BBC Parliament - Archive Genral Election
Andy258
Posts: 670 Forum Member
✭✭
I notice that BBC Parliament are repeating a past General Election this coming Saturday (15th), however neither my BT Vision or Sky+ boxes reveal which one they're showing.
Anybody have any ideas?
My guess is it will be one of the 1974 elections (to put us in the mood for an election on October 14th!!)
Anybody have any ideas?
My guess is it will be one of the 1974 elections (to put us in the mood for an election on October 14th!!)
0
Comments
The original coverage of the Feb 74 election carried on until just before 6pm, so plenty of coverage to repeat!
However, as rightly pointed out earlier, this one was only repeated a few months ago, so either 1970 or October 1974 would be my bet.
Hopefully they will follow this up in October with the Oct 74 coverage.
This year Sky got panned for having a similar piece with Jeff Randall, clearly it's been going on for a lot longer than people care to remember!
Shame about the picture disturbance every time they Genlocked to an OB. It was probably OK on the original Quad VT but caused an upset when transferred to D3 or whatever.
I seem to remember when BBC Parliament first showed this election back in 2003, it was much worse- I guess it's possible they've retransferred it from the original tape with some higher quality TBCs. I could be wrong, of course. I do remember that the 1970 election was even worse, with the picture jumping all over the place every time they cut to a different source.
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=1261857&page=4
A Beta SP machine would have fixed it.
Any old rubbish in, perfectly locked pictres out.
That's me sorted!:D
am shocked that some of the outside broadcasts are still in black and white in 1974
It's the smoking in the studio that gets me.:D
Heath - there will never be a woman PM (5 years later there was one)
some mystic - Liberals will be in government by late seventies or early eighties (only 30 years out)
It was indeed, they did it for both 1974 elections and 1979 as well. Also in at least one of those elections Radio 3 at breakfast time simply read out all the results in alphabetical order for two hours.
As for the black and white, it did take a while to convert everything, and indeed there's half a dozen episodes of Blue Peter from 1974, the latest from June, which were recorded in black and white as there were no other studios available so they had to use one that hadn't been converted. I think they were still making schools programmes in black and white at that time because no schools had colour TVs. And of course the regions would have much poorer facilities, Tyne Tees only had one colour outside broadcast vehicle until 1977 so if they were covering racing for ITV on Saturday they couldn't cover any football.
I'm sure that was a dream job for whoever drew the short straw that day!
It probably wasn't OK, it would have caused the Quad VTR servos to have a fit, and that's why there was picture disturbance, it's 'burnt' into the recording. Of course it was a live programme, so that wasn't an issue during Tx.
Genlocking while playing a VT to air was a big no no in the 70s, as any ITV MCR engineer will tell you.
Can't warm to Burnett doing it, he certainly lacks Dimbleby's warmth but Robin Day was class
Burnet's sombre and excessively formal isn't he? He did election nights for ITN for years both before and after 1974. Richard Dimbleby, Cliff Michelmore and David Dimbleby (the three others who have anchored BBC general election night programmes since they started in the 1950s) were all much warmer.
Michael Barratt covered for Burnet during the breakfast period and he was good fun. He's in for a nice surprise next time he logs in to Twitter - his son and others have been teasing him on there for his appalling dress sense in 1974!
Day is good here but I think he peaked during the three elections he did with David Dimbleby from 1979-87. They seemed to have a very good rapport (lots of jokey bickering), while Day seemed to mellow and become more humorous with age. He was also good with Jon Snow on ITN's election night in 1992.
And they say politics is completely different today...
For me the worst thing Burnet does is when they put results from safe seats on screen and he says "Not much to say about these" or "None of these are particularly interesting", which is rubbish because if it's your seat, it's very interesting. There's a bit in the morning sequence where he hands over to Robin and Robin says "You said some of the things I was intending to say, but no matter, we're on the same programme". Just the fact he doesn't thank Michael Barratt when he takes over from him again makes him seem quite cold.
It's odd, though, because on the Swing Time documentary about the history of eelction coverage which you can see on YouTube (http://youtu.be/wfgeCFWb8KA - do take a look, it's fascinating) they talk about Burnet presenting ITV's coverage in 1964, after their disastrous coverage in 1959, and it was a huge success because he was so engaging. Not so much here, though.
Schools programmes were mainly made in TC5 which was colourised in 1973.All the TV Centre studios (with the exception of TC2 which had been closed) were colourised by the end of 1973.