Pat Heigham

Channel Yesterday has been running old TOTP footage.  Quality very good – they are 1967-8 progs – and some in colour.

Were these older ones on 625 B/W I wonder as the transfer is very good, with very little line distortion.

Then, the groups mimed to the recorded backing track, with vocals taken live.

I recall working on some of these as Grams – Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” had a long play out, a fade was necessary after 15 bars following the final vocal.

It  is noticeable that some of the group members were less than enthusiastic and were rather lazy in their performance, losing sight of the fact that a TV appearance must improve record sales!

Working on that show, and having access to the material meant that a private reel was made up, which went down very well at BBC parties – even before the songs were featured in the charts.

Sometimes it was necessary for a completely reproduction of the record balance, and praise must be attributed to Dickie Chamberlain who managed it every time, without the resources available in a recording studio and more importantly, the time. (I do remember that a record producer was in the sound gallery, one time, and much preferred Dickie’s balance to the record studio!)

Ah! Well!

Alec Bray

I worked on TOTP for some of Procol Harum’s early appearances.

I remember being in the studio, tracking into the piano.  What was noticeable was that we could not hear the SINGER! We cued from the backing track.  Normally on TOTP  we in the studio could hear the live singing to the backing track,  but on “Whiter Shade of Pale” we just could not hear Gary Brooker – must’ve been a nightmare for the SS.

Pat Heigham

Another memory of TOTP.

At the end of one show, the PA came in to the Sound Gallery and asked to listen to an acetate pre-release disc, so she could time it for next week’s show.

This was Tom Jones’ “Delilah”.  John Milner, sitting in the corner, grimly remarked: "That’s going to be a huge and horrible Hit!"

Ian Hillson

I would guess that most BBC programmes in 1968 were 625 line origination in preparation for UHF Tx in 1969 (along with ITV).  I joined AP in early 1968 and by that time every news was produced in 625.

I watched a TOTP retrospective (may have been “one hit wonders”) the other evening, and even though it had been graunched into widescreen (pah!) the pictures were pin sharp throughout the 1960s and 1970s using EMI 2001s, only becoming soft during the 1980s with the advent of Ikegami and Link cameras and cheaper VT machines.

David Brunt

They went from recording on 2” VT to 1” VT around 1984,  that had a very obvious affect on the picture sharpness.  Speaking as a viewer, programmes from 1984 on did tend to have a grainier and softer picture from a 1” source.  It lacked the sharpness of 2“.

TOTP didn’t go colour until November 1969. If they were music clips before then they’d have been BBC2 music shows like “Colour Me Pop” Or “Line-up”.

Hugh Sheppard

Well, I’m not so sure about picture sharpness – unless it improved with 1" VTRs.

In the dim and distant past I provided HBO with their facilities for Wimbledon, for whom their Ops Manager, one Caren Reiser, was keen to have 1" machines on-site instead of the much more ponderous 2" VTRs.  HBO was the network whose standards had taught me that the BBC didn’t set the pace anymore, and their ‘experts’ in New York were fans of 2" and needing some convincing that 1" would do the job.  So we set up links to NY and a trial of test recordings on both standards, with Caren and me in ICR. Conspirators both, we had VT in the TC basement agree to run 1" machines when we asked for 2" and vice versa, and left the talk-back open to New York.  You’ve guessed the rest.  Caren was brazen enough to tell them at the end of the session when, after a period of silence came the grudging response that there really wasn’t that much difference…..  Caren was convinced it hastened the end of HBO’s 2" Ampex machines – always run in tandem for network transmission with a 3rd machine 10 seconds behind. Eat your heart out BBC Presentation!

Chris Booth

The best VT replay pictures until the mid 1980s were from a properly lined up VR2000B.

The ‘original’ 1” VPRs were awful, the VPR2 was a bit better, but the main problem was the tape. It was not until around 1984 that a decent tape (oxide formulation) was created that replay quality matched quad.

Initially 1” tape was very difficult to erase which is why we went to recording black level as a track to insert video on, as the machines erase stacks couldn’t cope with bars.  Audio also required several passes to ‘get rid of’.

Tony Crake

I also watched TOTP  on Yesterday.  The 1968 monochrome vintage all looked like film recording to me?(Full of dust sparkle)  Very strange programme …  odd bits of David Jacobs and  Simon Dee….a real old Jumble!

Dave Plowman

I watched a bit of ‘one hit wonders’ on BBC4. Some of the picture quality looked like VHS.  Of course converting it to 16:9 won’t have helped – why do they do this?

Oddly, for once, the sound was subjectively better than the pictures, which wasn’t the case with the old quad VTRs.

Ian Hillson

I think it was the “one hit wonders” on BBC4 that I was watching rather than an old TOTP compilation.

Methinks the softness introduced in the 1980s was cumulative, you could tell that the 3 tube Link cameras were softer than the 4 tube EMIs and any handheld Ikegami shots were even softer with their little 2/3" tubes.  Back in the day I was still with news (just) and they were about to buy some cheap(er) Bosch studio cameras – we’d had a couple on trial and had used them in N3 on a Falkland map setup in 1982 and had moaned about softness back then as they used tiny tubes like Ikegama.  HE Tel News stated we were going down this route because all the research and development was going into smaller tubes…. cue voice from back of room "and it needs to!"  When N1 and N2 were equipped with them the viewer noticed too and a hasty redesign of their AK circuits was made on the Beeb ones, resulting in sharp(er) coloured pictures.

One or two other colour cameras had been assessed to replace the ageing news Marconi MkV11s, including one called an Ikegami HL790 (I was to find it one morning, rigged in N2 studio) as everyone looked at its output on a high grade monitor.  Mounted on a studio ped, it looked just like a proper camera with a full size lens on the front with servos and all the extras.

"Go and look inside it" someone whispered to me – so I did, and lifted the flap on what looked like a meatsafe on the back of the lens.  Inside facing back was a viewfinder tube, and facing forward…. an Ikegami HL79 with lots of air around it! 

Anyway, I’ve digressed – yes, I do think helical scan VT using 1" tape didn’t help.  Neither did wheeling out a fifteen year old EMI camera with noisy old tubes in it to compare with the next generation of tube camera help, when making a rational decision as what to buy next for Studios.  I know “Eastenders” started in Elstree C with them, but I guess that someone chose good examples from the TVC ones to send there as they were replaced with Links at the Centre.

"Of course converting it to 16:9 won’t have helped – why do they do this?" – Stupidity, mainly, otherwise known as BBC policy as there will be a bit of 16:9 on the end of that compilation.  I also hate "postboxing" too to put 4:3 into 14:9.

"… the sound was subjectively better than the pictures… " – yes, it was on my Aldi telly too, and I’ve got cloth-ears – which led me to wonder if they dubbed the original records back onto the soundtrack…..