Taken from "Prospero"

Engineer who lived his dream

'Kind, caring, can do' is the way Mark Byford, deputy director general, then a 20 year old just starting out on his BBC career, remembers Jim Bradley.
It's a sentiment shared widely by friends and colleagues from Jim's own long television engineering career - a career that began in the 1960s in London and ended in Leeds in 1991.
Jim's fascination with the way things work began early at Chigwell School where, in his mid teens, he built his own fully-practical television set.
Jim, determined to join the BBC, was too young when he left school, so he served his engineering apprenticeship with the General Post Office. In 1962, his ambition was realised, as he began his BBC career at Lime Grove Studios, first as a technical assistant and then as an engineer in telecine. Jim firmly believed it was having made the television set at school that got him the job.
He returned to Leeds in 1965, where he had been born before the war, to work as an education engineer in Schools Broadcasting.
When the BBC decided to open a television station in Leeds, Jim was in his element, doing the complicated engineering work needed to set it up and get it on the air.
Not one to sit still, Jim took courses in lighting and camera work and, at the end of the 1970s, he became a senior television engineer.
At that time he lit much of the studio output from BBC Leeds. The post later changed to operations manager, which further widened his responsibilities.
On leaving the BBC in 1991 Jim became a BBC pensioner visitor and with his wife, Sylvia, maintained his relationship with the BBC and made new ones with older, former employees. Rebuilding a I6mm telecine machine, with his former colleague and friend Stan Robinson, became a passion. And they got it back to full working order.
Jim cared deeply about the BBC -not just about the programmes he worked on - but about the people who were his colleagues, and he took a real delight in watching people flourish.
Helen Thomas, head of BBC Yorkshire, says that 'Jim's outstanding ability to spot potential in people and then to develop that potential has seen people go on to enjoy very successful careers both here in Yorkshire and elsewhere in the BBC'.
Jim's spirit remained undiminished after his stroke in 2007, and although he would never regain his independence, he never lost his courage or unique smile.
'Mr Twinkle was such good fun' says one of his colleagues, 'always game for a laugh and one of the best bosses we ever had at the Beeb.'
The final words go to Mark Byford: 'We will all miss him deeply, but I will never forget his rock-solid support and that smiley-face as ever bumbling down the corridor saying "Get a grip Biff!" Lovely Jim.'

By Marion Allinson