09/12/2024
CFTA history? buy the book (Amazon and others). Here's a snippet:-
Aston University was not renowned for its academic excellence. Its admission grade requirements, in an era when it was not a forgone conclusion that every school-child entering 'A' levels would immediately get top score simply by attending, were very modest. While Hull had required of me, for example, two grade 'B' and a 'C' as a minimum, Aston was accepting students with a couple of grade 'E'. That said it had a reputation as a good technological university, and many of the courses, once students were on board were run by quite hard taskmasters.
The almost exclusively technological content of the courses left a significant 'artistic' gap in the facilities that the campus offered. In the early seventies this had been filled somewhat by the creation of three separate, but loosely allied 'clubs'. These covered Theatre, Music and the Visual Arts.
The story goes that, strolling around his campus one day, the Vice Chancellor happened past the former BBC Studios.
Aston University is set, inconveniently, straddling a public road and adjacent to a small semicircular grass patch that probably thought it was going to be a roundabout but never quite made it. On the further side of that grass patch stood a former cinema, which, following a period as a boxing venue, had been acquired by the BBC in the mid 1950s and had become BBC Midland TV. BBC Pebble Mill was by now open, and all the 'Gosta Green' studio's work was finished. Joe Pope, the Vice Chancellor, passed as a casual gang of BBC workmen was inside the studio, unhitching bits of technical equipment of all sorts from the access galleries around the side, and throwing them over the edge for scrapping. Joe, appalled by the wastage, and scenting an opportunity, is said to have slipped each of the workmen a few quid, sent them to the next door pub, and told them to wait there. Returning to his office at speed, he then rang the BBC and bought the building, lock stock and lighting barrel.
What Joe thought he'd bought did not quite match up to what he actually got. The University thought it had got an 'arts centre', what it had bought was a derelict TV studio, and a black and white one at that. Undeterred a tie up was arranged with the Music and Theatre clubs, and these and the Visual Arts club were welded together under one umbrella. The University shunted Alan Crumpler, (who'd recently had some medical problems and was being recommended for easy duties... I always thought that was funny) sideways into the role of Administrator. Three appointments were made at first, Music Organiser, Theatre Organiser and Technical Manager.
The original Technical Manager was a bloke called Mike Fisher, who seems to have found the whole thing too much for him, and have retreated to the adjacent pub, 'The Sacks of Potatoes'.
Thus, barely a year after the university acquired the property I arrived as Technical Manager. The permanent vanishing act of my predecessor had produced a strange technical situation. It had always been intended that the Centre for the Arts, as it had been named, would rely mostly on the student body for its workforce. A few members had taken on the bulk of the technical side of the building, and it must be admitted that the background knowledge of the building's wiring that was available from Bob Wall was invaluable in the early days.
Perhaps unfortunately, Bob was almost a walking example of the University's prime mistake with the building purchase. Joe Pope had bought a TV studio, while wanting an arts centre. Regrettably Bob, who had come to form the core of the technical back-up during the building's first year, was a BBC employee in his real life. As a result, nearly everything that had been done to the building in the early months had been approached from a TV point of view. Since this was the major practical difficulty in the first place the situation was still somewhere between a shambles and a disaster.
