Here’s yet another video that I had completely forgotten about. It was when we were recently packing up the TV Studio videotape archive (not STOIC’s) for relocation, that I came across this video again. Bryan Steele was in fact a member of STOIC and had presented many items on their weekly news programme, hence his on-camera confidence. I do wish I could remember all of the details as to why we made this video in February 1980, but that’s over 45 years ago now!
Irrespective of why it was made, I’m glad we did. It features many of the demonstrations that were famously linked to Professor Eric Laithwaite. In the TV Studio we had a large number of his demonstrations, like the ‘jumping ring’ and down in his Electrical Engineering lab Bryan runs the ‘Magnetic River’ with the model train on it. However, I have never seen it in this strange brown colour. It’s usually painted something like blue or even white which shows up well on TV or film. If you search this blog you’ll find a few examples of these different colours. Guess who appears from behind the camera to return the model train to Bryan after each run!
I’m assuming that Bryan was linked in some way to the “Pimlico Connection” that did undergrad outreach visits to schools and hence this video. I’d marked the videotape with “a video made for schools’, but that’s not in the actual title sequence. The video was made within the first 6 months or so of having moved into colour and we’d not even created a TV Studio logo in colour by that time.
Colin Grimshaw June 2025