Engineering: The System Transformed

Abstract

Progressive developments in broadcasting equipment and techniques during the 1960s and 1970s made it ‘far less necessary for an engineer to stand as middleman between director and viewer’, as the IBA told the Annan Committee. In ITV’s infancy engineers had ‘determined what could or could not be in the studios; who could or could not receive the programmes; how close to the camera the actors must stand and in what temperature; how much make-up they needed; how far outside the confines of the studios the camera could venture’. But in the years of maturity their daily operational role dwindled.