tv house is hotting up

This month, Television House begins to warm up, until the contrast between the nip in the air outside and the waft of heat inside the building is an everyday commonplace. Winter is here again and the central heating is on. Oddly enough, the boiler room – heart of Rediffusion Television’s central heating and hot water supply – is probably one of the chilliest areas in Television House during the bleak winter months. Not that its three-man staff of plant attendants, Harry Poole, Roy Coleman and Len Jones, have time to worry about cold hands during the 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week, October to May winter shift they share. With 903 rooms, some with three or four radiators to warm them, the business of organised central heating on such a scale takes on something of the mysteries of an art.

As Roy Coleman comments: ‘It’s all press-button now, but every action is timed to the minute. We’re constantly checking and re-checking. And we’ve never got to forget that we are burning money in the boiler room.’ In summer, the shift work stops at the end of transmission time, but temperature checks continue throughout the building, boilers are overhauled and there is also the building’s ventilation system to look after.

Roy Coleman, at 57, has worked with boilers for 30 years. He remembers stoking eight hours non-stop with no lunch break in the old days. Rediffusion’s oil-fed boilers – there are three central heating boilers and one domestic boiler (for canteen and wash basins) which takes 3,000 gallons of the gushing fluid each week in the winter – are, in contrast, clean and scientific. The combustion engine has taken over from the shovel and thermostats are on continuous warning duty. But back-breaking memories sometimes harden into fact again as when Roy Coleman once helped to bring in tons of ice to the washer cubicles in an attempt to cool down Studio 9 on a sweltering evening.

Harry Poole, also aged 57, has been with Rediffusion six years – two years less than Roy Coleman. He spent some 12 years with a central heating firm as a fitter and knows all about the fixtures and fittings and pipes that start in the boiler room and thread their way throughout Television House. ‘During the very cold winter some years ago we had three boilers going at full pressure to keep the building warm,’ he recalls, ‘which just goes to show the efficiency of the present system. But I still prefer an open fire to anything.’ Sixty-three-year-old Len Jones was in the Royal Navy for 25 years and ended up a chief stoker. Once the destroyer he was in was torpedoed in the engine room and the boiler burst… ‘worst experience I’ve ever had,’ he says laconically. ‘Eventually, I dropped two anchors on dry land in this job. I think we can be proud that, during the last eight years I know of, we’ve always managed to supply heat and hot water to Television House.’ Len Jones has a final word on complaints from members of the staff about heat and ventilation. ‘We do our best to keep things running smoothly. I can remember an incident in which two typists complained, one that it was too hot, the other, too cold. When we investigated, we found they sat at opposite desks in the same room.’