BBC Television Technical Operations:
Going Live with “Softly, Softly” 1966
We can consider studio-based TV Shows as being in one of four categories:
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Of all of these, the one category of shows that has changed most dramatically in terms of the method of production over the past 60 years has been the series, serials and one-off dramas: from the early 1960s’ theatrical style, multi-camera, live studio productions to the new century current single camera “rehearse-record” approach for Drama productions, which is a very similar approach to that used in feature film making.
(The “continuing dramas” (“soaps”) such as “EastEnders” are shot multi-camera in the studio sets as rehearse-record: scenes on the outside lot mostly use two cameras to shoot sequences, again as rehearse-record. Many scenes are shot in parallel with other scenes. The timescales allowed for four or five episodes a week would not allow film-style production.)
The very last multi-camera studio-based BBC drama series was “The House of Eliott” (1991-1994), but that was not live or “as-live”. It is quite difficult to convey to a new generation quite what it was like to work on these live theatrical-style multi-camera live or “as-live” drama programmes – each production was like the first night of a play in the theatre, with all that angst and excitement: this story of a couple of days in the life of various Technical Operators tries to convey that unique experience, describing the work of the technical crew.
Other entries in the BBC Tech Ops website (created by Bernie Newnham) explain the technology that Technical Operators used and what could, and did, go wrong. Here, however, it is a fictional Tuesday and Wednesday mid-season on the regular first series of “Softly, Softly”.
For the first two series transmitted in 1966 to 1967, the majority of episodes were “live” (58%): what you saw on the television screen at home was what the actors were doing in the TV studio at the very same time (series 1: 78% of the episodes were live: series 2: 42% of the episodes were live). This was one of the last long-running British TV series to do this.
The live transmission of an individual episode was the end point of at least six weeks of planning and rehearsal (although the Technical Operators got less than two days’ rehearsal), and in terms of the actors’ performances it was close to live – repertory – theatre. The regular actors were performing this week’s episode, rehearsing the following week’s episode, reading through the following week’s episode and so on. Alan Stratford Johns (Barlow) was an enthusiast for Live Television and was influential in maintaining this format when the trend was moving towards Videotape recording. Producer David E Rose and Elwyn Jones also wanted to continue live broadcasting as a holdover from their days in documentary-dramas.
When David Rose was moved elsewhere, the new producer (Leonard Lewis) decided to have more recorded shows. That starts around season three.
Live drama required teamwork of a high order, and in those days the adrenalin flowed throughout the Transmission for cast and crew alike, which some would argue added to the crispness of the performance.
(Episodes of the third and later series of “Softly, Softly” were recorded onto videotape “as-live”, that is, as if the programme was actually going out live to the audience: at this stage of television’s technological evolution, in those early days of 2-inch videotape recording, editing the tape meant actually cutting the tape: the cost of the tape was then invoiced as a programme cost, and it took time to do the editing which, of course, entailed extra cost, and in any case the tape editing was difficult and could sometimes go wrong. The episode was recorded onto videotape at the same time as a previous week’s recorded episode was being transmitted on the network from the VideoTape recording (VT).)
What follows is a description of a typical live episode of “Softly, Softly” being created in the studio, based on those two live series, from the viewpoint of the Technical Operators. No real names are used, because different people did the jobs on different episodes – and you won’t recognise any story line or pages of script – this really is a work of fiction about the transmission of a fictional episode “Taken for a Ride”.
It was a dismissible offence for technical staff to bring cameras into the BBC studios, and official photographers were in the main interested in the actors, not the technology of television production. There are very, very few photographs of Technical Operations’ work in the Television Centre studios, fewer photographs of the Marcon Mk IV cameras in studio TC3, and even fewer photographs of these in use on a drama series (there are a number of photos for “Z-Cars” but that is about it!)
As there are so few available pictures, there are a number of illustrations here presented as “artist’s impressions”, simply to give a feel of what it was like – they are clearly labelled as Artist Impressions, so please accept that they are not real photographs!
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