Children Films In Sheffield

[Guest Deejaysnr]

The Christmas Leavers of Silverdale Sec Mod School.

I was in a Documentary when I was at school and here is my story:

It was Christmas 1961 and Tony was about to leave school and go out into the big wide world at 15 years old, but that was not before he and his class mates were roped in to filming on that last day by the BBC. It was for a documentary called ‘Where Are They Now’ and it was about following children after leaving school and what they did as employment and how well they did. With a follow up programme in five years time, unfortunately this did not happen. The main reason for the documentary was that we were one of the last pupils to leave school at Christmas as the government of the day had stopped it, so only Easter and summer were leaving times, and it wasn’t long before Easter was stopped as well.

The day started with various scenes been filmed and re-shot two or three times until the director was happy. The film cameras were the big cumbersome type, not like they are now, so each location took ages to set up. There were big cables lying about all over we filmed in classrooms and corridors and coming out of the main door yelling and shouting pleased to be leaving school, it was one big laugh all day. It took all day just about and therefore stopped the boys in the group getting up to any mischief against there teachers as was the norm.

When Tony left school he went on to fulltime employment in the gents department at Atkinson’s on The Moor where he had been working part time for about a month on the run up to Christmas. So when the programme was on he was unable to see it and has never seen it since, and as Tony says there were no VHS recorders available then to the mass market as there is now as they were very expensive and even the TV format was different to now and only in black and white.

These are the people involved:

THIS IS THE TRANSCRIPT OF AN INTERVIEW BETWEEN SOPHIE.doc

[RichardB]

Nice work, Thank you for your input and Welcome to SheffieldHistory.