BBC Centenary

[MB]

There have been many broadcasts over the last couple of days of what the
first programmes on BBC radio would have sounded like. Why do they
always have to add a heterodyne to the sound?

[Roderick Stewart]

Probably the same reason they always add scratches and bounces to what
is supposed to be old black and white film, or superimposed lines with
horizontal tearing to what is supposed to be old television or
videotape material.

It will have been done by people who have no understanding of the
technology and are not old enough to have any experience of the real
thing, so have no idea how good it could be when done properly.

Rod.

[Brian Gaff]

Because they can.
In my view I'd imaging lightening crashes might be more realistic!

Brian

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[Scott]

Nobody is old enough to experience the real thing with the first
programmes on the BBC :-)

[MB]

On 15/11/2022 11:58, Scott wrote:
> Nobody is old enough to experience the real thing with the first

> programmes on the BBC 😄



But there are plenty of people who have listened to AM radio on radio
receivers that are not that different from ones used in the early 1920s.

[Scott]

On Tue, 15 Nov 2022 12:38:46 +0000, MB <M...@nospam.net> wrote:

>On 15/11/2022 11:58, Scott wrote:
>> Nobody is old enough to experience the real thing with the first

>> programmes on the BBC ?

>
>But there are plenty of people who have listened to AM radio on radio
>receivers that are not that different from ones used in the early 1920s.
>

True, hence the :-)

You could also add anyone over 100 who enjoyed listening to the radio
in their cot :-)

[Max Demian]

What, ones with a "reaction" knob?

I think only hobbyist kits would have used positive feedback to increase
sensitivity and selectivity since the mid 1930s.

--
Max Demian

[John Williamson]

On 15/11/2022 12:38, MB wrote:

The early 1920s sets would often have been superregenerative receivers,
not superheterodyne ones, and I have not seen a superregen receiver for
sale commercially in my lifetime.

The superregen types used to interfere with each other's reception if
the tuning of one of them was even slightly off.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.

[NY]

It is particularly funny when "people who have no understanding of the
technology" get it wrong and add an effect for the wrong technology.

I saw a documentary about the 1980 Iranian Embassy Siege in London,
which used the well-known shots of the SAS soldiers abseiling down the
walls and clambering from one balcony to another, and the flash-bang of
the stun grenades.

Very obviously shot with TV (video) cameras and recorded on videotape.
The slightly garish colours, the clipping on highlights and the absence
of film grain and bob/weave made it abundantly clear what technology had
been used.

But some "herbert", who probably hadn't even been born in 1980, had
thought "this is archive material - we need a way to distinguish it
visibly from the modern-day interviews". So they added fake *film*
scratches and dirt.

[John Williamson]

Is it likely that this sort of thing happens because both the editors
and compilers are now from an arts background, rather than being advised
by the engineering department about how to restore the footage when
asked to dig into the archives?

[jon]

.....with a reaction control knob.

[Scott]

Is there any requirement to distinguish between current and archive
material? On the news, if they are showing a clip from 10 years
earlier, it would seem eminently sensible to distinguish it in some
way.

I remember my late father phoning his brother in Canada to say how
well the Canadian was doing in the snooker only to find he was
watching a year old video recording by mistake.

[John Williamson]

On 15/11/2022 17:08, Scott wrote:

> Is there any requirement to distinguish between current and archive
> material? On the news, if they are showing a clip from 10 years
> earlier, it would seem eminently sensible to distinguish it in some
> way.
>

In technical terms, no, but for artistic reasons, the programme creators
may want to distinguish them, especially if they want to make a point
about attitudes changing. As for news programmes, maybe showing an on
screen date might do the job that adding scratches and such does?

> I remember my late father phoning his brother in Canada to say how
> well the Canadian was doing in the snooker only to find he was
> watching a year old video recording by mistake.
>

:-)

[NY]

"John Williamson" <johnwil...@btinternet.com> wrote in message
news:jti0mp...@mid.individual.net...

And likewise for the Iranian Embassy documentary, to make it clear to the
hard-of-thinking viewers that they were not looking at events that were
taking place a few hours ago ;-)

[Scott]

On Tue, 15 Nov 2022 17:31:02 +0000, John Williamson
<johnwil...@btinternet.com> wrote:

>On 15/11/2022 17:08, Scott wrote:
>
>> Is there any requirement to distinguish between current and archive
>> material? On the news, if they are showing a clip from 10 years
>> earlier, it would seem eminently sensible to distinguish it in some
>> way.
>>
>In technical terms, no, but for artistic reasons, the programme creators
>may want to distinguish them, especially if they want to make a point
>about attitudes changing. As for news programmes, maybe showing an on
>screen date might do the job that adding scratches and such does?

What about legal considerations? Would it not be misleading viewers
to show a 10 year old news clip without identifying it in some way
that goes beyond small print?

[John Williamson]

On 15/11/2022 19:03, Scott wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Nov 2022 17:31:02 +0000, John Williamson
> <johnwil...@btinternet.com> wrote:
>
>> On 15/11/2022 17:08, Scott wrote:
>>
>>> Is there any requirement to distinguish between current and archive
>>> material? On the news, if they are showing a clip from 10 years
>>> earlier, it would seem eminently sensible to distinguish it in some
>>> way.
>>>
>> In technical terms, no, but for artistic reasons, the programme creators
>> may want to distinguish them, especially if they want to make a point
>> about attitudes changing. As for news programmes, maybe showing an on
>> screen date might do the job that adding scratches and such does?
>
> What about legal considerations? Would it not be misleading viewers
> to show a 10 year old news clip without identifying it in some way
> that goes beyond small print?

What about programmes that degrade reconstructed footage to make the it
look "genuine"?

[Scott]

On Tue, 15 Nov 2022 19:48:16 +0000, John Williamson

I would say it could be a legitimate device if - say - Panorama wanted
to distinguish between the present and archive material. I can see
that a news headline 'New allegations have emerged about the disgraced
former DJ, Jimmy Savile' ought to be presented in a way that makes it
clear this is part of the narrative and not something that happened
yesterday.

[Roderick Stewart]

I can remember watching 405 line television in the 1950s, but don't
recall any of the sideways jumping and tearing that is often added as
an effect by modern programmes when they attempt to duplicate it.

Rod.

[jon]

Not disgraced before he died,though.

[jon]

On Tue, 15 Nov 2022 09:34:12 +0000, Brian Gaff wrote:

> Because they can.
> In my view I'd imaging lightening crashes might be more realistic!
>
> Brian

Not sure many crashed.

[Scott]

That is a different point altogether more to do with the culture of
the organisation than any technical aspects of broadcasting.

[NY]

"Roderick Stewart" <rj...@escapetime.myzen.co.uk> wrote in message
news:vn99nhpng1fecfdnp...@4ax.com...

> I can remember watching 405 line television in the 1950s, but don't
> recall any of the sideways jumping and tearing that is often added as
> an effect by modern programmes when they attempt to duplicate it.

I can remember white horizontal streaks across the picture when a
car/motorbike with poor ignition suppression went past. I had an old
cast-off 405-line TV in my bedroom long after my parents got 625-line colour
TV, so I still saw the effect until the late 1970s.

405 line TVs tended to have poorer control over the picture shape, so you
got rectangles that were shown as parallelograms, or people whose heads were
abnormally small in relation to their bodies/legs.

I've seen a 405-line picture rippling, maybe due to beating between the
frame rate and the mains frequency at that moment (poor PSU regulation).

But I don't remember tearing and sideways jumping.

Home VCRs tended to introduce artefacts of their own: tearing at the ends of
lines, especially towards the very top and bottom of the screen; and there
were the stereotypical noise bars which you got when you played a recording
forwards or backwards at high speed.

The noise bars are still used as an effect nowadays on TV dramas which show
someone skimming through a digital recording at high speed. Also you often
still see a TV displaying a snowy picture if the aerial feed has failed,
which doesn't happen with digital TV.

Another effect which is sometimes added to modern footage to make it look
like old 405-line TV (when it's part of the story of a drama) is the
Venetian blind effect, where one field is darker than the other so it has
alternate darker lines. I've also seen that used as a crude device on
archive footage in a documentary to say "this is old footage".

My view is that when it is not obvious that archive footage is old (by the
picture quality, the fact it's black-and-white and 4:3, etc), the fact is
best conveyed by a caption "footage from 1937" etc. Many (but not all)
documentaries tend to distinguish between a modern interview and one from
the archives by a caption "Fred Bloggs, speaking in 1975" or equivalent
information in voiceover narration.

[Max Demian]

On 15/11/2022 15:02, NY wrote:

> On 15/11/2022 09:05, Roderick Stewart wrote:
>> On Mon, 14 Nov 2022 23:25:18 +0000, MB <M...@nospam.net> wrote:
>>
>>> There have been many broadcasts over the last couple of days of what the
>>> first programmes on BBC radio would have sounded like. Why do they
>>> always have to add a heterodyne to the sound?
>>
>> Probably the same reason they always add scratches and bounces to what
>> is supposed to be old black and white film, or superimposed lines with
>> horizontal tearing to what is supposed to be old television or
>> videotape material.
>>
>> It will have been done by people who have no understanding of the
>> technology and are not old enough to have any experience of the real
>> thing, so have no idea how good it could be when done properly.
>
> It is particularly funny when "people who have no understanding of the
> technology" get it wrong and add an effect for the wrong technology.

The most absurd example I recall are recent programmes of Click on BBC
News. They discussed the TV trials at the BBC which compared Baird's 240
line mechanical system with EMI's all-electronic 405 line one. They
implied that Baird's was the *30 line* system (only used experimentally)
and even showed the images side by side on the screen. And then repeated
the error a couple of weeks later on a different episode.

--
Max Demian

[NY]

"Max Demian" <max_d...@bigfoot.com> wrote in message
news:tl2ihq$2bet8$1...@dont-email.me...

> The most absurd example I recall are recent programmes of Click on BBC
> News. They discussed the TV trials at the BBC which compared Baird's 240
> line mechanical system with EMI's all-electronic 405 line one. They
> implied that Baird's was the *30 line* system (only used experimentally)
> and even showed the images side by side on the screen. And then repeated
> the error a couple of weeks later on a different episode.

The distinction between Baird's 30-line and 240-line systems definitely
needs to be made clearer: a lot of info about old TV systems mentions the
30-line system and is less forthcoming about the 240-line system. I was well
into adulthood before I was aware that there had been a 240-line system.

There have been news articles/demonstrations about modern reconstruction of
30-line images that had been recorded on gramophone-type discs. I presume
there are no equivalents for 240-line because technology for recording those
images did not exist: frequencies were too high to record mechanically, and
spinning-head videotape technology was not developed until the 1950s. Were
film recordings ever made of Baird's 240-line broadcasts, either for
archiving or for repeating shortly after the original live broadcast?

[MB]

On 16/11/2022 09:20, jon wrote:
> Not disgraced before he died,though.

Always suspicious of allegations that are treated as true without any
evidence. The ones against Prince Andrew seem to be unravelling.

[Roderick Stewart]

On Wed, 16 Nov 2022 09:40:53 +0000, Scott
<newsg...@gefion.myzen.co.uk> wrote:

>>>>What about programmes that degrade reconstructed footage to make the it
>>>>look "genuine"?
>>>
>>> I would say it could be a legitimate device if - say - Panorama wanted
>>> to distinguish between the present and archive material. I can see that
>>> a news headline 'New allegations have emerged about the disgraced former
>>> DJ, Jimmy Savile' ought to be presented in a way that makes it clear
>>> this is part of the narrative and not something that happened yesterday.
>>
>>Not disgraced before he died,though.
>
>That is a different point altogether more to do with the culture of
>the organisation than any technical aspects of broadcasting.

Even if they're still alive, anybody who has been accused of certain
types of offence always seems to be described in the media these days
as "disgraced", whether the matter has been proven or not. It seems an
allegation is all it needs, even if it refers to alleged events from
decades ago.

Rod.

[Scott]

There was Dame Janet Smith's report:
http://downloads.bbci.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_work/dame_janet_smith_review/conclusions_summaries.pdf
Are you saying that 'evidence' only exists in the criminal courts?

[Max Demian]

Since Baird's system involved a cine film intermediary perhaps some of
those films still exist. Were EMI's TV trials cine filmed; I mean from
the TV screen? I would have thought that both would have been filmed so
people not present at the original showings could compare them.

(There are plenty of films *of* the TV trial available, filmed in the
studio.)

--
Max Demian

[NY]

"Max Demian" <max_d...@bigfoot.com> wrote in message

news:tl34vj$2d1so$1...@dont-email.me...

> Since Baird's system involved a cine film intermediary perhaps some of
> those films still exist. Were EMI's TV trials cine filmed; I mean from the
> TV screen? I would have thought that both would have been filmed so people
> not present at the original showings could compare them.

Ah. I'd forgotten that Baird's system used intermediate film which was then
scanned (after very rapid processing and fixing). How did they scan the
film? Was it a mechanical scanner (a lens which moved rapidly across the
film, focussing a different part of the image onto a static sensor) - like a
mechanical version of a flying spot scanner? I should have remembered about
the film - I remember in Jack Rosenthal's drama "The Fools on the Hill"
about the "trial of the standards" the scene where the actress/presenter
noticed that the hem of her dress was wet and the director said "Bugger, the
tank of fixer has leaked again"... and there were puddles of highly
poisonous fixer (or maybe it was developer) all over the studio floor.

[tony sayer]

In article <tl3go1$2e5v2$1...@dont-email.me>, NY <m...@privacy.invalid>
scribeth thus

And here it is enjoy!..


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMmZ72uSuYk
--
Tony Sayer


Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.

Give him a keyboard, and he will reveal himself.