, poor boy, I hadn’t been in the office more than about three weeks when this managing director called me into his office and said, ‘Listen, I’m going to give you Francis Celoria’s job, but he’s a very nice boy and I’m going to move him sideways and I don’t want to hurt his feelings and we must do it so that he’s got a move up’, etc, etc. So we went through this farce and Francis was sent to tell me, ‘I’ve got a wonderful new job, they’re talking me off this television quiz business’, etc, etc. So I said, ‘Oh, how marvellous, that is good news’, you know.
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