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from Les Brown May 2, 2022
Trinity Episcopal Church in Newport, Rhode Island celebrated its bi-centennial in 1976. The Archbishop of Canterbury was to be the guest speaker. Lee Tanner arranged for WTEV to broadcast the service but not live. He rented a small van, with VTR included, but not one of those quarter-ton VTR's like the one we took to the bowling remotes. Things were a bit cramped for the director in there.. The three cameras were Bosch, very thick, heavy cables and also very long cables. The van had to be parked at the back of the church, in the church yard/cemetery. The three camera cables were laid from the truck to the back of the church, into the building through a very high-up window, snaked through the pipes of the organ and then down to the church floor. I was doing audio, placing microphones. Trinity Church has a three-tiered pulpit, but I didn't have enough mics for all three. While we were setting up inside, there was an older priest in simple black walking around. I asked him if he had any idea where the Archbishop would speak, on which level. No hesitation at all, he said: "The old bugger'll go straight to the top. He likes being as close to God as he can get!" The service was going well and then The Archbishop was introduced. He started up the stairs to the pulpit. Sure enough, straight to the top. And surprise, surprise, it was the old fellow in the modest robe I had talked to earlier. After it was all over, we had to remove and pack up all the cables, but the weather had turned cold and it was snowing heavily. The camera cables were more like copper pipe, heavy and stiff. It was no fun coiling them up to squeeze them back into the no-spare-space van. A Sony Beta VTR (the earlist version sold, not Betamax, which came later) was bought and given, with a cassette dub of the event to Trinity Church. I contacted them a year or so ago and offered to pay to have the cassette copied to digital form but there was no response. I suspect the machine and the tape are long gone. Everyone who worked on the bicentennial remote got a thank-you letter from Lee Tanner for our bravery and hard work. I have it somewhere but just wasted an hour looking for it filed in this blasted computer somewhere. |
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