Mike Bennett Speedway - About Us
Welcome to our new look site! It's taken a while to get here but
this is where you'll find the classic speedway collection from
1988 to 1997 and our more recent productions from 2005 to the present
day.
It all started back in 1986 when years of nagging paid off and
Wimbledon speedway invited me to take over the announcing duties at
Plough Lane. Within a few weeks the Boston Barracudas management invited
me to join them in a similar role and by the start of 1987 I was looking
at presenting several meetings every week while continuing with my radio
and live presentation work throughout the UK. That was the year I made
my TV debut as presenter and interviewer for Screensport and enjoyed
fronting League meetings and championship events during that year. At
that time, there were only a couple of video companies filming on a
regular basis and it was obvious that speedway fans were looking for a
record of meetings they had either enjoyed or couldn't get to so it was
a fairly obvious decision to enter the world of Video production and in
1988 MBI Video was born!
There were no shortage of volunteers willing to film at Kings Lynn,
Rye House, Milton Keynes, Sheffield , Long Eaton and Bradford - that was
the easy bit! The problem was editing and producing meetings every week
while continuing with all the other work so from March until October,
there were NO days off! When you look at the production facilities we
have now, back in the late 80's equipment was fairly basic and all
filming and editing was done using standard VHS tape! We then had to
edit in real time using fairly crude recorders so by late 1988 we
invested in our first edit suite ready for the 1989 season and that
improved the picture quality. That year also saw the first edition of
the now legendary "Anything can happen on the night" production which
featured out-takes, falls and a host of extras never seen in the
speedway world before. To this day the "Anything" series has been the
most popular of all our tapes and the entire set has now been mastered
on DVD.
Our first overseas venture saw us film six meetings in Australia so
we came back to the UK with two tapes for the start of the year - Aussie
89 one and two. We also invested in our first SVHS camera and purchased
a state of the art (well, it was for those days!) SVHS edit suite and we
filmed on a regular basis at Kings Lynn, Wolverhampton, Bradford,
Peterborough, Newcastle, Milton Keynes and Long Eaton. I was presenting
at most of those tracks too so would watch the meeting one night then
edit it the following day!
On each page you'll find more information about the DVDs available
from that particular year plus some more background about us and the
tracks we filmed at. There are buy it now buttons for the more recent
meetings or we can send you a payment request via email so you can use
credit card or PayPal - whichever you prefer.
If you go to the 2008 page, you'll find more information about the
archive material and you can see the entire catalogue on this site.
Thanks for taking the time to look at our site and we look forward to
receiving your order soon.
Mike Bennett
Click
HERE
for our main 2008 page
