We All Live...

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Just watched an episode of The Repair Shop this evening, and the late actor John Clive's daughter brought in the Corgi Yellow Submarine model presented to him after voicing John Lennon on the Beatles' animated film in the late sixties. This brought to mind my brush with the model back in the early nineties, when we were working on a contract with the then Thorn-EMI; providing various audiovisual displays and their associated control systems for three locations around London. The Beatles connection with EMI was obviously the central theme to all the displays, and the Yellow Submarine featured in one of a number of 'vitrines' which flanked the lifts at each floor of their headquarters in Tenterden Street, in the West End. I had the task of doing some of the animatronics for the cabinets, as well as some of the other electronics, and the one that sticks in my mind is the Beatles' sub.

The model was one that our London contact, who shall remain nameless, for reasons various, had as a child. I had to disassemble it, much as they did in the Repair Shop, but rather than repair it, I had to animate it. This was done via stepper motors and solenoids hidden in the plinth - made by a guy in Surrey - that supported the thing in its display case. The front and rear hatches opened and closed, and the periscopes rotated, all under the control of a central processing system housed on the top floor of the building. Anytime a person stepped close to one of the vitrines, the various animatronics would spark into life, illustrating some aspect of EMI's history. The work on the Yellow Submarine was all designed and built by me on my kitchen table in Gerlan...

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