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Ten Acre Books is publishing a new edition of television pioneer Bernard Wilkie’s memoir, A Peculiar Effect on the BBC, arriving on April 6th.

“We were there when Television Centre was still only a rubbish dump and Lime Grove was as famous as Hollywood. We were the first designers to work at Ealing Studios and were certainly the first effects men ever to be employed in British television.”

Bernard Wilkie was a pioneer in the world of visual effects. Along with Jack Kine he co-founded the BBC’s Visual Effects Department in 1954. Between them, they worked on too many BBC productions to list, but they included Doctor Who, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Quatermass, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em.

A Peculiar Effect on the BBC is his memoir, looking back over his career in detail with a light, but educational, and often cautionary tone. Whether it’s trying to make a smoke gun, encase an Ice Warrior in a block of ice, create a Loch Ness Monster, or simply come up with a way of presenting a photo collection on screen utilising only one studio camera, Bernard and Jack rose to the occasion – often choking, soaking and terrifying their colleagues in the process. And almost all of these effects had to be done live – the pressure was on!

First published in 2015, this new edition includes photographs from the Wilkie family collection, a foreword by visual effects designer Mat Irvine and an afterword by BAFTA-winning visual effects designer Mike Tucker.