Or: the wrong thing in the wrong place or time
Background
There has, for a couple of years or so (from 2017) a strand in “The Sunday Times” “Culture” magazine, in the section covering the TV listings, on the problems of period piece television programs with anachronistic artefacts: it started with one drama series, set in the 1940s or early 1950s or so, with London AEC Routemaster buses in shot: the Routemasters were not introduced in service until February 1956. Since the initial complaining letters, there have been many more reports of poor background research on period dramas…
Ian Hillson
More Routemaster Moments from recent “Sunday Times” “Culture” Section(s)
“In Plain Sight” (ITV), set in 1955:
- Had a reception sign in Helvetica typeface which was not designed until 1957.
- Played “Magic Moments” which was not published until 1957 and was not a hit for Perry Como until 1958.
- Used a Morris Minor with a one-piece curved windscreen, only used from 1956.
“To Walk Invisible” (BBC 1), set in the 1840s:
- Had parcels loosely tied, not sealed by sealing wax.
“The Victorian Slum” (BBC 2), set in the 1890s:
- Used modern coinage.
- Had carrots priced at 7 pence per pound – in old money, one shilling and sixpence.
Bernie Newnham (and Graeme Wall)
Once upon a time, long ago, the young Bernie was a LMS trainspotter at Watford Junction. It was the place that young lads met up in those days – better than the bus stop, and there were no malls pronounced mauls. Anyway, we got to know our steam engines, so it I still notice when someone screws up through lack of a tiny bit of research, which is so easy these days.
Back when I was producing PoV there was a drama which was big on newspaper headlines about Yuri Gagarin, then the actor got on a train with spotless GWR seating. A number of people wrote in, and though Ms Robinson didn’t understand we did run it – to my leftover youthful satisfaction. I did ignore the letters about how GWR locomotives were four cylinders and the sound effects had three… Anyway, that seemed to be an anorak too far.
Graeme Wall
With my initials I have to be a Great Western man.
Geoff Fletcher
I’m a long time GWR man.
My Dad was a GWR man all his working life, even after the amalgamation when it was absorbed into BR, so it was inevitable for me too.
He started out as a Porter after his WW1 and Afghan Campaign service with t in Shropshire successively. I spent many happy hours with him in his box at Oakengates and Wellington and had rides on the footplates of several Matchbox and Prairie Tank locos, plus guard’s van trips. Thank the Lord ‘elf an’ safety wasn’t as all consuming back then as it is now.
There were three signalmen at No.4 – Dad, Bill Dunn, and Bert Preece. Attached is a photo I found somewhere of Wellington No.4 with the aforementioned Bert Preece at the box window. (I can’t remember the source of this, but tender the appropriate acknowledgements for my using it.)
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I could tell many stories of my boyhood railway days.
Also here are a couple of photos of me with Black 5 45110 on the Severn Valley Railway back in July 1972. Wish I had all that hair now!
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John Howell (Hibou)
As a fellow Salopian, I seem to remember a serious rail crash at Baschuch in 1961: I don’t suppose Geoff was ‘playing’ signal man on that occasion?
Geoff Fletcher
Re the accident at Baschurch. It happened on 13th February 1961. The 18:37 Wellington to Chester express collided with a freight train which was supposed to be in a refuge siding. The engine turned over and a couple of carriages turned over on top of it and caught fire. The rest of the train was not involved in the blaze however. Sadly, the driver and fireman were killed, as was a railwayman travelling in the first coach behind the engine. There was also one person seriously injured and twenty odd other people less so. The engine was a GWR Hall, 6949 Haberfield Hall. I was working at ICI in Slough at the time but remember reading about it in the papers.
Ian Hillson
Who would have thought that this would have started a trainspotting discussion, rather than a Routemaster one… well done gricers!
I’ve been watching “Endeavour” rather than “Sherlock” (Roger Allam is great!) on Sundays (January 2017) and at the end of the last series it had D.I. Fred Thursday’s daughter wandering off into the mist, past one of those old level crossing signs showing a steam engine. At this point someone in post had dubbed a distant train whistle on.
Cue someone to write in saying that steam had been withdrawn on the Oxford line two years previously!
Why didn’t ITV cast Roger as Maigret (he even has his own hat for the part!) in their new series rather than Rowan Atkinson who is totally unsuitable?
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On the odd occasion when I did grams on mute film in News, back in the 1960s, two suitable discs for ext w/s were “Prov. Town” and “City Skyline”. I could never remember which was best, as choosing the wrong one resulted in getting a train whistle part way through.
John Howell (Hibou)
There were many Sound FX pitfalls to avoid, the label on best disc for an owl hooting advised the user that sheep could be heard as well.
Another favourite was using the 78 rpm disc of Victoria Falls for Prov. Town and City Atmos when played at 45 rpm. Those responsible for cutting the then new 331/3 rpm discs noted much use of the 78 and duly produced a copy. Nobody told them about it being used at reduced speed!
Then there was ‘Calves chewing cabbages’…
Graeme Wall
One of my sound colleagues at Southern was playing in fx on the news one evening and noted an item headlined “sheep”. He dutifully played in a track of sheep bleating over a wide shot of dead sheep in a field.
Alasdair Lawrance
Had the same thing in Cardiff near a Christmas, except it was turkeys being ‘processed’…
Gary Critcher
When I started working for Formula One Management in 1997, the main sound guy (freelance like me) brought along a CD of F1 sounds ‘just in case’.
Sure enough, in Melbourne for the first race, we found that FOM had brought just 6 microphones to position around the track for FX. Even I could suss that that wasn’t going to do the job.
So Phil dutifully ran his CD underneath the ‘live’ sound for the whole weekend…. no-one seemed to notice!
Dave Plowman
I made the rather naive choice to dub a new soap for Channel 5 from the off. It had only a tiny budget and that was well spent long before anything was ready for dubbing. So when I asked for some FX CDs, all I was allowed to buy was a couple of BBC ones.
Along with the producer, we chose the backgrounds to be used for the stock locations. One was a very nice park atmos, but with geese going mad at a particular point. Soon edited out.
On another soap, I remember them seeming to use the same traffic track from the start of many a scene – with a Morris Minor changing gear with that characteristic ‘barf’ from the exhaust. A problem with using old atmos tracks.
Dave Mundy
… and dogs snoring (?in a submarine)….good old 7c FX 45!
Alasdair Lawrance
Speaking of low budgets, has anyone else noticed that when there’s an insert from London with the newsroom background, a woman in a blue dress walks from cR to cL, sometimes more than once, especially if it’s a long interview like on the Andrew Marr show.
If she has a UTI, she really should get treatment… And she doesn’t get many Sundays off, either.
Mike Jordan
Not forgetting of course the man with the black shoulder bag entering down left before heading off into the (empty) desks. Not to mention the two barges anchored in the Thames behind the BBC London news presenter for very many years and the trees/flowers/deckchairs behind BBC Breakfast News.
At least (after adverse comments) the old version of the Marr show re-shot the embankment backing with leafless trees in Winter. Not sure about now as he is positioned on the North Bank of the Thames overlooking the RFH!
Dave Mundy
I was doing grams on a drama set in the English countryside and had many hints as to the correct bird songs to use from an avid twitcher, DMT, however I got my own back by adding the archetypal American steam train whistle on one sequence AND NOBODY NOTICED! Not even ‘disgusted from Tunbridge Wells’! A result!
Bernie Newnham
I think an A4 sounds pretty much the same.
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See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOMTGrUTLg4
Alec Bray
The A4’s original chime whistles were in fact imported from the USA (Railway Correspondence and Travel Society). Although most were removed during the war, new replacement whistles were made under licence in the UK.
John Howell
I was dubbing “EastEnders” and the director wanted to hear the sound of a TV drifting out of an open window.
I mixed it in with a passing Tube Train but didn’t do away with the Coronation Street Sig tune! I s’pose it should have been the EastEnders Sig!
Dave Buckley
I worked in the projection areas at AP in the early 1960s, and the comments about ‘prov(incial) town’ reminded me that on one of the dubbing shifts, we ran a very long 35mm loop of prov town on one of the sound followers. After many times through the machinery, it would break up, so the news dubbing editors would make up another one.
Some of the cue charts that came in with descriptions of Sound Effects that would be considered very non-PC nowadays, particularly concerning crowd noise. The dub suite had an early cart machine and there were various specially made up sound effects carts. One was marked ‘cibara’. When I asked what it was I was told ‘Arabic’ backwards!
I also remember the owls with sheep in background – I have a complete copy of the disc on an Sound Effects tape in my loft which I made for an amdram production – any dub suites were a good source of SEs! For a production of “A Passage to India” the gram op at AP ordered up an SE disc of traffic noise in an Indian street.
When the 33 rpm discs came along, most were straight copies of the 78rpm version. But, as the discs ran longer, two copies of the original were joined together. Not a good idea as, if you didn’t like a particular part of the disc, you automatically moved the pickup along to try and find a better sounding part only to hear the same sounds again. This also applied to the CDs when they came out.
What was useful was the cue tone at the beginning of spot effects on the 33 discs. Using an RP2 gram deck, and setting the start of the effect just at the end of the cue tone, gave a set number of 35mm feet to the start of the actual effect. I cannot now remember if it was two or three 35mm feet.
Vernon Dyer
Mention of “How We Used to Live” in “The Sunday Times” reminds me – it was a YTV production, and one day we were doing a show based on the family getting its first TV to watch the Coronation.
Unfortunately it was December and we had a foot of snow!
The location was ideal; an unmodernised house right next door to a closed-down cinema with a huge car park. Our rig day was taken up with getting the trucks in and digging paths in the snow. A hose was attached to the hot water system to wash/melt the snow off the roof for a scene installing the aerial (remember the big “H”?). We still had to watch carefully for snowy roofs in the background, of course, but got away with it, I think.
