Plymouth – a city known for naval tradition, Angela Rippon, Tom Daley … and perhaps not student television.
But a cursory glance at the annals of NaSTA's past throws up an interesting and unfamiliar name. SUTV from the University of Plymouth first appeared around 1970, and hosted the NaSTA conference in 1984.
This imaginatively named station played a big part in NaSTA's early years, before sinking beneath the waves in Plymouth harbour. Now STAN are asking - who were the people that ran this curious station? And where are those alumni now?
We contacted the union, who trawled the archives and uncovered an article in the UPSU student newspaper from October 1970. The station was freshly launched, and Pip Wood took to the paper to encourage students to join S.U.T.V. - with a warning of an impending bite from the 'T.V. BUG'.
SUTV was set on course to become part of the primordial National Student Television Association. An article from the 1982 offers a fascinating insight into the 9th NaSTA conference. The piece, authored by Bri the Exec. Prod, recounts SUTV's entries:
“having finished our competition programme for the National Student Television Association, we delivered it in person to the BBC judges at the NaSTA Conference, University of London. We were duly judged and came second out of all the entries supplied up and down the country. This, we felt, was a remarkable achievement when we compared our minimal budget with those of other student television societies, their annual budget running into thousands of pounds”.
STAN wonders what Bri would think of the resources offered to students in 2024. She continues: “This conference, I believe, was forced to recognise the strength and potential in the field of amateur television, from a small polytechnic stuck at the bottom of the country”.
These clippings allow us to glimpse the student television world during the 1980s. But what about the people? STAN asked SUTV alumni what life was like for student content creators 40 years ago...
John Stuart
I joined SUTV in my first year at Plymouth so this would have been 1985-86. One of the more active members was Hugh Wright (if memory serves), there were tv screens hung around the union building, I would often see footage of Hugh talking on these.
Among the projects undertaken was a short fictional film. One of the scenes I was most involved in - as an 'extra' - featured the main character being late for an appointment. We literally trashed someone's kitchen - cereal and milk all over the floor, ketchup on the wall – yuk!
We did a 'vox pop' with a camera on an events day, this was a Saturday, around Plymouth city centre. This was a feature for an SUTV magazine programme - it may have been Plymouth Navy Day. What does stick in the mind was we got to 'interview' a local tv hero at the time on a stationary bus - Gus Honeybun, the puppet mascot for Television South West.
I believe we had a tour of the TSW studios at one point. Possibly some of the kit we used came from there.
The above are just a few snippets as I wasn't there for long (always so many distractions!) but the experience definitely piqued my interest as something to revisit in the future - which I did. In 1995 I attended a course in screen acting which took place at Mersey Television Studios, where Brookside was filmed. In more recent years I've done stints as a Supporting Artist, famously (well among friends and acquaintances) appearing in the Dr Who 2007 Christmas Special 'Voyage of the Damned', the one with Kylie Minogue. Something I'm trying to pursue once again.
Simon Ransome
My only direct involvement with SUTV - or rather their network of large CRT TVs mounted around the students' union - was when I set up and ran an in-house teletext system called FlyFax (named after the student newspaper, Fly).
It ran on a BBC Micro in the SU office and used Teletext software to display a short sequence of Ceefax-style information about SU events and so on. I didn't run for that long (maybe a few months) because of reliability issues and me not being arsed to update content all the time, but it was fun in a nerdy sort of way.
SUTV's NaSTA affiliation eventually lapsed, with the station folding altogether in the late 2010s. The University now runs a BA in Filmmaking – the T.V. BUG is still biting students in Devon after more than half a century.
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