Digitial Age is Nothing New...

I am currently working with former BBC Producer, Barry Letts, on a Doctor Who story we are pretty sure will be taken by BBC Worldwide called “The Power of N-Space.”

Barry and I often discuss his life in television and it is amazing to think how things have changed in his lifetime. Barry made his TV debut in 1950. This was live television of course, monochrome on the comparatively low resolution of 405 horizontal lines. There was one station: “The BBC Television Service” broadcasting for a very few hours a day mainly to the affluent south of England. In 1950, the only way to preserve a broadcast was to make a telerecording of it. This involved pointing a camera at a monitor and recording the image shown and making an optical soundtrack. This further reduced the definition to about 270 lines. Although a little pre-WW2 output remains in the BBC archives (having launched their 405 monochrome service in 1936) with the exception of the 1948 Olympics, very little remains in the archive from 1945-1953.
As an actor, Barry found live television was especially nerve-wracking. The cameras were mainly pre-war Marconi’s, weighed several hundred pounds and were very difficult to move. The BBC’s studios at Alexandra Palace and Lime Grove were extremely small and there were frequent technical errors.
1953 was a landmark year in British Television. The coronation of a new Queen encouraged everyone to watch TV and take it seriously as a medium for the first time. As the UK emerged from post-war austerity, the television became the new thing to have. In the same year, VERA, (they love acronyms at the BBC, as we shall see) changed the way TV was made. Well, it nearly did. Video Electronic Recording Apparatus allowed, for the first time, a direct to video feed of a live broadcast for posterity and almost instant playback. However, the tape speed was measured in meters per seconds, if not set perfectly, the tape head would fly off threatening life and limb to all in the vicinity and the tape was so expensive, it soon became impractical for a television service requiring public subsidy. On the plus side, the BBC were able to obtain the old Ealing film studios and although still very expensive, location filming could now be achieved using 16mm film stock and inserted into live drama broadcasts, giving more time for actors and production crew to move between sets and so on.
The next big step was the miracle of the Helical Scan Video Machine which was introduced in the UK in 1957. By scanning fields at a diagonal angle, the amount of tape needed to record something was dramatically reduced, it also became easier to edit as more information (or data as it was then not known) was shared between frames. From the late 1950’s television drama began developing into something we recognize today. Less live performing, studio shots on video and location shots on 16mm. Though this became an issue in the color era, at this stage it did not matter. Camera technology allowed multi-camera set up’s to become more sophisticated and by 1960, live coverage of the Rome Olympics became possible. To truly see the marvel of the Helical Scan Video Machine in action one only has to see the differences between the two six-part serials produced and directed by Rudolph Cartier in 1955 and 1957. Quatermass II survives as telerecordings and has all the problems associated with early television. Numerous technical errors, badly timed cues for actors and the few filmed inserts are roughshod into the production. Just two years later, Quatermass And The Pit, (now it has been restored) looks as if it could have been made yesterday. No live performances, far superior direction and technical work and no actor fluffs.
1955 saw the birth of commercial television in the United Kingdom. Although not the purpose of this essay, with bigger budgets, television was able to be made entirely on film and had (for the time) truly groundbreaking qualities. If you don’t believe me I offer you “The Saint,” “The Avengers,” “Danger Man,” and “The Prisoner.”
After many years of pleading with the Government, Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, recognized the need for the BBC to lead the way in the UK in television technology and in 1963 commissioned BBC-2, rebranding the original BBC as BBC-1. But, there was a snag. BBC-2 was going to be high-definition…in the mid-sixties? Well, they did it and were able to do so using the existing cameras and equipment. The agreed standard was 625 line UHF as opposed to 405 line VHF (known as FM in the US.) Despite a power cut blacking out their opening night, the new high definition service became home to many music and arts programs, and just as today, there was a demand for sport in the new high resolution.
Although 405 line TV was accessible until 1985, 1969 was the date chosen by the Government for all broadcasters to switch to the 625 line format. But, before that happened, the world was going to become considerably brighter.
July 1967, Billie-Jean King was the Queen of Wimbledon and for the first time, the BBC was transmitting in color, Viewers of BBC-2 with a color television could watch Wimbledon in color and BBC-1 carried the same game in monochrome. It is sometimes asked why the BBC waited until 1967. Experiments with the American NTSC system had proved unsatisfactory (NTSC, to this day is known as Never Twice the Same Color) and as UK TV has higher definition than US TV (625 lines versus 525 lines) the problems were just compounded. Eventually, the BBC adopted the European PAL system, developed by Philips.
Barry Letts takes up the story: “When I directed the Doctor Who story, “The Enemy of the World” in 1967, it was monochrome and I was still using matte techniques I read about in the 1930’s. When BBC-1 announced the autumn schedule for 1969 would be in color, at least in prime-time, I quickly realized in my new job as Producer of Doctor Who, we could try effects which previously would have been too expensive to attempt.”
CSO (Color Separation Overlay) was the BBC’s name for chro-makey or as it is known today, the blue/green screen effect. Essentially, with CSO you can electronically key out a background and move the foreground information, (usually a person) and place them in another setting (usually a model) recorded by another camera. The actor(s) perform against a blue screen and floor and ceiling. Although time consuming to set up, the fact it can be done on video saves considerable money. For the first time, there was no need for expensive back projection using film, front axial projection on video was far easier to achieve using CSO as was the use of model monsters and huge creatures and so on. Of course, the technology was very primitive. Never did CSO look worse than when an attempt was made to mix video and film, (something the Quantel Console, did not really get to grips with until the mid eighties.) Many of the backgrounds were never quite to scale and the figures being CSO’d frequently had fringes around them which made them look incredibly cheap.
However, steady progress was made through the 1970’s and as portable video equipment became more commonplace, it was possible to film exteriors on videotape – combined with improvements in the CSO process. (It was discovered excessive noise and contrasting colors caused the fringing, for example.)
The next issue became one of film versus video. Until the early 1990’s it was still fairly common for exteriors to be filmed on 16mm film and interiors on video, The difference in the texture of the picture is very jarring. Film, although grainy, could pick up greater detail. Video was brighter, required different lighting as well as different make-up and was sensitive to certain bright colors. When programs were made on film, they were transmitted often straight from the telecine machine (which turned the film into an electronic signal) although the machines ran smoothly, the heads often became very clogged as a result, programs made in the early 1980’s entirely on film now look very work indeed. This, of course was a long time before the current fad to filmise video and vidfire film to make it look like video!
Similarly, hand held cameras have more or less destroyed the traditional TV camera set up. Digital technology now enables TV to be made on video in a similar way to film production. You can now film shot by shot instead of scene by scene or episode by episode.