BBC 2 Aborted Launch Night BBC 2 Aborted Launch Night A special welcome if you've found yourself here after doing some Googling as a result of tonight's (17th April) The One Show piece about the disasterous BBC TWO launch night. Yes, that was me showing Giles Brenreth the original tape! We filmed that segment of the piece at the BBC's new archive centre in West London. When BBC2 launched on April 20th 1964, widespread power failure in Central London prevented the channel from broadcasting its intended schedule from BBC Television Centre, which was affected by the power cut. Instead, the channel launched with a short news bulletin, read by reporter Gerald Priestland, from the BBC's news studios in Alexandra Palace, followed by an evening of instrumental music from contemporary west end musicals and "BBC 2 WILL START SHORTLY" captions occasionally interrupted by "MAJOR POWER FALIURE" captions accompanied by apologetic announcements explaining why people weren't able to watch Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate or fireworks from Southend Pier. Even this short broadcast was dogged with technical difficulties - the first two and a half minutes were broadcast in complete silence, with Priestland completely unaware we couldn't hear him.

BBC 2's first scheduled programme was in fact Playschool, broadcasting the following morning. A second "launch" programme, which featured the now famous scene of presenter Denis Tuohy blowing out a candle in the darkened studio was shown as part of the news bulletin later in the evening, which is just as well as it's now folklore that someone had forgotten to put hands on the studio clock for the intended first night! Since all the recording equipment at BBC Television Centre were out of action, the only recordings of the aborted launch programme were believed to be amateur audio recordings made by enthusiasts in their homes. No video was believed to exist since video recorders were very rare in 1964, well out of the price range of a household (then, about �100,000). Until now. Early in February 2003, an engineer was sorting out tapes in BBC Research & Development's modest tape archive at Kingswood Warren in Surrey when he came across a 2 inch Quad spool tape with associated paperwork reading "Opening of BBC 2" dated 20th April 1964.

The archive itself comprises mainly of experimental HDTV recordings but it seems the 2 inch spool had been kept as an example of obsolete technology after an extensive clear out in the mid '90s. Since the only Quad tape machines that now exist in the BBC in London are based in the main archive at Windmill Road, it was several days before it was indeed confirmed that the tapes did contain the original news bulletin in its entirety. The tape was made on Kingswood Warren's own Quad recorder on the evening of launch, off-air from Crystal Palace, and the recording was in very good condition - almost as good as the day it was recorded! What's most remarkable about the tape is that back in 1964 (only 7 years after the first high-band video recorder had been invented), tapes were very expensive and were routinely bulk erased and re-used (I'm told that this spool would have costed around �100 in 1964!). The fact that this tape survived provides what's believed to be the earliest surviving recording off-air of a 625 line broadcast in the UK and probably the world.

The original spool alongside a conventional VHS tape for scale comparison A detail of the label on the spool The recording gives a remarkable insight into what news broadcasts were like in the mid 1960s. Today, the production gallery communicates with the news reader using talk-back through an ear piece worn by the presenter, with the news usually being read off auto-cue. In this recording, the news reader reads from cards on his desk, with a single card for each news item. Twice, breaking news items were brought in from a teletype by one of the men sitting behind him, and on more than one occasion, Priestland is interrupted by phone calls from the production gallery. The first phone call, like the broadcast had a technical difficulty and Priestland couldn't hear the other person! The news stories themselves seem remarkably trivial by today's standards; the very first story we hear after the sound is restored is about a Yorkshire bus conductress who was sacked and then given her job back after she appologised to some Pakistani men to whom she'd made some racist remarks, which are repeated in full by the news presenter!

As news of the tape's discovery spread, Ariel, the BBC's in-house news paper took an interest and ran this story the following week: Dusted down - a piece of BBC Two's history By Clare Barrett It's a well documented piece of broadcasting history: the major power failure that blacked out Television Centre, together with most of Central and West London, and scuppered the launch of BBC Two on April 20, 1964. The channel did come to life briefly via a hurriedly rearranged broadcast from the BBC's news operation at Alexandra Palace in north London. But with TV Centre's recording facilities also falling foul of the power cut, no archive tape exists� or so it was thought. Thirty nine years on, staff at Kingswood Warren have stumbled across a recording of BBC Two's first moments in a dusty corner of their tape archive. 'It was unbelievable to find that an off-air recording of the aborted launch had been made at Kingswood - and that the tape still existed', said research and development engineer James Insell. 'It was even more remarkable that the tape had not been reused - the fate of most '60s VT.

The quadruplex video tape claimed to be a high band 625 line recording - probably the oldest surviving UK example'. Insell called on the BBC's film and video tape library in Brentford to verify the tape's contents. Senior technical operator Edwin Parsons ran the tape on one of the BBC's two surviving quad VTRs, transferring the contents to a modern digital format. 'After what seemed like hours of test signal, the screen went black', said Insell. 'Then, as if it was recorded yesterday, video appeared of a man at a desk, with a '2' on a large piece of card beside him.' It was news reader Gerald Priestland, who explained what had happened and delivered a news bulletin - interrupted a couple of times by phone calls - from Ally Pally. The recording may be no great shakes as entertainment - far from the promised launch line-up which included Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate and fireworks from Southend Pier - but it does provide the missing piece of the jigsaw for the channel, celebrating its 40th birthday next year.

Instead of the promised BBC 2 launch line-up, including fireworks and Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate, a resigned looking Gerald Priestland had to deliver the bad news on that fateful, in between fielding calls from Alexandra Palace. The article isn't clear on the origin of the broadcast - it came from studio A at Alexandra Palace, where the original experiments on television were made using Baird & EMI Marconi camera equipment. BBC 1 also switched over to emergency cover at Alexandra Palace, showing films instead of the scheduled lineup. There was another news bulletin from Alexandra Palace at around 10:35 that evening. It is believed that no copies of this exist and the engineers at Kingswood Warren had given up and gone home long before then. Since the Ariel article was published, the engineer who made the original recording, now retired, has been in touch with the BBC and I have since had the opportunity to meet him. He informed me that the recording itself was an achievement against adversity!

Although the power hadn't failed at Kingswood Warren, the power cut in the centre of London had caused the power supply in the south east of England to alter by several volts and more significantly for the sensitive video equipment, the phase had also significantly changed and was continually changing meaning the equipment had to be re-calibrated on the fly. He described this process as operating the machine "like a spinning dervish with a screw driver"! I can confirm he did a superb job - the recording only loses lock once briefly during the entire broadcast. I've been told that a more recent transfer from the tape has even managed to correct this problem. The effort however was worth it and 39 years on, a significant event in British television history has been recovered for the archive. The broadcast has now been transferred to digital tape meaning that deterioration of the original spool is no longer an issue. It's remarkable that it has remained in such good condition for as long as early Quad tapes were known to deteriorate quite badly over time, depositing chunks of oxide on the spinning head.

Personally, I hope this will be shown to the public soon as it gives a wonderful view of how current affairs programmes appeared in the 1960s and also how the BBC coped with a disaster which put all it's major broadcasting facilities out of action in London. The First Public Screening The "world premiere" screening of this recording took place on September 3rd 2003 at an annual gathering organised by the Alexandra Palace Television Society and the Test Card Circle for their members. Coincidentally, the screening not only took place in Alexandra Palace where the broadcast originated, but it was shown in Studio A, the very studio used by BBC2 on the night of the power cut! The projection screen was even situated roughly where the news desk was originally situated! This of course added a lot of atmosphere to the event! Being in the studio where the world's first regularly scheduled television service started on September 2nd 1936 was a fantastic experience. Today, the studio looks very much as it did then, though most of the lighting has now been removed and the walls are now lined with antique television and radio equipment.

Although both studios and associated machine rooms are now closed to the public, Studio A is part of the regular conducted tours of Alexandra Palace. See their web site for more details. Studio A is the only part of the building now accessible as the rest of the "BBC Area" including the original Baird Studio B is now quite derelict. "Where can I see it? Is it going to be shown on television?" Extracts of this historic broadcast were shown on television for the first time since the original broadcast in 1964 on BBC2's anniversary programme "Happy Birthday BBC2", being shown on 20th April 2004 (8pm - 11pm on BBC 2 - where else?). That week's Radio Times even has a picture of the "BBC 2 WILL START SHORTLY" caption shown above. The Alexandra Palace screening mentioned above was given to members of the aforementioned societies only, but the first time it was shown publicly in its entirety was during The 10th Anniversary Missing Believed Wiped event at the national Film Theatre in London on 29th November.

This event proved so popular that it's being re-screened there (again in its entirety) on the 17th April as part of a special presentation about the history of BBC 2. On BBC2's 40th birthday, BBCi put a short Real Media clip of the broadcast online. The clip consists of the first 6 minutes of the broadcast (the second half is essentially a repeat of the first - with sound!) Unfortunately, for some inexplicable reason, the clip has been cropped down to 16:9 losing quite a bit of detail on the top and bottom of the picture. You can see the clip here , or from following the link on this page . The clip is quite obviously captured from a DVD presentation originally made to show to staff at Kingswood Warren (I recognise the "don't adjust your sets" caption!). April 17th addenum: Having reviewed these links again, the technology used for the video clip on the BBC web site is so out of date that most PCs and tablets will no longer play the video!

However, the Alexanra Palace Tlevision Society and You Tube have come to the rescue and you can now watch the video by clicking on the following two links for the broadcast in its entirety: Part 1 and Part 2 With the 50th anniversary of BBC TWO coming up in late April 2014, I know for certain that segments of this original broadcast will be shown as part of this celebration. In deed, some clips were shown on BBC ONE's The One Show on 17th April 2014 about the rediscovery of this very tape. I was acutally interviewed by Gyles Branderyth about my involvement it the tape's re-discovery on the programme at the BBC Archive Centre (flying in from Cork, Ireland just for a day for the filming). Those reading this after the transmission date have 7 days to watch the programme as it aired on the BBC iPlayer. What's your involvement in all this? I was one of the people involved in the tape's discovery and the one who first realized the significance of the find.

It's been known for some time that a tape of BBC2's launch night existed in the Kingswood Warren tape archive, but it was either believed to be the Dennis Tuohy re-launch on the 21st April 1964, or its significance wasn't realized by the people who handled it. In February 2003, a colleague showed me the tape after finding it during a routine clear up of the archive (no, nothing was being thrown away!!). As soon as I read the label, I realized that if what the label said was true, I had something that "didn't exist" in my hands. I rushed the tape to another colleague who has contacts in the main BBC archive, who still have video machines capable of playing the QUAD format. Within a few days, the tape had been transferred to a digital format for preservation and confirmed that it was in fact the aborted launch of the 20th April 1964. It's always been a dream of mine of finding a "lost episode" of a series such as Dr.

Who or Dad's Army, but I never thought I'd be this instrumental in finding something so integral to the very history of broadcasting in the UK - a tape of a broadcast that's gone down in UK broadcasting folklore as never have been in existance in the first place...! Addenum Since I wrote this piece, BBC Research & Development have left their Kingswood Warren facilites in Surrey and moved to Manchester and a location near central London - the BBC decided to sell the 19th century mansion that housed its purpose built labs, studios and in some cases totally world unique facilities, and surrounding land to property developers who have turned the entire mansion and surrounding location into "millionaire's properties". R.I.P. BBC Kingswood Warren, the birth place or major facilitator of colour television, NICAM Stereo, DAB, Teletext, Digital Terrestrial Broadcasting (Freeview) and so many other technologies that wouldn't have happened were it not for the "boffins" who worked there. I hope your new owners will love you and your quirks as we did when we were your residents.

21st March 2003 BFI Screenonline: TV Technology since 1936) 600-line colour transmitted from Baird 's remaining test facility adjacent to the ruins of the Crystal Palace , destroyed by fire along with his extensive TV studios in 1936. Baird 's work may have given Peter Goldmark in the United States the inspiration to design the CBS colour system, which also featured a rotating colour wheel coupled with electronic scanning. However, while Baird was undoubtedly the father of television, the poor reliability of his rotating discs and mirrors meant that his systems ultimately proved impractical for broadcasting and for use in the home, although his flying spot scanner formed the basis of the primary method of televising film for years, and rotating mirror drums scanning and colour wheels have had application in certain types of space probe cameras. It was not until 1955 that the BBC began to experiment with colour television and test transmissions began, using a version of America's now-standard NTSC system, modified for 405-line, 50Hz operation.

Tests were broadcast from the Alexandra Palace transmitter in North London, the original home of the BBC Television Service , after hours from 10 October 1955, and then, late the following year, from the new Crystal Palace BBC transmitter before it came into service. Nobody other than the few engineers and manufacturers who were involved in the tests would have seen these transmissions in colour; the public would have seen them, and their rather low-key test card, in black and white. There were also doubts about introducing a colour 405-line VHF service when much of the rest of Europe was already considering a higher definition UHF standard. In 1953, top designer Abram Games had devised the world's first animated TV ident, the 'BBC Television Symbol', with its eye, rotating rings and lightning flashes - referred to by modern television enthusiasts (but never at the time) as the 'bat's wings'.

Games later produced a related tuning signal - similarly referred to as the 'angel's wings' - that was in use from 1956, and a special colour version of this was produced for the tests in 1957, featuring coloured panels on the 'wings' and a picture at the centre of BBC announcer Sylvia Peters. In the same year, the BBC expanded its programme of colour tests, still using NTSC, to UHF. The relatively new commercial television network was also interested in colour, and carried out its own tests. In 1960, ABC Television, serving the Midlands and the North at weekends, experimented not only with the French colour system, SECAM (a sequential-frame system that conceptually had quite a lot in common with Goldmark's CBS colour system but was all-electronic), but also with NTSC. May 1960 saw Parliament's Television Advisory Committee recommend the introduction of colour TV, specifying that it should be backwards compatible with monochrome broadcasts: in other words, viewers of a colour broadcast on a black and white set should see a reasonable picture.

However, the standards for colour TV were still up in the air and the Committee recommended that introduction should wait until the standards issue had been settled. At the beginning of June 1962, the Pilkington Committee's report recommended that colour TV should only be broadcast on UHF with the new 625-line UHF specification, following the allocation of Europe-wide UHF channels the previous year, but still left the standards issue undecided. Accordingly, in the same month the BBC began colour test transmissions, still in modified NTSC, in 625-line on UHF, along with monochrome 625-line tests for the forthcoming BBC 2 service on channels 33 and 34. They also carried out SECAM tests the following spring, and it was evident that there was still no agreement on standards for British colour. Meanwhile, the GPO carried out colour link tests via the Telstar 1 satellite - tests that were easily picked up in the US and thus constituted the first transatlantic colour television linkups.

The next era of British television began officially with the (monochrome) opening of BBC 2 on the evening of 20 April 1964 - although opening night was ruined by a major power failure. ITV and radio, along with the BBC 's news facility at Alexandra Palace were unaffected, and London weekday independent contractor Rediffusion offered to transmit the new channel's opening programmes, though it proved impossible to link the systems together in time. BBC 1 continued by broadcasting from Alexandra Palace, but instead of the new channel's planned opening night, newsreader Gerald Priestland appeared from the Ally Pally newsroom, initially without sound, and explained what had happened. The evening continued with a programme of music and apologies until a further news bulletin at 10pm and closedown. The next day, with emergency generators on standby, the programme Play School , broadcast as scheduled at 11am, unexpectedly became the first programme from BBC 2. That evening the channel showed the items planned for the opening night, which this time went without a hitch, opening with a memorable moment when announcer Denis Tuohy blew out a candle symbolising the previous night's events.

To apparently add to the confusion but ultimately to settle it, the previous year had seen the announcement from Germany of the new PAL (Phase Alternate Line) colour TV system. This built on the structure of the existing American colour standard but fixed several of the problems that dogged the US system in a broadcast environment. While NTSC worked quite well over wires in the TV studio, once it was radiated from a transmitter, multipath reflections and other problems caused all kinds of colour shifts, as had been noted years before in the US FCC hearings. Indeed, television engineers referred to 'NTSC' as 'Never Twice the Same Colour' (while the radically different French SECAM system was dubbed 'System Essentially Contrary to the American Method'). PAL fixed the main colour stability issue by changing the phase of the colour subcarrier every line, largely cancelling out colour errors - curiously enough a modification that had been proposed before the NTSC system was finalised, but never implemented. It looked great - 'Perfection At Last'. The BBC 's experimental UHF NTSC tests ceased, to be replaced by PAL tests beginning in the afternoon trade tests from 26 May 1965, and the decision to use PAL for British colour television was taken the following year.

The independent television companies had also been working away, with ATV having begun colour experiments towards the end of 1962. The ITV companies, seeing the importance of colour (several were looking at adding colour production capability, if only for the US market) but not relishing the additional transmitter rental charges on a whole new set of UHF transmitters - which would have to be far more numerous to cover the population than the relatively long-range VHF network - advocated operating an ITV 405-line VHF colour service in parallel with the BBC 's second channel UHF service, an option that would have made dual-standard sets even more complicated than they already were. ABC was perhaps the most advanced in terms of colour equipment, and as late as 1965 it was demonstrating 405-line VHF colour to the Press Association. ATV began colour production in earnest in 1965, while Television Wales and West (TWW) , ABC and Rediffusion made some of their last productions in colour in 1967 before losing their franchises.

BBC2 began a limited, but scheduled, colour service on 1 July 1967, with transmissions live from Wimbledon (a favourite for BBC OB test transmissions of new technology), preceded for a few weeks by colour broadcasting of certain shows and, of course, colour Trade Test films and the famous Test Card F with its centre photo of Carol Hersee, the daughter of the engineer who designed it. Initially the service covered London, southern England, the midlands and the north. Due to the lack of colour production facilities, the majority of early colour programming consisted of outside broadcasts and movies until the conversion of Television Centre studios 6 and 8, but by the end of 1967 BBC2 colour broadcasting had extended into the South West and South Wales, southeast and eastern England, and by early December the channel was broadcasting over three quarters of its schedule in colour. After the first year of a full colour schedule from BBC2 , there were over 100,000 colour sets in Britain.

The government announced in May 1969 that colour transmissions from ITV and BBC 1 would begin on 15 November, and two months later British audiences saw colour television pictures from the Apollo 11 spacecraft on its way to the moon - interestingly, the camera used for these shots used a spinning colour wheel. In September and October respectively, ITV 50 years of BBC2: from David Brent to the Blackstuff | Television & radio | The Guardian The Observer 50 years of BBC2: from David Brent to the Blackstuff As the channel celebrates its half-centenary, key figures behind some of its landmark programmes – from Arena and The Office to Boys From the Blackstuff – pay tribute to the channel that tore up the TV rulebook Ricky Gervais’s monstrous creation David Brent shows off his dance moves in The Office.

Saturday 29 March 2014 20.05 EDT First published on Saturday 29 March 2014 20.05 EDT STEPHEN MERCHANT THE OFFICE, 2001 As a BBC trainee in the late 90s, Stephen Merchant made a short film in which he cast his friend, Ricky Gervais, as the awful boss of a small paper firm. The short eventually became The Office , a sitcom first broadcast in 2001 which ran for two series and won multiple awards, including a pair of Golden Globes. With Gervais, Merchant went on to write and appear in two further BBC2 sitcoms, Extras and Life's Too Short . Now 39, he recently created and starred in the HBO comedy Hello Ladies. I remember, at university, being in a flatshare, and one day a flatmate flipping from BBC1 to ITV. Not even pausing on BBC2, she said: "Ah, there's nothing for me on there…" She was studying law! But it made me laugh, this idea that there was a whole audience who didn't even bother with BBC2 . That it had that reputation of being esoteric.

When we started writing The Office, I don't think we were ever thinking: "This is a BBC2 show." But certainly it felt it would fit there, slotting in to that lineage of comedy I'd seen on the channel. On BBC2 it felt like you could find an audience – that they would seek you out. Rather like that girl at university, people have to flip over to BBC2. They have to make an effort to get there. They're not just watching because of whatever was on before. I don't quite know what happened [in terms of the BBC allowing Merchant and Gervais, both unknowns, to write, direct and star in their own six-part comedy series]. I think it helped that The Office was going to be cheap. We weren't paying for stars. It was a very contained show, just that one location. It wasn't a huge gamble for them, either in terms of money or anxiety. Various people championed the show within the BBC , and we were given enough rope to hang ourselves, really. Pinterest I don't remember us sitting around worrying about what the audience figures were going to be. We were just pleased and relieved that we'd done something we were proud of.

We discovered much later that the BBC had tested it in front of an audience. It had got the lowest score ever, apart from women's bowls. TL ALAN BLEASDALE BOYS FROM THE BLACKSTUFF, 1982 Alan Bleasdale, a former teacher, is a writer and producer known for his social realism dramas. He wrote Boys from the Blackstuff in the late 70s but the series wasn't broadcast until 1982. Later described by the BFI as "TV's most complete dramatic response to the Thatcher era and as a lament to the end of a male, working-class British culture", it established him as one of Britain's most influential screenwriters. Bleasdale has since been responsible for GBH and The Sinking of the Laconia, among others. He is currently working on a new screenplay. My involvement with BBC2 was an accident. Michael Wearing (the producer) and David Rose (head of drama at BBC Birmingham, Pebble Mill) both wanted Boys From the Blackstuff to go on BBC1.

The controller of BBC1, Billy Cotton Jr, refused to have it for two years running, because he thought nobody would want to watch a six-part series about unemployed Liverpudlians wandering around the streets. In desperation, Michael Wearing went to Brian Wenham on BBC2. Wenham asked one question of Michael: "Do you think it's good?" Michael said: "Yes, I think so" and Brian said: "Off you go, then." That's how it got on to BBC2. I owe Wenham a colossal amount, as indeed do many people. If the controller of BBC1 had agreed to let it go out in 78/79, it may almost have gone unnoticed, because at that time unemployment wasn't the raging issue it was when the series came out… so it was spectacularly well timed. The reason I was ahead of my time was because anyone with any sensibilities who walked the streets of Liverpool would know something terrible was about to happen . I actually wrote the first three episodes under a Labour government. It was incredibly frustrating waiting around, though. I'd given up the ghost and thought it was never going to be made.

Pinterest [After one of the episodes went out], I remember being on the train from Liverpool to Sheffield. So many people – and they didn't have a clue who I was – were talking about Boys from the Blackstuff. Those moments are what everyone involved with television wants. The BBC should be talked about for all the right reasons. If we're not prepared to pay what is in real life a very small amount to sustain and develop the BBC as a whole, then I think there's something terribly wrong with the people who run our society. Whatever the variance and the quality year to year, I think the BBC is desperately important. KS JAMES MARSH ARENA, 1975 Director James Marsh, 50, was in his 20s when he joined Arena, the BBC2 arts strand that launched in 1975. He made his name with quixotic docs about Elvis, medieval animal trials and US murder sprees, and went on to direct Man on Wire, which won him an Oscar in 2009, as well as films such as 2012's Shadow Dancer .

My first job was at London Weekend Television , on a local arts programme, and we would worship at the feet of Arena. You would never know what you'd see from one week to the next. They enlarged on the grammar of what an arts show could be. It was around 1990 that I joined Arena. It was an extraordinary place – a lot of young, ambitious people exchanging ideas. Pawel Pawlikowski [a Bafta-winning film-maker] was there, and Paul Lee, now the head of ABC in America. Unimaginable, these days, but there was a culture of hedonism that seemed to go hand in hand with work. If you caught Anthony Wall [who ran Arena with Nigel Finch from 1985 to 1995 and who is still in charge of the strand] at the right moment in the bar, and had a good idea, you'd be doing it the next day. Anthony and Nigel were inspiring because they were also film-makers – very good ones. They led by example. You could go to them with any idea that you had, however crazy it was, and get an audience. The work I started to do there – there were no rules for it, it seemed.

The first film I made for Arena was in Latin. It was about animals that were put on trial for crimes against people in the middle ages. Then I made a feature-length documentary about the murder of Marvin Gaye by his father. Alan Yentob had just become the controller of BBC2 and he came from Arena. So there was someone at the top who understood what we were doing and encouraged it. There was a freedom to do ambitious, iconoclastic work. There are periods in the culture when things align and flourish in a certain kind of way, but it never lasts. I always look back at that time and feel very privileged. Documentaries, then, could support creative ambitions. You could take that form and do something surprising with it. I don't know what it's like now; I haven't been at the BBC for 15 years. A lot of us were flushed out in the 90s, paid off and made to leave. Which in the end was not a terrible thing. There was a sense that things were changing. The BBC became much more bureaucratic. We were made to compete for money. The bar did indeed become a gym.

A scenes from the 1999 Arena film Wisconsin Death Trip, which dramatised bizarre events in a US city using an archive of black-and-white photos. Photograph: © NFT The last film I made for Arena was Wisconsin Death Trip. That was probably the most whacked-out, experimental film I ever made. [It told the story of a series of killings in 19th-century America.] It was a real struggle – there wasn't the money for that kind of work any more, and the BBC didn't know what to make of it, [they] discouraged it. Of course, when it was made it did have some success, and it was released theatrically in cinemas. But that was a very difficult film to make. I wouldn't want to deplore what the BBC's become, because I enjoy what it was then. All the work I've done since I left the BBC goes back to my time on Arena, and if Man on Wire is the most successful film I've made, it definitely emerged from my apprenticeship at BBC2. Arena was a laboratory, we had freedom to experiment, and not every film worked. But it was worth the attempt to do something original.

Anthony and Nigel's mantra was: "Do anything you want. But don't be boring." TL FLOELLA BENJAMIN PLAY SCHOOL, 1964 Trained as a stage actor, the then 27-year-old Benjamin joined the cast of Play School in 1976. The popular children's programme, famous for its whimsically named toys and its windowed set, had been on air for more than a decade by then. Trinidad-born Benjamin, recognisable for the bright beads she wore in her hair, became one its most popular presenters. Now 64, and a baroness, Benjamin sits in the House of Lords as a Liberal Democrat life peer. I worked in the theatre in the 70s, and I could watch children's programmes during the day. I loved Play School, especially the presenters Carol Chell and Chloe Ashcroft. It was so creative, so visionary, the way they drew the audience in. I was in a production called The Black Mikado with Derek Griffiths, another Play School presenter, and I remember talking about how much I'd love to do it. When an audition came up, I went.

What I tried to do on Play School was to give each member of the audience the feeling that they were special. I spoke very slowly and imagined I was talking to just one person: "Hello, are you all right?" The secret of any good children's programme is to be childlike. Not childish. Being childlike is quite different – showing enthusiasm for life, expressing the joy of seeing things for the first time, the mystery, the wonderment. We had dancing, we had music, we had storytelling. Things that excite creativity. BBC2, to me, has always been a thinking channel, a creative channel, a window on the world type channel. I remember, 33 years ago, when I gave birth to my son, thinking: "I can't do this." And suddenly in my head came a programme I'd seen on BBC2, about a woman in a field in South America who gave birth while she was out working the land. And I thought, if she could do that… The memory of a TV programme got me through. ‘I loved Play School,’ says Floella Benjamin, who joined Humpty, above, and the rest of the programme’s cast in 1976.

‘It was so creative, so visionary.’ I'm very grateful for Play School; it changed my life. The day I was introduced at the House of Lords I was thrilled. Then later that night I was watching Newsnight, as I always do, and suddenly I heard my own voice. There was a clip of me on Play School… They even zoomed through a window, then you saw me coming through the House of Lords doors. It was such a lovely thing. I cried. TL RICHARD HAMMOND TOP GEAR, 1977 An art graduate originally from Solihull, Richard Hammond, 44, began his broadcasting career on local radio before joining the cast of Top Gear in 2002. The car programme, a BBC Two stalwart since the late 70s, had previously been cancelled; now it was being relaunched, in a more irreverent format devised by host Jeremy Clarkson and producer Andy Wilman. Hammond and Clarkson were soon joined by James May and the trio have remained at the helm of a show that is consistently anarchic, controversial – and popular.

I'm a big believer that TV still has a role to play in saying: "Look at this, isn't it amazing?" BBC2's always been very good at that. Growing up, it showed me the world and explained it. I was an avid fan of anything science-y, natural world-y. I lapped it up. But oddly enough Top Gear was always my favourite. This shows I'm a bit different in age from my esteemed co-hosts, Jeremy and James, but I first watched it sitting on the carpet in the living room, playing with Lego. It was grown up. It was about cars. I wouldn't have missed it. Pinterest I think it built up in me an interest in presenting television programmes, too. The idea of standing there and talking about stuff, I found really compelling. And this – somebody telling you about something that they knew about – was perhaps best seen on BBC2. Because the channel always allowed room; not everything was shown in bite-sized clips. The facts could lead. The subject could lead. Instead of being delivered so damned fast the audience didn't have time to get bored, the content had to be interesting. It had to stand up.

I started on local radio in 1988, first in York, then on stations across the north. I dreamed of getting into television presenting, but the opportunities were few and far between. If you're working at BBC Radio Cumbria, it's difficult. Eventually, I gave up on that route and got a job working for a car company in their press office, secretly thinking: "Ooh, I'll get to know all the editors of all the car shows." I got some work on a satellite channel, Granada's Men & Motors, and left my comfortable job with a mortgage-paying salary, a company car, to do that freelance for five years. Then Top Gear came along. They auditioned me and I got it. The luckiest moment of my life, really. It has evolved over the years in a very BBC2 way. We weren't subject to the kind of pressure that we might have been under on different channels. We were allowed to grow (and it's a buzz word in media circles) organically. There was no hideous glaring spotlight on us. And the BBC, when I first joined, didn't take any bloody notice of us.

When Top Gear relaunched, in 2002, it was just a car show coming back. It wasn't big news. We slipped under the radar and were allowed an amazing amount of freedom. We've done a lot of things that would have been difficult to justify before doing them. I was excited when it came back, though. I remember the first recording in the studio, they played the theme tune and I automatically thought: "Brilliant! Top Gear's on!" Then I realised I was presenting it. Standing next to Jeremy Clarkson. I thought: "Better get on with it." TL RACHEL KHOO THE LITTLE PARIS KITCHEN, 2012 London-born Rachel Khoo, 33, was a chef and food writer living in Paris, in 2010, when she was signed up by BBC2. The Little Paris Kitchen was first broadcast in March 2012, in an 8.30pm slot that once hosted Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, Rick Stein and Gary Rhodes. I always thought, if you're going to be on TV you'd get some sort of training.

When BBC2 commissioned my show three years ago, I said: "When am I going on this BBC course, then, to learn how to present a cookery programme?" They said: "Nope. There isn't one. You're just going to cook." Growing up, I was allowed to watch some TV in the evenings and I liked Food and Drink, with Oz Clarke and Michael Barry and Loyd Grossman on Masterchef. When Jamie Oliver came along, it changed everything. When I was a bit older, at art college at Saint Martins, I used to have Ready Steady Cook on in the background while I was working in the afternoons. And I did a bit of food styling, assisting on photography shoots, while I was at uni. After graduating, I worked for two years doing fashion marketing and PR. It wasn't really me; I thought: "You know what, I'm going to go to Paris and learn to bake." I studied patisserie for a year. One year has become eight. I'm still here. I got a book deal about four years ago [ Little Paris Kitchen , Penguin, £20] and while I was testing out the recipes I opened a two-seater pop-up restaurant in my apartment.

I'd already written two cookbooks in French by then, and I knew from experience that there was a lot of food waste. This was a way to minimise it and get a little money to cover ingredients. And writing is pretty lonely; the restaurant was a nice way to meet people from around the world. While I was doing it I thought: "Ah, I think this would make a good TV show." I found a small production company called Plum and we did a little video in my flat. BBC2 liked it. I went to meet the commissioning editors with some biscuits. Bribes. And I wanted to prove that I could bake. When one of the commissioning editors came to visit us during filming, he couldn't believe we were making a TV show in this little space. We had to borrow the upstairs apartment for a test kitchen. I had no experience in TV and it helped that it was all done in my kitchen. I felt at home. TL MEERA SYAL GOODNESS GRACIOUS ME, 1998 Writer and comedian Meera Syal was one of a team that created and starred in the sketch show Goodness Gracious Me, which aired on BBC2.

She rose to prominence portraying Sushila, the grandmother of her real-life husband Sanjeev Bhaskar, in The Kumars at No 42, which ran for seven series and won an international Emmy. In 2009 she also starred in the BBC2 sitcom Beautiful People. BBC2 has been responsible for two of my biggest breaks, one being My Sister Wife in 1992. They had this strand called Screen Two which consisted of one-off films, and they were the most amazing opportunities for new talent and writers to have 90 minutes of screen time – you don't get those slots any more. A lot of established people cut their teeth there. My Sister Wife was about a Muslim man who had already got a wife and takes on a second, who doesn't know he already has a wife – very timely. But it was much more about the relationship between the two women, and that, for me, was a huge calling card. Because of that I got the commission to write Bhaji on the Beach for Channel 4. Nina Wadia, Kulvinder Ghir, Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar in the BBC2 comedy sketch show Goodness Gracious Me.

‘We knew what made us laugh,’ says Syal. The other huge break was Goodness Gracious Me. We had been guests on The Real McCoy, the first Afro-Caribbean sketch show, and wanted to do an Asian version of this, and we had an awful lot of material. [BBC comedy executive producer] Jon Plowman wasn't sure what Asian comedy was – and neither were we, we just knew what made us laugh. We then put on a live show at the Riverside studios in Hammersmith to help persuade him, with all the material the four of us had been doing on the standup circuit. But it was BBC Radio that gave us a six-week slot and it was the huge success of the show on the radio that was the point at which people really sat up and took notice. BBC2 then realised it was mainstream, not niche. From then we got a pilot, then a series , so the whole development process was about two years, whereas My Sister Wife was one meeting and a commission. The Kumars at No 42 was rejected the first time we took it to the BBC – it was only when Hat Trick Productions saw the potential of this strange hybrid that we got the commission.

BBC2 is certainly a channel that takes risks. I always thought The Kumars and Goodness Gracious Me could never have appeared on any other channel; they were BBC2 products. They were quirky and a little out there. They weren't your 8.30pm low risk family slot. They were voices you don't hear in mainstream slots, and for that BBC2 has been remarkable. I owe them a lot. The Goodness Gracious Me team are reuniting to do a one-off special, we're all very happy to be back together, to commemorate the show and BBC2. KS

Question: During which year did BBC2 start broadcasting in the UK?
Answer: 1964