A small postscript…
Whilst not strictly within the remit of this website, it is perhaps worth recording that during the time of the ‘three-day week’ in the winter of ’73/’74, the Questor’s Theatre in Ealing was taken over by the BBC and used as a studio. At least three live programmes were transmitted from here. One, hosted by David Dimbleby, had Uri Geller as a guest. It is said that this show was the first time that he demonstrated his famous spoon-bending trick on live TV. Well I never.
Thanks to Richard Broadhurst for this little gem. Ian Dow has since added to it…
‘…One of the cameramen cast doubts during the derig. Uri asked for his car key, and bent it before his eyes. He had to get a taxi home as he couldn’t get it into the ignition!’
In fact, I’m told by Bob Scrivener that the BBC had used The Questors before this, in the late sixties. There were at least two hour-long programmes screened on BBC2 called Something Special. One featured Humphrey Littleton introducing some trad jazz and the other starred The Four Tops.
Yet another post script…
Mark Mumford informs me that another theatre was taken over for a while and used as a temporary studio by the BBC. This was the Westminster Theatre in Victoria. He thinks this happened some time in the early to mid 1980s. Serviced by an OB unit it became the home of shows like Parkinson, My Music and a show about music hall performers called The Old Boy Network with Frankie Howerd, Arthur Askey, Jack Warner and several others. Alec Guinness was one of the guests on Parkinson – fresh from the latest Star Wars movie, so that would date it probably as 1983 when Return of the Jedi was released. Initially, I assumed that this was because a number of studios had closed at TVC to remove asbestos but that happened in 1988. Why this theatre had to be used is a bit of a mystery. TC4 was undergoing a major refurb in 1983 so it’s possible they simply ran out of studio space at a busy time of the year.
