This is a view of the original Main Reception area at the base on the concrete doughnut. This was renamed Stage Door when the (far more practical) street-facing reception was opened along with the rest of Stage 6 (see posts previous) sometime in the 1990s.
This angle captures the elaborate ceiling design in the double-height space, the charming wood-paneled walls (left of shot), the balcony on the first floor (left), the tall windows looking into the circular courtyard beyond, the BBC Transport Desk (despite the stick that the BBC constantly gets for excessive taxi bills, booking cars is sometimes essential for moving staff out-of-hours and getting staff, crew, kit and contributors to locations around London when a trip on the tube just wouldn't be practical... although I've done that too. In my experience, taxis were never booked casually and a great deal of thought went into how to minimise the number of bookings required for any project) and the (ahem) top-notch seating provided for guests waiting to be whisked off to other parts of the centre.
This space could often be seen in news programmes when (usually political) guests were seen entering or leaving the building and was sometimes commandeered for live broadcasts such as CHILDREN IN NEED and - famously - the WOGAN talk show when they were forced to decamp from their usual TVC studio in the great asbestos scare of the late 1980s.
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