BBC Look East celebrates its 60th anniversary

Wind back the clocks 60 years to 1964 and a tsunami of stories sweeps out of the archives.

The Beatles were conquering America, Mods and Rockers were scrapping at the seaside, the Great Train Robbery was making headlines, Mary Quant had invented the mini skirt and My Fair Lady was making movie history.

Look a little closer and nearer to home and you might still miss an event that has had a profound effect on the life of this county. For on this day, September 28, 1964,  the first of well over 15,000 editions of Look East was broadcast from the BBC’s Norwich studios.

Despite the digital revolution that has exploded television programmes out of the box in the corner of the room into an over-crowded array of multi-platform media, Look East is still there every week night with news and views from across the region. It is a survivor and as much a part of Norfolk as the Canaries or Cromer Carnival.

(Image: Supplied)

You have to go a little further back for the arrival of the BBC in Norwich.

In the mid-1950s, the BBC had a temporary headquarters at No. 35 All Saints Green, which are now offices for the John Lewis department store.

Then in September 1956 they moved to nearby St Catherine's Close which remained the home of BBC East, first for radio and then television,  for almost half a century before moving to the Forum in 2003.

The first daily news programmes  began in 1959. Called East at Six, they were  ten minutes long and in glorious black and white. Look East was born five years later in September 1964 by which time the programme had been extended to 20 minutes.

These were exciting times for the Corporation who had  just launched the BBC2 Channel.

So now with ITV there were three television channels. Channel 4 was still eighteen years away.

And as for the iPlayer, Freeview, satellite channels, social media, mobile phones, they were all, well,  still science fiction.

Down the road at the newly formed Anglia Television, with its emblematic silver statue of a knight on horseback, it was a similar story.

Twice weekly About Anglia bulletins began in 1960, were beefed up to four times a week and then eventually to every week night.

By today’s standards equipment was primitive  and even back then  Look East had to put up with its share of cast-offs from Network TV in London.

 All the film shot for that day was assembled on a large spool and in the right order on a machine called a telecine for transmission.

But what if there was a late news story during the programme? Panic stations.

While the presenter conducted a studio interview, the spool was hurredly removed, the new film spliced in and the spool laced up again on the telecine by an engineer, usually with seconds to spare.

The first freelance reporters were paid a handsome four guineas (£4.20) per story and an extra thirty shillings (£1.50) if the story ran for more than four minutes.

And the two Look East editors reckoned that they cut the equivalent of a 100 miles of 16mm film every year.

In those days before the BBC installed its own processing, the film was rushed to Coes the photographers in Norwich who charged threepence (less than 2p) per foot.

Some film was  shot without sound and gramophone effects were played in during the live transmission, sometimes with unexpected results.

One request was for chickens.  Up came the sound fader with lots of clucking chickens.

Except the pictures were inside a chicken processing factory with lots of very dead birds.

One figure dominated the early Look East landscape. For the first few years presenters came and went.

Then in 1973 Ian Masters  took the presenter’s chair and dominated it for ten years.

(Image: Supplied)

His strength of personality and unflappable style established Look East as one of the most popular regional shows in the country.

Ironically, Ian is forever remembered for one smashing mistake. Midway through Look East and live on air, he was puzzling over a large glass bottle somehow intricately filled with wood and nails when to his horror it slipped from his grasp and smashed into a hundred pieces on the studio floor.

It is still there on YouTube to enjoy.

And then of course there was Delia. Her career as the first  queen of TV cooks enjoyed some of its earliest success in the studio at Norwich.

(Image: Supplied)

Her cookery books went on to sell millions of copies but what is less well known perhaps is that one of the very first was a tiny paperback published in 1975 called Country  Recipes From Look East, price 35 pence.

Today, that Look East landscape has changed beyond recognition.

With technology advancing at break-neck speed and the BBC betting its destiny on  becoming a world-wide, multi-platform entertainment giant, who knows what the future holds for local programmes. But enjoy it while we can.

And to celebrate the anniversary, past and present reporters, presenters and BBC staff will gather at Sprowston Manor Hotel tomorrow to toast the programme. Happy 60th birthday Look East. !