Tate St Ives was built between 1988 and 1993 in St Ives, a small town in west Cornwall. Over these years there was considerable interest in the development from national and local TV. I worked on several different programmes for C4 and the BBC and a couple of series for our local ITV company, Westcountry TV.
This was really enjoyable work as it was pretty much all positive stories, and meant many visits to St Ives interviewing artists who had made Penwith their base over the 20th century. These famous painters and sculptors were a large part of the reason for Tate building the gallery in St Ives.
Television was in the late stages of analogue tape acquisition, and we shot on Sony’s BetaSP (Betacam SP) format. The camcorders took the smaller 20 or 30 minute tape cassettes that were the same size as the domestic Betamax tapes, so a little smaller than the ubiquitous VHS video cassettes. Consequently, a day’s filming would produce a sizeable box of tapes. We freelancers would label the tapes and hand them over at the end of each shoot to the producer. Back at the TV station the tapes would be digitised for editing and archived.
Westcountry TV had won the regional franchise from TSW. The latter had a large headquarters in central Plymouth and appealed the loss of their franchise. Westcountry had promised to build a new studio complex at a waterside location in the heart of the city but the legal challenge led to them hastily building a small HQ on a nondescript industrial estate in Plympton. These small premises meant space was at a premium.
The lack of storage space led to the company only keeping edited programmes and erasing the original camera tapes. It’s heartbreaking thinking of the material we shot that went through bulk erasers. Interviews with people like Patrick Heron at his home Eagle’s Nest near Zennor and the writer who explained abstract painting saying how can you paint the warmth of the sun on a stone. I’ve forgotten his name. When we interviewed Heron, the director Peter Francis Brown asked me if I’d seen anything strange – I hadn’t. As the interview with the soft-spoken painter went on, Peter saw a bright aura develop around our host. Is it on tape? Not any more, if it ever was.