Towards the end (~2004) television centre was looking pretty dilapidated. A friend and I managed to sneak into the production gallery — he played the role of t

Towards the end (~2004) television centre was looking pretty dilapidated. A friend and I managed to sneak into the production gallery — he played the role of tour guide and I was a visiting dignitary from a prominent equipment manufacturer — and we had a good look around the back of all the cable routing racks. My goodness! Some component had been leaking an oil mist over everything for years and that had in turn picked up all the dust and hair etc that wafted in and out all day and night. It looked like a student kitchen cooker hood. I don’t know why it was allowed to get so dirty. Perhaps there just wasn’t any capacity to have downtime on these cabling units to clean them, or maybe someone tried once and took BBC1 offline? Interesting fact (or perhaps urban myth?) about Television Centre is that it was built in a circle so that the cable runs from each studio would have the same path length: http://s3.amazonaws.com/medias.photodeck.com/b1226a66-e42d-11e3-96ff-329e81129ea7/BBC_Telivision_Centre_London_ea14097_uxga.jpg http://s3.amazonaws.com/medias.photodeck.com/b1226a66-e42d-1...