Studio 8

To round off the holiday season we took a trip this week for a tour of the BBC’s Television Centre in West London.  Much of its activity has recently been transferred to Media City in Salford and New Broadcasting House at the top end of Regent’s Street.  The site has been sold for £200,000 and will soon be closed for refurbishment as a hotel.  Three studios are, however, being retained so the BBC presence will remain at this iconic building in White City.

It was a fascinating tour.  We were told of how the building’s architect, Graham Dawbarn, came up with the circular design (it actually resembles an enormous question mark - ? – from the air) on the back of an envelope whilst sitting in a pub in 1949!  Much of the interior furnishings reminded me of bits of Amersham Free Church – hardly surprising in a way as both were opened in the very early 1960’s.

The ‘holy ground’ moment of the tour probably came as we entered Studio 8.  It’s not the largest in Television Centre but it was still cavernous.  Studio 8 was used for the filming of those BBC sitcoms which have become part of our national heritage.  We were standing on the very spot where ‘Faulty Towers’, ‘The Two Ronnies’ and even (my favourite!) ‘Only Fools and Horses’ were filmed.  Yet this studio, apart from the hundreds of numbered lights on the ceiling gantries, was completely empty.  We were told studios at the BBC are rarely permanent sets, instead they are empty shells filled with props and backdrops for each session of filming.  So, for example, the carpet in the Faulty Towers’ reception was painted (yes, actually painted) onto the concrete studio floor every time a recording was made.

Studio 8 is just a building, a shell.  It’s what filled it that made us laugh.

You might say the same about any building, including churches.  I know we might more readily ascribe intrinsic worth to our ecclesiastical arenas – for churches and cathedrals do seem to have their own particular aura of something ‘other’ – yet their true worth is to be experienced in the worship that fills their walls week by week.  We make much the same sort of statement when we say it is love that turns a house into a home.  And it’s certainly the case that all those empty 2013 diaries and calendars we were given at Christmas represent days just waiting to be filled – filled with struggles, achievements, sorrows and joys.

The structures of our buildings and lives are just contexts – what matters in 2013 is how we fill them.

The Victorian Scottish hymn writer, Horatius Bonar put it like this:

Fill thou my life, O Lord my God,
in every part with praise.
That my whole being may proclaim
thy being and thy ways.

So here’s to a truly ‘fulfilled’ 2013,

Ian