Coronation Street

Maybe it's himself.

Up to 1977 on the Network DVDs now, was watching the episode where several charcters have a seance in Hilda's living room, and Part One ends on a shot with the characters forming a circle with their hands- after a few seconds they start moving their hands and talking and laughing- I imagine that part wasn't originally broadcast!

It was of course the norm at ITV (and AFAIK still is the norm) that the final shot of each segment (which would normally be the EOP caption or production card) was held in place for ten seconds after the intended “out” point, to give regions something to sit on for a few seconds should the ads/next item fail to run. In the case of a live shot/continuing action shot like this, you would expect (a) the actors to be directed not to break character and/or (b) in the case of a stuff-up, the shot to be freeze-framed or faded to black in case it was accidentally broadcast. Very odd that neither of these things appeared to happen in this case!

I’ve seen examples of chat shows, game shows or similar where end credits are rolled over a studio shot and the presenter has been heard quietly saying to the guest “Just stay there, don’t put your coat on or anything - we are actually still in shot” as the theme music fades up!

I think they do stay in place for around 10 seconds or so after the end of part one music stops (I'll need to rewatch and check- In fact I should capture it and upload it here!).

Quite a few cases on the various episodes on the discs where after a few seconds you see shadows moving on, or someone starting to move either the "end of part one" card, or the endcap!

There are quite a few examples of End Of Part One shots being held for an awkwardly long time on Corrie...


(Clip courtesy of the late, wonderful Martyn Hett)

I guess it doesn't help that you couldn't "freeze frame" quad videotape, so they couldn't have just done that- it's either hold on the shot or fade/cut to something else.

I didn’t know that - so they couldn’t freeze the shot, even in post-production?

An alternative would be to fade to black, leaving only the caption on screen. In fact, I’m sure this was done quite regularly on 70s/80s dramas.

That clip is very Acorn Antiques. And they always say that Victoria Wood’s inspiration was Crossroads

They couldn't, no. I'm sure I've read that some shows telerecorded video footage to film so that that could do freeze frames and fast forward/slow motion things. You couldn't do them until 1" came along, I don't think.

I guess digital frame stores that could have done a freeze frame would have been around towards the end of the life of Quad tape, though I don't know whether a show like Corrie would have had access- they were still running their end credits off a roller until mid-1986 after all (and the static credits still seem to be on physical cards even on the current ITV3 May 1987 episodes!).

There's plenty of Corrie episodes on those DVDs where they do superimpose the "end of part one" caption, then fade the background to black after a few seconds- obviously they didn't for these episodes.

To be fair, a lot of those "as live" dramas of the 70s had the same sort of dodgy production values! Crossroads seems to be the most notorious, but it's far from the only one.

To be honest, the 1987 Corries we're seeing on ITV3 don't seem much better- well behind the production values the likes of EastEnders and Brookside had at the time.

Corrie was really slow in modernising, way behind EastEnders and even Crossroads which upped its game in 85?

I've read about David Liddement saying what he did when he started preparing to take over the show in 1988 and how he felt it was old fashioned and moved to modernise it. The getting rid of the film on location was the first part of it, in addition to bringing in more location work (just watching on ITV3 you can see even as late as 87 how many episodes were entirely studio based, or only have very brief location bits) and having more studio space so they can have more sets and scenes per episode and be faster paced, by 1990 it's quite unrecognisable from how it was just a few years before.

I don't think you'd get away with entirely studio based soap episodes now, though modern studio work looks a lot better and more realistic than it did in the 80s at least- it feels a lot less "studioey" than it used to, particularly the lighting. It still feels claustrophobic for scenes to be set indoors all the time though regardless.

I wonder how it felt to viewers at the time? Surely it must have felt badly dated compared to EastEnders and Brookside, and as you said, even Crossroads and Emmerdale Farm had higher production values than Corrie in the mid-80s!

Funny actually that when it comes to production values Corrie was the last of the major soaps to go widescreen in 2002- though it was actually the first to go HD back in 2010! Though I doubt either are things that would impact much on your average non-geeky viewer (I wouldn't say the overall look and feel of the show changed noticably with either change after all, compared to things like moving to colour, upgrading from tubed cameras and switching from film to video on location).