BBC Productions from the 1960s and 1970s

Lately, I've been watching a lot of BBC television productions from the late
60s and 70s. Those were the days when they shot on videotape in the studio
and on film on location, both interior and exterior. The quality of the
film footage ranges from acceptable to awful. Some of the Monty Python and
Faulty Towers film is badly scratched and decidedly low resolution. Most of
the All Creatures Great and Small film is fairly good, but I just watched an
exterior sequence that is very overexposed, and some of the interior footage
is underexposed, and not in an effective way to achieve saturation.

What film equipment and stock did the BBC use back then? I assume it was
16mm. Did they record the sound directly on film? The sound is not
especially good. I'm surpised that the BBC's technical standards weren't
higher.

Jim

 

Until US producers and networks began co-producing certain UK series,
terrible audio was par for the course in British TV productions,
especially anything with sequences shot outdoors. However, even the
interior soundstage audio was often pretty bad, with dialog volume
levels fluctuating as mic booms followed actors with varying degrees of
success.

Produced as recently as circa 1990, "A Summer's Lease" was near ruined
by bad audio. IIRC none of the outdoor dialog was looped and ambient
noise practically destroyed the audio which, for the most part, was
technically amateurish.

Ditto, unfortunately, for most UK and Euro movies, unless they were
being backed directly by major Hollywood studios (eg, Columbia or MGM
for David Lean's jumbo films).

For movies, however, the problem often was bad looping, making all the
actors sound dead and disembodied.

I'd speculate the trend was a persistent leftover from post-WW2
austerity which cas a shadow until well into the 60s.






C.

 

As an ex-BBC lighting cameraman, I can tell you that most material was shot
on 16mm Eastman Kodak negative stock.
I forget the emulsion number right now, but it was always being improved.,
though I still shudder when I see some of the old material being broadcast
these days!
Sound was recorded usually on a Nagra 1/4inch tape.
At the time, there didn't seem to be so much of a difference between the
film and video mix. I wonder if it's more noticeable today because our
receivers have got that much better.

Robin.

 

Robin,

I enjoyed your Web site and you certainly found a fun way to make a living.

A couple of years ago I read that Britain was on an aggressive schedule to
switch over to high definition television within a short time, with digital
radio to follow. Is most TV programming over there now produced in high
definition video? It will be interesting to see if it soon completely
replaces film for American television production.

I love the look of film, but everything changes and you have to accept it.
The powers that be keep forgetting to get my approval before proceeding with
these sorts of things.

Jim

 

It's interesting that BBC productions tend to either look superb, or like a
junior college television production class project. In general, they seem
to put more money and effort into dramas than comedies, and their in-studio
productions are usually better than location shoots. Be that as it may, I
still love the BBC.

Jim

 

Personally, and this is just a personal opinion, I can see a partial
re-birth for 16mm as the need to produce with Hi-Def in mind leaks slowly
(like a dodgy battery) into the mindset of the average British producer....

Two dozen years almost exclusively on tape and I'm fiddling with a load of
old Bolex for my next load of ramblings over the hills.... Quite liberating.
And in the absence of any REAL direction for HD in the UK about the only
rational direction to take....

and FWIW I tend to think that the poor quality of repeated old programmes is
down to bad archiving. Often VT was erased in the name of economy, negs were
dumped and all that remains is off-air recordings, stuff that's been in
folk's loft for donkeys, cutting prints etc...... The notion that audio was
routinely bad and we were 'saved' by the septics is, quite frankly, a load
of old bollocks..... And a downright bloody insult to some very finae and
able engineers.... But then septics are prone to that!

Fact is many an important programme still exists ONLY because someone hadn't
the heart to destroy it. took it home (in a tescos carrier bag) and stuck it
under the potting compost for 20 years...... Or recorded it in 1968 on
pieces of old knotted string dipped in cow dung and iron filings...... NOT
the best long term storage strategy but......

 

You have to bear in mind Jim that there was and remains a 'pecking order'
.......

Things we consider classic now... fawlty towers.. Dr Who etc, were
considered quite disposable in those days.........

My other post alludes to problems archiving some of this material but often
they weren't given the 'best' kit to work with either. Not a huge priority
with the lab boys and certainly not stuff that would finfd it's way onot the
best TK chain....

I trained in EFP with an ITV Company and by the time I joined (late '79)
film was dying near stone dead. Where in-house labs existed they were dark
dank depressing places of mystery... Where troglodite creatures roamed the
corridors, chemical stained, whailing and revenant-like...... In years to
come ghosthunters will chase reports of sounds like film-rustling....... (as
opposed to chains rattling)

 

and FWIW I tend to think that the poor quality of repeated old programmes
is

When one of our local televisions stations celebrated its 50th anniversary
it became known that they had saved very little news or entertainment
footage from the early days. Broadcasters don't seem to see themselves as
history archivists. They don't want to foot the cost of storing and
indexing film and tape that doesn't have much commercial value, so they just
chuck it. One well-known example here in the States is NBC's destruction of
the first ten years of Tonight Show tapes. When you look at the list of
guests on those shows, it's heartbreaking to think that their appearances
and performances are gone for good. I don't know for sure, but I'm willing
to bet that the television network news departments discarded most of their
early footage. We only see a few clips from that era and they are of
monumental events, like space shots and assassinations. What was considered
mundane news back then might be very interesting to us now, but much of it
is gone for good. Hopefully things will improve in the digital age.
Digital storage takes much less physical space and will consequently be less
costly.

Jim

 

AIUI some production might well be going over to HD, delivery within the UK
is staying LD, although there is a push towards digital delivery (both via
satellite and terrestrial transmission) - unfortunately the people who
decide these things have decided that we (the viewer) want more channels of
low technical quality than a few channels of high (HD) quality is seems....
:~(

 

Sadly they possibly have a point; given the nature of what is
produced.......... And watched!

But it seems unfortunate that there's no real push towards HD on DVD......

 

Hardly, I think it has more to do with archiving, budgets and
differences in production style. The mix between studio video and
outdoor film was something that was never really done in the US, where
pretty much everything was doneeither on film and OR on video in the
studio (I think I saw ONE episode of "Married, with Children" that
used film for a location shoot). That means all those old episodes of
Quincy and Battle Star Galactica etc were done right up to broadcast
on 35mm, even to the mid 1980s. Since then, some time in the late 80s
or 90s they would and been transferred to video probably by a High
quality telecine or film scanner, the BBC stuff has stayed on
videotape and thus has not benefitted from the upgrade if you will.

One the other hand, the mixed media BBC shows, the film segments were
transfered to video at the time, probably on some kind of pretty
primitive film chain, and haven't had the second chance and sprucing
up that the big budget US TV shows have had.

Seondly, just like the movies, even a big show in the UK has probably
less than a quarter of the budget of an american show. The pilot
episode of The Office was made for £90,000. What's the cost of an
american sitcome pilot? $1-2million? Most of the big network shows
were produced by the same studios that produce hollywood movies, and
even had access to the same backlots and studio space as those movies.

Thirdly I would say that there is a difference in production styles
between the UK and the US. Becuase of the dominant influence of
hollywood, that was the style in the US, that seemless whole. In the
UK it was split between the studio work and the location film units,
with different crews, even different directors sometimes. The location
crews were often also documentary crews, and therefore a more rough
and naturalistic style was their chosen approach, also tied to the
influence of documentary realism on british TV production, preferring
imperfect but natural some rather than looped and totally fixed studio
overdubs. The dead sone you refer to is a prominent feature of italian
and german cinema which preferred that style to the less technically
perfect (which I'm assuming you refer to as amateurish) direct sound
preferred in French and British cinema.

Dylan

 

Your comments are valid (especially that US TV production had/has access
to movie production facilities, and bigger budgets), but do not negate mine.

It was the audio for "A Summer's Lease" which I described as amateurish,
not British cinema.

I'd agree that, on average, the audio for British and French movies from
the 1960s was better than Italian (I haven't seen enough German films to
comment), though I'd hardly describe it as "technically perfect".






C.