Tune in to the story of CampusTV – the University’s student-run TV station – and discover its journey from humble beginnings and U-matic video recorders, to award wins and successes of today.
To mark its 35th year, we sat down with the station’s founder, Hugh Mason (BSc Physics with Physical Electronics 1989), and outgoing station manager, Peter Irvine (BSc Politics and International Relations 2024), to discuss the society’s broadcasting brilliance.
By Frances Coleman
Then
Take yourself back to Freshers’ Week.
After settling into your student accommodation, nervously introducing yourself to the stranger next door and desperately trying to make sense of the campus map, you find yourself meandering around the stalls at Freshers’ Fair. Students from all kinds of clubs and societies – from BEAMES to BUSMS – are desperate to sell their passion to you and fill your free time for the year ahead.
This is exactly where Hugh Mason – the creator of CampusTV as we know it today – found himself in autumn 1986.
“When I came to Fresher’s Week, there was one guy with a very old U-matic tape recorder and a camera. That [society] was called Channel 4A,” Hugh recalls. “He was in his final year, so was very, very busy, and he was desperate to hand it over to somebody so it didn’t end. And so, by default, I ended up sort of, taking over from him.”
New beginnings
Before the dawn of Netflix and Apple TV – platforms that make decision paralysis an evening ritual for viewers across the world – UK residents had a limited choice of channels in the 1980s: BBC1, BBC2, ITV and the newly launched Channel 4. Hugh wonders if this inspired the naming of Channel 4A as “the whole idea of having a fourth TV channel in Britain was a big deal at that time.”
He continues: “I thought Channel 4A sounded a bit naff, like a leftover thing that wasn't very important. CampusTV just seemed more like it.”
With that, CampusTV, or CTV, was created, and Hugh was determined to broadcast the news around Bath. “It's weird to think of it now because ‘student makes video’ just wouldn’t be a news story these days,” he reflects. “We teased the local media with the idea that we were going to make these shocking programmes that included material that wasn't suitable for general audiences.”
Their efforts paid off, with the BBC Points West covering the launch. Then Bath MP, Chris Patten, was even captured on camera proudly declaring “there are going to be more people watching CTV than are at present capable of watching that other great endeavour.”
Lights, camera, action!
Did Hugh and the team produce the debauchery and controversy they promised? Well...
“We started making really bad cookery shows, really bad dramas, really bad news shows,” he says, “as well as all the usual things I'm sure still goes on like Freshers’ Week videos.”
But while Hugh and his fellow CampusTV members wasted no time creating content, they had to overcome many obstacles along the way: “There were three technical problems we had to solve. The first was what kind of camera or recorder we’d use. And at the time, there weren't camcorders, there were cameras attached to something like a small suitcase, wheelie bag thing, which was the U-matic video recorder, with chunky tapes that only ran for, I think, a maximum of about half an hour.”
Capturing images involved navigating bulky and temperamental equipment, and transmitting the pictures required a lot of help from the campus infrastructure team, but according to Hugh, the biggest challenge of all was editing the footage.
A long and laborious process, editing involved the careful synchronisation of two machines, one playing footage and one recording, to overwrite the desired section which left no room for error. “Just to make one cut would take a minimum of two or three minutes,” Hugh recalls. “When I made my first 50-minute films for TV in the early 1990s, if I wanted to take out ten frames in the middle, I’d have to play through everything up to the bit I wanted to cut, make the cut, and then play it through again. So, it'd literally take an hour to make the edit.”
But to Hugh, this time-consuming method of creating content, as well as taking on the difficult task of coordinating video shoots without smartphones or Google Maps, wasn’t all that bad. “Everything took a long time,” he says. “But the good thing about that was it gave you time to prepare.”
Now
While Hugh stepped into a world of videotapes, analogue signals and gruelling manual edits, the current station manager, Peter Irvine, faced an entirely different media landscape when he joined in 2020 – one that was fast-paced and continuously evolving.
Off the back of two years studying media production in college, Peter was looking for opportunities to explore his photography and creative arts passion when he came across CampusTV. “I thought ‘Goodness, what am I doing? I should be doing that! I've done camera work for years. Let's do this,’” he tells us.
“I saw they were having committee elections so I joined and applied to be their head of advertising or something like that. I remember feeling really at home.” In 2021, Peter moved into a communications role in the society, by 2022 he was station manager and by 2023 he became head of media of the Students’ Union while continuing his role with CampusTV.
We ask Peter how he juggles it all during his degree. “I remember telling my director of studies last semester that I do university on the side rather than media,” he tells us with a grin.
Alumni support and award wins
His first mission as station manager was to update the outdated equipment they’d been relying on for nearly 15 years. “The SU funds us quite well, but we went in for an Alumni Fund bid to get more money to help the station – a joint bid with URB, the student radio station.”
They were successful and, thanks to Bath’s community of alumni, CampusTV were able to elevate their kit and take their content creation to new heights. “We bought a new vision mixer, which is a critical piece of kit, to help our live streaming, which was another one of my goals,” says Peter. “Back in college, I'd only ever done short films and documentaries and things like that. I'd never touched live broadcasting before.”
After building strong relationships with the University sports teams, staff and other students, CampusTV have been on hand to broadcast major events such as Freshers’ Week, the Summer Ball and Varsity – no mean feat considering 2023’s torrential downpour. They’ve livestreamed more than ever before and their success is reflected in a view count of over 400,000 across all platforms in the last two years.
Peter and his fellow CampusTV team members are also proud winners of several National Student Television Association awards – including a recent Gold for their short documentary (see below) on the history of CampusTV itself.
Leaving a legacy
Since the University opened in 1966, there have been over 1,500 members of student media societies – each member leaving their own unique mark. With Peter graduating this summer, and passing on the torch of station manager, we ask him to reflect on the legacy left by those before him — including founder Hugh Mason – and the one he hopes to leave himself.
“We still make the same sort of content [as CampusTV has always done] – some serious, some funny – but it’s always for the students, and we haven't really changed from that mission since 1989.”
Having applied for a range of master’s courses in broadcast, production and documentary filmmaking with the hopes of building a career in the industry, Peter acknowledges the way CampusTV, and his involvement in student media in general, will hopefully propel his career like it has done for his predecessors. In fact, after graduating in 1989, Hugh Mason went on to build a successful career in filmmaking, producing programmes for the BBC and his own film company before changing channels to entrepreneurship. Hugh cites CampusTV as being “absolutely fundamental” to his career.
But beyond the life-changing impact that participation in a student club or society may have on a graduate's career, for many alumni, it’s the memories, experiences and connections from their spent time with like-minded, passionate people that have the most lasting effect.
“When something becomes more than a hobby and transitions into becoming a family,” Peter tells us, “that's definitely what CampusTV feels like.”
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