Last year, Classic & Vintage Commercials visited the Broadcast Equipment Conservation Group’s new museum at Hemswell in Lincolnshire, and ran a feature on their wonderful restored Southern Television Outside Broadcast Unit. That, though, is not the only OBU in this fabulous collection, and another former ITV vehicle is now nearing the end of a full restoration.
Like “Southern”, GNF951E is built on a Bedford VAL 14 six-wheel chassis – normally used of course for buses and coaches. It is one of three similar vehicles ordered by ABC Television in 1966. ABC, who also ran the ABC cinema network, held the weekend ITV franchise for the Midlands and Northern England from 1956 to 1967, and the ITV companies generally tended to be rather more forward-thinking than the BBC. This trio were certainly state of the art for the time with new featureslayout similar to the control gallery in TV studios (previous OBUs had been arranged with car or bus-like back and forward-facing seats), all-transistor operation and separate compartments for sound, production and engineering.
