They did go through an awful lot of announcers in those first 2-3 years - including this announcer and also Syd Burke, both of whom seemed to be there for a matter of weeks. The original four had all basically gone from behind the mic within little over a year - though Keith Harrison did continue to do some weekday shifts for a while after he'd started to do contunity for LWT.
I imagine the original four were staff, and probably also people like Veronika Hyks, Linda Thomas and Bill Bingham who joined in ‘83 and stuck around a while. Out of the original announcers, I think Paul was the first to leave, closely followed by Olga. I wonder if people like Sabrina were possibly freelance? I only seem to remember her doing two full shifts (a Saturday and Sunday) and a bit of meal break cover the previous week, so this Friday night closedown is a bit of a surprise to me. I’m sure she didn’t work the full shift from 5pm. Incidentally, Syd’s first shift was only half a Friday evening, taking over from Paul about 8ish - so Sabrina probably did the same here, covering for someone else.
Wow, never knew C4 did 'in-vision', although if they only did it around 1983, I would've been too young to see them at closedown, in bed long before that! This has just reminded me that I went for a job at C4 (Charlotte Street) years later, didn't get it, entirely their loss of course ;-). Thanks ADC.
What a mess. Can't quite work out how they managed to fade up what appears to be gallery audio in place of the announcer, how dud that get to be patched in as a source in the first place? Sabrina would have been better off at a smaller ITV company - she had a pleasant demeanour and the slightly wobbly performance would have been better tolerated at TSW or HTV I'm sure.
That final in-vision link was done from the studio used for Preview 4 and Look Forward, and I believe it wasn’t rigged up very well for live stuff. I think Paul Coia mentioned there wasn’t even a monitor showing “live” and “next” output so they were working with only audio cues. Not that this necessarily explains or excuses the cockups.
