London

It’s a little like redecorating your house – in fact, it’s exactly the same. You get the living room done and suddenly the coffee table you always thought looked like something out of ‘The Avengers’ looks too shabby and stained to make it as a prop in ‘Peep Show’. Closing the Festival Hall for two years has meant that every wall, every knob and knocker, every horse brass (I’m kidding) can be reassessed and refreshed to look as good as it did in 1951. Feature continues

When it comes to something as colossal as the hall’s organ, you get some idea of the time and money that’s needed. Reinstallation of the first phase – some 2,500 pipes – started at the end of October; the Swell organ, the great organ fluework and the pedal are now back in place. It’s a delicate operation. By necessity, reintroduction has to be done in phases. The venue needs to be dust-free, and to ‘voice’the organ has to be done in complete silence. So whether it’s in a newly-built concert hall, such as Birmingham Symphony Hall, or other refurbished arenas (like the Albert Hall) it takes months to even reach stage one. Though the Festival Hall first opened in 1951, the organ still wasn’t completely ready until an inaugural concert by four duelling organists in 1954.

It was designed by Ralph Downes and built by a Durham company called Harrison & Harrison. Its ‘open plan’ design (more suited to baroque than the romantic repertoire) so appalled Ralph Vaughan Williams that he wrote a letter to the Times. In keeping with the spirit of ’51 the organ was in the vanguard – in America it became a legend, and the Holtkamp Organ Company was established in Ohio that year; a similar design was later used in Coventry and Blackburn cathedrals. Harrison & Harrison have been working on the renovation at an extraordinary workshop in the northeast that looks rather like Santa’s grotto.

Anyone with a yearning to witness an organ pumping at the South Bank Centre doesn’t have to wait until the hall reopens in June. They are instead pointed towards the Queen Elizabeth Hall on January 30, when there will be a rare opportunity to hear a Tudor organ. No English organs survived the Reformation, but when two Tudor organ soundboards were discovered, one in a seventeenth-century house in Wetheringsett, Suffolk and the second decaying behind old pews and lumber in a churchyard shed in nearby Wingfield, experts were able to reconstruct two of these mysterious machines. The holes in the recovered soundboards revealed where the pipes were placed, and further evidence from surviving organs of the period in France and Spain allowed their recreation. Thrill to their trill for one night only.

Trust us to pick the exact same night for our next Turntable Café in the Purcell Room. It’s a tribute to ‘Watch With Mother’. In the late ’60s and ’70s, a period when pre-teens were allowed all of 15 minutes airtime a day, this series moulded a generation. The centrepiece will be ‘Joe’, a 1966 series about a kid with a bowlcut and brown saucer-sized eyes who lived in a transport caff. Even back then there were enough PC fanatics (they claimed Joe shouldn’t be climbing into strangers’ vehicles or darting between parked lorries, whether they were cartoons or not) to get the poor soul’s family moved to a safe B&B for the second series.

The ‘caff’ episodes were thought to be wiped, but last month creators Joan Hickson and Alison Prince rediscovered them on a BBC reel and they will receive their first airing in almost 40 years in the Purcell Room on January 30. Joan and Alison will take part in a Q&A, as will others involved in the creation of ‘Bod’ and ‘Fingerbobs’; Alison Cole, curator of their archives, will be exhibiting episodes and memorabilia. Rare as a Tudor organ, it is thought that no ‘Fingerbobs’ puppets survived the ’70s, with the exception of a solitary seagull. DJ Martin Green (of Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club night Workers’ Playtime) will help us out with a ‘Vision On’-esque set in the foyer.

For more information on events at the South Bank Centre, visit www.rfh.org.uk.