Background
A number of recent programmes have been set in the early 1950s to the mid-to-late 1960s, and many people watching would have had a good working knowledge of what it was like to work then – and what things looked like and how they worked. However, many of these programmes get things wrong – sometimes even when the programme makers have been told that things were wrong (see http://tech-ops.co.uk/next/an-adventure-in-space-and-time-errors/). The problem is, of course, that the period that these programmes are set in is still within living memory for some – although likely not within living memory of those making the programmes- so general viewers will notice errors and not just academics.
Here is a further collection of things that the programme makers got right – or got wrong.
“Cilla” – ITV
Not totally on topic since it was shown on ITV …
Dave Plowman
It was nice to see an art department making a decent fist of reproducing a period recording studio.
The control room had BTR2 tape recorders and a quadrant fader mixer. The talkback mic looked odd, though.
Cilla’s mic appeared to be a U87, so rather too new I’d think. But since I’d guess the mic was practical, perhaps understandable. And very similar in looks to what would have been used. The song was recorded in early 1964, with the U87 arriving in 1966. Which I do remember it was the first to use phantom power. A marvel to us dirty handed mic riggers.
I was surprised to see George Martin operating the mixer on his own. I’d always assumed he was ‘just’ a producer and most of that would have been done by an engineer.
Brian Curtis
I was also interested in the “technical props” in “Cilla” and also thought the “control room” with BTR2 and quadrant faders looked good. The mic that looked like U87 was interesting and perhaps too modern but watching the later programme “One and only Cilla” with Paul O’Grady and Cilla, they showed a clip of her original recording which was filmed at Apple Studio: the mic which I could not exactly identify did look a bit like U87. Interestingly the headphones used by Cilla (Sheridan Smith) in the drama looked really ancient but perhaps authentic. However I did spot a stray pair of Beyer DT108s on the piano in one shot.
Martin Kisner
I worked at EMI Abbey Road studios for about two years 1963-1964. A good time to be there.
I recall being present in the control room for Cilla’s recording of ‘Your my World’. I’m sure that took place in the very large Studio One. The microphone used by Cilla likely to have been a U47 or U67.
I was present at a number of recording sessions with George Martin including a number with the Beatles. I never saw him doing the sound balance for a recording. Talking cars, George Martin drove a white Triumph Herald at the time. I remember the registration number letters were WAR!
BTR 2’s and the upgraded BTR 3’s (sprayed grey) were the studio recording machines, built like tanks and originally designed in Germany. The sound desk was quadrant fader made by EMI , see the attached photo taken in the Studio Two control room.
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The balance engineer pic is Norman Smith (later becoming Hurricane Smith). He is surrounded by some well known faces. Note the talkback mic and also the cigarettes. Looking on in the background is me wearing the regulation engineering white coat.
I wrote an article about my time at Abbey Road (Crossing Abbey Road) for our community magazine. Its online at www.martinkisner.com
“Foyles War” – ITV
Not totally on topic since it was shown on ITV …
In “The Sunday Times” “Culture” section during 2014 there was a continuing thread in their “You Say” feature about people complaining about the use of RouteMaster buses in the programme, as these were not in use until after the supposed period of the drama.
Geoff Fletcher
I watched the last episode of Foyles War and once again there were some irritating errors which should not have occurred given a modicum of basic checking for correct period detail.
The series is set after WW2 but contained flashbacks of an SOE agent bring despatched to France in 1944. They used a post war Auster AOP 4 or an Auster Aiglet painted in post war RAF colours with post war Type D red white and blue roundels on the upper wings and fuselage. They may have used Austers, but certainly not that mark and not in those colours.
The usual mount for delivering individual agents was the Westland Lysander. These were fitted with a long range fuel tank under the fuselage and a ladder to the rear cockpit, finished in all black undersides extending halfway up the fuselage, with type B red and blue roundels on the wing upper surfaces and Type B or later Type C roundels on the fuselage sides. There is a fine example of one of these machines, in the correct wartime operational finish for clandestine flights over France, hanging up in the Aerospace hangar at Duxford.
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Indeed, there is a flying example in these colours also available.
Again, of all available airfield locations to use for the sequence with the Rapide on late finals and landing, they chose one with what looked like late cold war era hardened shelters very obvious in the background. They could at least have framed it so that they were out of shot.
Such a shame when it would have been so easy to get it right.
Philip Tyler
Quite right – and here is the ladder they put on the side so the agents could get in and out quickly.
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Alasdair Lawrance, Patrick Heigham, Ian Hillson, Peter Neill
“Foyles War” appears to have been ‘Downton-ised’, black crushed and curiously desaturated skin tones, and some funny shading in the shadows. The DVDs of previous series are fine.
Foyle was always rather set to be ‘brownish’ and a bit desaturated.
Series 8 has been “graded” more – the last series, and I assume this one too, have been made in Ireland by a different production company than the “wartime” ones – with a few (mute) London sequences thrown in).
You can tell this by the buildings, not being built of London Stock and some locations seemed odd, especially a bit of pavement with pebbles set in concrete. The official buildings weren’t the usual University complex, either.
It is believed that this series was shot in the Liverpool area. A little more like the Peckham that Peter Neill grew up in. But West Peckham? East Dulwich, more like.
There are also the “made up” registration plates. Foyles car VCM xxx is a never issued (1960s) Birkenhead one – so at least they’re using real combinations of letters for this series. .
What was the X-collar number Met Police officer doing at Southampton immigration?
No Routemasters spotted yet in this episode though….Someone said of Series 7: ‘Routemaster buses 15 years too early, too many white painted and even uvpc windows. Everything was black, brown, green and cream then. Oh, and too many iron railings. They were taken to make armaments. The production team need to study these things. I know it is difficult but “could do better!”‘ (see comments on page http://www.tvguide.co.uk/detail/2074270/104669883/foyles-war#.VLLkKMnixkg).
Bernie Newnham
The trick – which I would have though was obvious – would be to accept that if you can’t get the right period gear you minimise it. A big red bus doesn’t have to come steaming into frame from the wrong year, just selected parts of it with your attention taken elsewhere. Same with locomotives. Of course, the other thing with locos is to always use the same one, even when wrong.
Dave Plowman
What was so obviously wrong throughout the series – and in other such period things – are the twin rear taillights on every car – so obvious in night scenes. Easily avoided by just removing the nearside bulb.
Of course you’d still see the aftermarket tail lights in any shot of the rear of the car – but not such a glaring mistake as at night.
John Howell
There was a close-up in a kitchen-to-living room doorway revealing a shoulder high white 13amp socket screwed to the wall (surface mount variety but no visible wires!).
As we know, modern artefacts generate increasingly greater challenges for the designer/director/cameraman on period dramas. I was fully expecting to be “TV aerial spotting” during “House of Elliot” back in the 1990s but it turned into plastic drainpipes and alarm bell boxes!
Patrick Heigham
There’s a programme on BBC 3 “Great Movie Mistakes” where Robert Webb picks holes in films and TV programmes for fairly insignificant errors.
I’ve worked on films where the crew has picked up on such errors, to be told: “If they spot that, they’ve lost the plot!” Very true – if all people wish to do is to find fault, then the storyline is nada.
This has come about with home recording and the ability to freeze and advance frame by frame – never possible at the cinema and earlier TV.
I confess to doing the same: worked a bit on “Eye of the Needle” where train sequences were shot both on the North York Railway (or Keighley) and the Watercress Line (Mid-Hants) in Hampshire. (I played a blinder on a very cold November night shoot, by offering to be an honorary Assistant Director with a walkie-talkie, but riding with the driver on the footplate – reasoning that that would be the warmest place!)
Analysis of the engine numbers gives the game away!
Tony Grant
I had an extremely enjoyable shoot on the Watercress line when I was shooting a BBC children’s programme. It had to do with ghosts, and the Watercress line part was concerning a ghost train. For part of the shoot (late at night, on a very cold and frosty one) I was on the footplate, and when I said ‘Go’, we went, and when I said ‘Stop’, we did! And it was nice and warm, and I got paid for enjoying myself!
By the by, watching the transmitted programme, I was really impressed with the edit on the ghost train disappearing. I had set up a wide shot on a footbridge overlooking the station (sorry can’t remember which one), and had lit the platform with about half a dozen red-heads spaced out along its length to augment the in situ lights. It was approaching the ‘witching hour’ where the evening light was just beginning to fade, and I’d put a couple of grads in the matte box, a .9ND and a dark blue, to really ‘pull down’ the remaining light in the sky. I locked off, rolled to record, and the train was cued to steam through the shot, which it duly did, and I ran until the smoke from the funnel eventually disappeared into the surroundings. On TX, those clever lads in VT had used a soft edged wipe through the shot such that the train entered LoF and began to disappear as it hit the RoF ending with no train, but the smoke just dissipating top of frame – magic!
Alec Bray
Some errors are very blantant: in “SkyFall”, for example, Judi Dench walks into an office with a handbag – leaves the office without it – and is then in the taxi with the handbag once again. You don’t need a freeze frame to notice that! Also “Avatar” and the moving putting balls – again very obvious, especially in 3-D.
In the film “Cemetery Junction”, although the locations are most decidedly NOT Reading, Ricky Gervais includes many in-jokes about Reading and in particular about Whitley, the area in which he grew up (and went to school – I taught there …). There is, for example, a Dennis Loline III running across a number of exterior shots, its route indicator “15”, destination “Northumberland Avenue” – and in the correct livery for the period. The 15 went through the heart of the Whitley council housing estate.
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Here is a Dennis Loline III in the correct livery for the period of the film – later the cream was changed to white.
So it IS possible to get it right – if the film producers want to get it right.
Dave Plowman
Perhaps those making it are aware of the errors – but just hope no one notices.
I remember having a ‘heated discussion’ with a design assistant on a show I worked on. The plot involved timer operated bombs, including close ups of an unexploded one – all made by the same person. The timers shown were clearly 13 amp plug in mechanical types – yet one of the bombs does its intended job miles from any mains supply. And the PCBs they’d made looked like some random Marlin components had been thrown at it. Which is exactly what had happened.
Alec Bray
When I was in Quality Management for Software Development, there was a very simple rule to apply – if there was an error on the User Interface, the software would not ship. The Software Engineers didn’t like this – “It’s only on the User Interface”, they’d say, “It’s not important. It’s passed functional test”. To which the reply was – “If you can not get something correct which is so easy to spot and to get right, the user can not have confidence that you have got correct the more difficult parts of the product.”
Similarly, simple faults on films and TV programmes easily distract from the story and essentially break the “willing suspension of disbelief” necessary to sustain a viewer immersed in the action – unless, of course, the intention is to achieve the Brechtian “verfremdungseffekt”. “Titanic” is/was a classic – spot the set scaffolding in one shot, digital watches on extras, the crude cuts into CGI …
My candidate for the worst (error) shot not retaken is in the “Titfield Thunderbolt” where a bowler bowls a ball – the ball goes really wide yet the stump is jerked out of the ground and the batsman given out!
“Last Tango in Halifax”
Ian Hillson
I was spending the New Year with relatives and they were watching this programme.
I had to stop as I kept noticing the background action of an extra in the restaurant scene behind one of the principal actors kept getting up and going to the toilet again and again and it was only a short scene – then being there again – then not being there. They’d obviously stitched together several takes of that particular close up.
“2001 – A Space Odyssey”
Roger Bunce
I know nothing about buses but – errors in classic feature films. “2001: A Space Odyssey” – as astronauts approach the black monolith on the Moon, a gibbous Earth is seen close to the lunar horizon. They touch the monolith; a shrill whistling is heard, and a shot looking vertically up the monolith shows that the Earth has changed from gibbous (nearly full) to a thin crescent (which would take almost a fortnight), and has jumped from being close to the horizon to being directly overhead (which would never happen at all, since the Moon does not rotate relative to the Earth, the Earth, as seen from the Moon, will always appear to be in the same place in the sky). I know both shots look prettier this way – but come one guys – get your astronomy right – it’s not as if it’s rocket scien . . . or maybe it is.
Peter Combes
Somehow I doubt if the effect was the result of carelessness. The semi-magical alignment of the spheres occurs in the pre-credit sequence, the “Dawn of Man” sequence, the final scene on the Moon, and on the approach to the Stargate at Jupiter. One could, if one wished, argue that the monolith is a portal linked to the Stargate, and that unexpected visual effects may occur in such circumstances, but I imagine this is visual poetry.
Roger Bunce
Which is what I meant by ‘both shots look prettier that way’. The alignment of spheres is a recurrent image: in the opening title; the Dawn of Man bit; orbiting Jupiter, and is even echoed by the way the pod emerges from the dome of the mother ship. On the Moon, it’s a case of art triumphing over logic.
“Jude the Obscure”
Alex Thomas
In early days of colour, I was a cameraman with a four camera OB unit recording Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure”.
As I recall, the cameras were Philips PC 60s with the “Philips” nameplate removed and “Peto Scott” screwed on instead. They didn’t want anyone to know that the BBC was using Dutch and not British cameras
Robert Powell as Jude and Fiona Walker as Sue Bridehead led the cast list. Hugh David directed.
I can still recall the name of the PM, one Lovat Bickford. It’s the sort of name you remember.
The production and design department had gone to great lengths to preserve authenticity even to finding fields fenced, not with barbed wire, but thin metal posts with 4 or 5 horizontal half inch metal rods between the posts.
They found a site near Abingdon and we started recording. All went OK. The next site that day involved some exteriors with actors walking in and out of a lovely period cottage.
We arrived after lunch to find that the owners of the cottage, anticipating the Tx soon on BBC-2, had blown the facility fee on a new 625 television set and its outdoor aerial attached to the chimney stack.
Pre-digital era, early seventies, meant that we would have to wait until the local aerial man could be summoned to remove the offending anachronistic aerial and replace it at the end of recording.
The local churches would not let us record interiors because they still objected to the themes of unmarried sex, bigamy etc. that Thomas Hardy included in the story but, surprisingly, the Catholic church in Oxford welcomed us (and the facility fee) so the interiors were all shot there.
Bernie Newnham
Bill and I worked on the studio part of “Jude”. Each week as the story got doomier, so did the atmosphere in the studio. Slightly enlived when I picked up the phone in the gallery one evening and took a message for Robert Powell – some girl called Babs asking “if you’re playing football tomorrow night?”
Ian Hillson
Maybe it was the Beeb spec laid down for the Philips PC 60s that the “Philips” nameplate was removed and “Peto Scott” screwed on instead.
Appropriate then that those PC 60s were bought in the 1960s when the Beeb still bought British. By the 1970s we were in the realms of having to consider European as no UK manufacturer existed for a lot of kit, and by the 1980s we were allowed to buy Japanese (although it seemed to be frowned upon).
I was still in TV News at the time and the political decision was made to buy some really dreadful (soft) Bosch cameras (they used two thirds inch Plumbicons) to replace the 1960s studio Marconi Mk VIIs when perfectly good and sharp Japanese cameras were available – but the Sony ones were all being hoovered up by BBC OBs and the Ikegami lightweights by location Beeb News crews. So politics dictated that we had to have something European on show, and this persisted into the 1990s with Thompson in the production studios, when Link was no more.
At a large News meeting to announce the new Bosch cameras, HE Tel News (Henry Tarner) justified the use of the two thirds inch Plumbicons rather than one inch for studio use by saying that we were buying these because at the time, that was what all the development work was going into. Voice from back of room – “It needs to!”
So politics meant that we didn’t always get the best kit – as had the historic ‘Buy British’ policy up until then. It just meant that to give every UK manufacturers work, and stop others going out of business – so giving the last standing a monopoly to put up prices – resulted in us buying some fairly crap equipment at the Beeb.
Back in the heyday of flying spot scanners (used in TK and studio slide scanners) there were three manufacturers of CRT for them. One produced fantastic result – they went straight to TK. The other two makers were average and poor, so when stores got a new batch you went straight down and got your spare one from the average manufacturer, rather than wait until you actually needed it and got a crap one!
“Carry On Camping”
Alan Stokes
I have always been amused by a short sequence in a Carry On.. film! I know the Producers say that if viewers are distracted by details then they have lost the plot anyway but in “Carry On Camping”, there are a couple of ‘distractions’. Well, to be completely accurate, three! In the scene when Barbara Windsor is having a ‘wardrobe malfunction’ with her swimming cossie, if you can tear your eyes away from the obvious, keep an eye on Hattie Jacques’ head dress. It is a blue towel in some shots and is not there at all in others. In this case if you are watching Hattie instead of Barbara, then you really have lost the plot!
“Last Of The Mohicans”
Ian Dow
Back in the early days of colour we had a weekly children’s TV show, “Last of the Mohicans”, in TC4 where I was a very junior engineer. The opening titles were a film insert with Indians paddling a canoe down a river, tracked by a camera car – presumably on a parallel road. I noticed that through the trees on the far bank of the river you could now and then see a yellow Volkswagen Beetle keeping track with the canoe.
I should have known better, but mentioned it to the producer. They couldn’t afford to go back on location and reshoot the sequence, so as the titles ran each week he would sit in the Gallery with his head in his hands and refuse to look at the screen!
“The Onedin Line”
Tony Crake
Surely the most glaring “problem” was the opening titles to “The Onedin Line”.
A rather large oil tanker in the back of shot… Week after week the crew had a good laugh at that!
Patrick Heigham
In one National Trust magazine, the curator of Antony, in Cornwall, where the live-action version of “Alice in Wonderland” was filmed, was mightily impressed with the skill of the set decorators and plasterers who were disguising light switches and mending faults in plaster covings etc. She wanted to employ them on a permanent maintenance basis!
We have come a long way from the dodgy polystyrene sets of the early “Dr. Who”s and I understand that the advent of Hi-Def TV proves a challenge to set designers – can’t get away with it anymore! Also the make-up and hair dept have to get the wigs looking better. I suppose this was always more of a problem with 35mm cinema film, capable of higher resolution than TV, but now the latter has caught up.
On one TV feature length film I inadvertently left a roll of 1″ white camera tape on an in-vision office desk. No one noticed, and I suppose it looked like a reasonable piece of office stationery.
