PSTOIC

That’s if you believe this write up from a 1990’s Imperial College magazine about clubs and societies at the college.

Photo credit: Andy Clark

The photo is from the filming of the short-lived gameshow “Going for Coppers”.

Going for Coppers

A mini-meetup was organised at short nortice last week as a VSPP (very special pStoic person) was in London.

The plan was to meet at the “refurbished” Imperial pub off Leicester Square followed by a meal at the Happy restaurant nearby. We hadn’t realised that Wednesday was live music night at the pub. The special guest was Ledda, a long overdue visit from Canada. Alan, Alex, Kevin, Martin and Matthew also made it.

A big Thank you to those who contributed to the renewal/upkeep of pstoic.com.

It is hoped that the annual pSTOIC dinner will be on January 13th 2024 (or possibly the 6th). A reminder that the theme is “Bring something hot” – these dates have been approved by the VSPP as she said she can make this date.

Here’s a possible suggestion for the 2024 theme from Ledda’s dessert:

Many thanks to Martin for this report, please visit http://www.g7oli.co.uk/bodge_events.py?22-pStoicAug2023 for full report and photos.

Coming Soon: September Londno meetup with another far-away Bodger…

In the present day the idea of recording onto flimsy videotape may seem bizarre to the current generation, but that’s what we had available at the time.

As Student Television evolved into the digital age, the rows and rows of old video tape – primarily Umatic in the case of STOIC, clearly became a waste of potentially useful space.

Massive pile of old STOIC stuff

When STOIC moved from the top floor of the Union building to the basement in Beit Quad, the archive was faithfully relocated and around 10 years ago we recoved some Umatic tapes and with the help of Doug and Alan, this was digitised. But many more hours of archive remained. On a more recent visit, perhaps 5 or 6 years ago we could see no sign of this archive.

I feared it was lost forever but I’ve just read on the blog maintained by the Imperial Television Studio’s creator, Colin Grimshaw, that he rescued the tapes from oblivion. Colin writes:

As discussed in other blogs, in 2009 I was able to save the entire STOIC videotape archive from being put into a skip during major rebuilding work in the basement of the Students Union building.

This is indeed wonderful news, and I recomend all STOIC alumni have a look at Colin’s excellent blog which is at https://blogs.imperial.ac.uk/videoarchive/

I read on the blog that the Imperial College maintained Video Server has been discontinued so it seems some of the digitised material has now gone!  So maybe the tapes were better after all 🙂

Other videos can be found at https://www.youtube.com/@pstoic/videos

Following a tip-off from Andy Bennett, we’ve discovered that very, very sadly, the Student Television Of Imperial College is reported to have shut down in 2021.

This seems to have been as a result of the closure of college during COVID, and when it reopened, there just weren’t the existing members to introduce the new students to keep it going.

We’re grateful to Amanda Hertzberg who runs the ICTV Facebook page who gave us some updates. She told us that the ICTV members who were running it at the time of the COVID outbreak had graduated by the time college got back to normal, so there were not enough new people to keep it going. Jamie John, editor  of Felix 2023, confirmed that it is currently inactive:

It was active up until last year and played an important role in student events such as ICHack.

We heard from Matej, the last ICTV station manager. He said:

The reason ICTV shut down was that we were not able to find core officers for the year 22/23. I managed to convince 2 people but it was after the deadline, they were not members the previous year, and when I tried talking to the union about it, their response was that the club was shut down and the only thing we can do is to start a new club through their society incubator programme.

Since I came to Imperial in 2018 we were struggling with attracting people, we usually had about 3 active members. We had some events with good responses but we didn’t manage to keep people interested. It felt like whenever we got any momentum either the people who signed up were busy or we on the committee were really busy.

Somehow we survived but when covid came it all crumbled apart. We couldn’t do any in-person events and that was the only way we got the few people we had until then. We weren’t good at marketing our society on the internet or organizing online events and so ICTV withered away.

Up until 2021, it seems to have been involved in a variety of activities that will be all too familiar to alumni of the nineties as this news update shows:

The equipment and studio at the time looked to be pretty good.

With thanks to Amanda, DH and Matej for helping us with this update. Amanda and Matej are pictured here in a group photo in 2019

Matej added that recent programme making had been a lot of live coverage and making vids for other societies:

As far as I know ICTV stopped being a College TV and became more of a filmmaking society way before I or the station manager before me came to Imperial so we don’t really have programming or any real archive for the past while. We did live streams for ichack and varsity, worked for the union, filmed other societies events, and some short ads for student companies… most of that should be on youtube or a drive somewhere.

He added:

The old servers are still in the west basement and tapes are in Imperial Archives

RIP STOIC 1969 – 2021

The pSTOIC bloodhounds had a chance meeting with STOIC (and Imperial) alumni, Andy Bennett at a conference yesterday (8 Feb 2023). Andy hasn’t been seen at meetup for many years but does make welcome contributions to the mailing list. For the last 10 years he has been building companies around distributed database technology.

He’s  on Twitter @RegDyn.

Andy shared the news that he’d heard that STOIC (lately Imperial College TV) has shut down! More on this as the bloodhounds investigate…