T'was a long time ago in a happier world:
My first long-term job in the Beeb (as a sprog of only just eighteen) was "Life on Earth", initially machine-minding for twelve-hour days, after a while I was allowed to do spot. Huge fun, and you got paid for it, too!
Doing stuff to picture could be really "interesting". To save time we'd try to do long takes, so you had to remember the movements, a bit like learning a piece of music. If it was complicated, you'd sometimes get two people, each pretending to be one whatever-it-was. You can just about manage to be one four-legged thing at a time, but if there are several it gets too complicated for one person. The worst bits were fighting animals, as the action was usually unpredictable and if you didn't nail the timing spot on it just looked silly.
If you ever see a re-run of the series "The British Isles," the golden eagle in the title sequence is actually my umbrella. Apparently it was really tame (the eagle, that is), but to get it to land on cue, the owner kept yelling at it!
I have to say the stuff we did in the late 1970s was really primitive. The dubbing theatre we had (a "Keller") could only run a maximum of four tracks at once, so you'd end up doing loads of premixes so that you eventually had enough space for a final mix. It used to break down often, which used to annoy a certain famous person particularly.
I also did the first ever nat. hist. TV prog. in stereo: Dilys Breese's "Nightlife". We had more tracks by then, but our sound desk was officially mono, so a lot of strange temporary re-wiring happened. My senior colleague, Pete Copeland, did the mix, and I worked the pan pots to move the sound effects left-right to match the picture. There were several sequences (a sequence of a fox in a hen house comes to mind) where we had to have several goes because we kept getting in each other's way - like a four-handed piano duet gone wrong.
I also remember spending half a day throwing myself around inside a laundry basket. They told me it was to represent Attenborough and Don Cameron doing some Nat. Hist. at high altitude in a balloon (don't ask!), but I think they just wanted me out of the way for a bit!
And yes, snow isn't snow, and horses hooves often are coconuts (but it's harder than you might imagine), and gents and ladies' shoes really do sound different.
If the editor was lazy, or the budget was too tight for an assistant film editor, it wasn't uncommon for films to arrive in dubbing with big gaps in the soundtrack, so we used to play in a lot of effects off discs. That could get interesting - none of this twin-turntable "DJ scratching" nonsense - we had five grams for one person to look after, plus three tape machines, often all running simultaneously and at different speeds. If you made a mistake it was quite a rigmarole setting everything up again. My tour de force was an entire mute cricket over for schools telly, entirely off disc, complete with 'oohs' and 'ahs' from the crowd, the thwack of the bat and subsequent applause - they'd 'forgotten' to track-lay anything!
I also used to do a lot of live regional TV news. In my early days, when it was still film, items were often shot entirely mute, and sound effects were played in live off disc and tape. If the story was late there was often a breathless film editor standing behind you to cue in a passing bus or similar.
Happy days, but sadly many of the bright lights are going out now...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2007/oct/17/guardianobituaries.media
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Copeland
Cheers,
E.
Homework: how did the BBC end up with a sound effects record of a French guillotine?
