This post covers several of my favourite subjects, so it will ramble all over the place. Apologies for that, but here we go…
Sticking some kind of disc over the centre of an onscreen clock mechanism is a very practical solution to hiding the rather ugly screw that holds the hands in place. You could simply use a plain white disc, or perhaps add some element of design to the disc.
The BBC first tried out a black disc with a thin white outline in 1965.
They then experimented with putting the second hand in front of the disc.
But by 1968 had settled on something that looked very much like the classic “polo mint” design, nicknamed after the similarity of the clock’s centre to Rowntree’s mint with the hole.
The polo mint clock design was a quintessential late 60s piece of graphic design and similar clocks abounded, even on white goods. My friend Al Duprés even found a very similar clock on a Belling gas cooker which I recreated in the following video:
The polo mint clocks used by the BBC’s presentation department were installed in special pieces of equipment called “Noddy” which were housed in special “Noddy” rooms, one for BBC1 and BBC2 respectively.
The “Noddy” equipment consisted of a small image orthicon monochrome camera and two spot-lamps mounted on a remotely controlled pan and tilt head. The camera could be moved to point at any of 12 slots in a specially designed wooden rack that was placed in front of it.
Each of the 12 slots could either hold a caption card (printed in white letters on thick black card using a Masson-Seeley hot foil press) or a mechanical model that would have been created by the BBC’s Mechanical Workshop.
The two sets of Noddy room equipment were beautifully built by Evershed and Vignoles Ltd (look at all that lovingly varnished wood!) and there is a picture of one of them before delivery to the BBC here. Below we can see the Noddy being used in anger by the BBC’s Presentation department for BBC1 Network Presentation in the late 70s.
In the early 70s there was more than just the one polo mint clock in each “Noddy” room—for instance, there could be one used for presentation between Open University programmes, another for Engineering Announcements and of course the standard clock for network presentation.
I thought that I had seen them all. In fact, I even made a video of all the versions of the polo mint clock that I knew about:
Then, a few weeks ago, Al Duprés came across this unexpected delight:
This clock belonged to the strange period in BBC Schools presentation between November 1969 and June 1972 that included both “modern” elements such as the 1969 polo mint clock and mid-60s elements such as the BBC Schools Pie Chart.
During this period large areas of the country could not receive colour pictures, and few schools had colour sets. But even if a school was lucky enough have a colour set, about half of BBC schools programmes were still in black and white.
If you want to know the kind of programmes this clock would have introduced, you are in luck as the excellent Broadcast for Schools website has a listing for Summer Term 1971 here. There were a number of old favourites on offer such as Going To Work, Watch, Words and Pictures, Music Time, Maths Workshop and Merry Go Round.
Anyway, back to the polo mint clock. If you examine the presentation of the era you might notice that in 1969–1971 both the clock and globe were placed more centrally on screen than they would subsequently appear, and there was a greater gap between the rule across the screen and the caption that lay beneath it.
The captions used an optical size of Helvetica that was designed for sign making; you can’t just use any old version of Helvetica to recreate it. You can see why in the picture below.
The digital version of this optical size I like to use is URW Nimbus Sans Poster. If you’ve been here before you may remember I had to use Nimbus Sans Poster when I designed my BBC Computer Literacy Project t-shirt.
The first job when tracing an image from an off-screen photograph (and I always prefer to do this by hand) is to correct for any distortions in the image. You can see the rather odd slightly skewed parallelogram shape I had to force the source photograph into to get the geometry right on clock face.
I already had the polo mint clock face and the BBC1 diamonds logo drawn in Inkscape from a previous project. That meant I just had to add the caption in Nimbus P Bold.
Now the vector image was complete, the next thing I did was to import it into Blender to create an animated 3D clock. Again, I already had a polo mint clock model all ready from a previous project, so it was simply a case of importing the Inkscape SVG file and sizing the caption to the correct place.
One thing that I do appreciate in the new version of Blender is that the Studio Environment HDRI (my favourite for this kind of job) is now built into Blender and I can simply drag and drop it into my Blender files. However, this environment was going to cause me a major headache down the line!
I completed the 3D model, and this is what it looks like when rendered, and shoved through my compositor set-up to key colour over everything…
To illustrate the use of the clock, I decided to make a mini-junction. For this, I needed to create the pie-chart 35mm transparency and the Noddy room countdown clock to make an entire pie-chart junction.
To create the pie-chart slide, I decided I would make full use of all the lovely features Inkscape has these days. I began by having a good look at the graphic of the pie chart slide, which was used from 1967-1972.
In his interview with Andrew Emmerson, George Hersee seemed rather bemused by tuning signals such as this pie-chart slide. Although they looked technical they weren’t really at all, as they were not prepared by engineers.
I noticed while looking at this slide that the vertical castellations are longer (72 pixels) than the horizontal castellations (70 pixels) are tall, and neither set of them are centred.
Whoever placed the second “B” and the “C” on the BBC logo was clearly drunk as well.
The first thing I did before I started to draw was get my palette set up using the Swatch feature of Inkscape.
Once your swatches are set up you can then use them by showing the Swatches palette:
The only downside of using the Swatches feature of Inkscape is that erroneously created swatches can only be deleted using the XML Editor, but this is the sort of paper cut Inkscape is fixing all the time.
I can create a 4:3 and a 16:9 version of the slide in Inkscape simultaneously using the lovely Inkscape Pages feature:
And because of this I use the linked Clone feature of Inkscape so that there is no needless duplication of vector artwork between the two versions.
Pretty quickly, the vector art version was finished:
The next job was to take the vector art version, import it into The GIMP and with the help of some special filters called G’MIC, make the exported vector image look like a well enjoyed 35mm slide.
To distress a slide in The GIMP you do various things. Firstly I start by adding glow, then lens blur, Gaussian blur, grain and then several layers of dust and scratches. There isn’t really a one size fits all solution as it depends on the effect you are after.
The final job I need to do is create the countdown clock. This would be another case of creating an Inkscape vector drawing and then importing the resulting SVG file into Blender to create a 3D animated model.
Due to its simplicity and symmetry I soon finished the countdown clock. The Inkscape Rotate panel was, as always, incredibly helpful in drawing the clock face.
The source material of the clock face I had showed me that the clock, after 4 years of use, had been bashed about a bit by this time. Unlike later Noddy models it was made of painted aluminium rather than printed cardboard and there were several small areas of paint missing from the clock face.
Therefore I needed to add a texture paint layer (which I created in The GIMP) which I could overlay onto the clock face in Blender to add some “distressing”2.
I also created another layer for the grey background of the countdown clock. This had actually fared much better than the countdown clock itself.
I had a lot of trouble with the lighting for this 3D model. Normally I don’t have to get the lighting exactly right as it will be hidden by keying colour over everything, but in this case it really mattered. To fix the issues I was having, I used two Area lights instead of Spot lights.
I also had some terrible trouble (I lost two and a half hours fighting this issue) with some very ugly pixelated shadows. No-one could explain what was causing them—I even resorted to asking AI which was as baffled as I was. I eventually, out of desperation tried turning off the shadows in my Environment HDRI of a Studio and as if by magic they disappeared.
I needed an announcement for the junction I am recreating and so I simply plugged my microphone into Audacity and recorded one. I couldn’t pass for an announcer but it serves the purpose for this example.
I did kick myself after I put the sequence together in Kdenline (my video editor) as I should have recorded an additional announcement which said “BBC1” after the clock had finished moving.
So here’s the finished junction:
I could have made a much better job of both the polo mint clock and the countdown clock, but I am a bit rusty, having not really done much for a few years.
I am also really unsure whether the Helvetica caption on the clock should be in Bold or Normal weight. BBC1 used both weights of Helvetica for the “COLOUR” caption on globes and clocks in this era. I plumped for bold, but this could well be wrong.
And, finally, I feel a bit guilty I didn’t create my own version of the Leonard Salzedo’s music in MuseScore. However the original recording is charming.
I’d like to thank Al Duprés, Mark Simpson, Transdiffusion and TV Ark for their help in finding the source material I used for this article.
- This image was taken somewhere between September 1977 (when the BBC Schools clock was introduced) and September 1981 when the Futura BBC1 caption was retired. ↩︎
- My friend Rory Clark coined the phrase “distressing” for adding dust, scratches and so on to recreated material. I really like the term as it evokes lovable rogue forgers like Tom Keating. ↩︎
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