I’ve been sent a link to the on-line auction of assets from the recently vacated Bush House.  I’ve never worked for the Beeb – though I have a number of friends who have – but it was interesting to see just what is for sale.

There were pangs of nostalgia for me as they seem to be selling loads of the kind of equipment I first encountered when I started out in radio.  There are loads of Studer and Revox open reel tape machines – just the kind of kit I learned to edit on with razor blades, chinagraph pencils and aluminium editing blocks. I could almost smell the tape and feel its coldness (especially if you hung a section of tape round your neck while finding a new place to insert it in the tape).  I can’t remember the last time I has to edit audio on a reel to reel machine.  When I first worked at Mercia every on-air studio had at least 2 Studer reel to reel machines!

In the Bush House sale you can bid for big studio clock and “on-air” light units – always fancied having red lights in my studio.  There’s also no end of rackmounted cassette decks (cassettes!), ISDN codecs and signal management units.

Or microphones – loads of Shure SM58s and Electrovoice RE-20s. Again more nostalgia for me as I regularly used to use one of the latter for recording items in the old production studio on the top floor of the Mercia Sound building.  I could be tempted by an RE-20 – especially as bids start at only £10!

There’s also loads of record players (or Grams as we used to say), BBC mixing desks (where the faders go the “wrong way”) and office equipment and, perhaps not surprisingly for the World Service, lots of framed maps of parts of the world.

However the most striking thing for me is boxes and boxes of unused CD players and stereo amplifiers. Why did they have some many of those and why were they unused? I’m trying not to think of my licence fee being tied up in needless audio equipment….

You can find the World Service auction here