Engineer - (Goonhilly Visitor Centre) : Mr Neil White

Transcript

We'd had a launch of the new BT at Goonhilly and we had a lot of media people and press people and television people down. And I was chatting to the various people over drinks and sandwiches and I mentioned to this guy that we were opening to the public next. What I didn't realise, the bloke I was talking to was a Radio One disc jockey and when he went back on that following Monday he said by the way if any of you are in Goonhilly tomorrow Goonhilly's open to the public. It taught me that the power of BBC Radio One was phenomenal, because at ten o'clock on Monday morning we were absolutely inundated by people turning up at the front door at Goonhilly in their cars wanting a trip around the station. So my son and my daughter and a couple of friends of theirs were absolutely overwhelmed and it was pouring with rain. We had a very small car park and the first thing happened was I had a phone call from the gate to say that did I realise that we'd got a queue of people going down the entrance drive and they were queuing down the main road outside to come in. So it took off quite well. I managed to convince BT that it was worthwhile doing it properly and I persuaded them to build a visitor centre in 1987. We actually had the visitor centre opened by the managing director so I was quite pleased about that.