Work for Idle Hands

I joined the staff in the Theatre Department at Croydon College in April 1985, just in time to help mount the Spring Term exhibition of second-year students' work that had come to be called Workshow. Individual students had chosen costumes, portions of a setting, or large props from their designs, completed in the previous term to be realised to full scale. Lighting students designed the lighting for each piece in the hall and the production team undertook the responsibility of technically presenting the exhibition to the public for a week in March. I was staggered at the scale and ambition of this exercise - and these students were only half way through their three-year sandwich HND course.
In the summer term, these same second-year students became a production team collaborating with a performance company to mount a new contemporary ballet at the Secombe Centre Theatre in Sutton. They designed and constructed setting, costumes and lighting. My role as lighting and production tutor was to support these realised productions.
Over the next two years, while I undertook an in-house Cert Ed, I was heavily involved in rewriting the course for BTEC validation. This successful course ran until the mid 90's, firmly establishing Croydon College's reputation for producing theatre design students with very strong practical skills.
In the late 80's, the department gained a lecture room, which was converted into a second venue named "The Peter Jackman Studio Theatre" (in commemoration of a talented lighting student, who helped design the space).
Workshows were finally phased out in the mid to late 90's as the course was revalidated as BA and Foundation Degree courses and the emphasis shifted to end-of-year degree shows.
In the early 2000's, a parallel digital film degree course was established and, after completing an MA in Computer Arts, I started teaching camera and editing on this course as well as lighting and production on the Theatre courses. In 2010, sadly, the Theatre course was discontinued and all the department's resources were concentrated on the current film-making courses.
This exhibition displays some of the practical work achieved by students of the courses over the 30 years that it has been my privilege to teach in this college.