An awful lot of picture roll between cutting of studio and OB sources. I suppose that was less noticable when this was played live 35 years ago.
Nice to finally watch Parliament in full screen after living with DTT for so long.
Just how tall is the podium the presenter is sitting at? It looks HUGE in the long shot.
It wouldn't have been there on the live transmission. The picture roll is there because the VT machine recording the output, couldn't cope with the timing errors between the outside sources and the studio.
An awful lot of picture roll between cutting of studio and OB sources. I suppose that was less noticable when this was played live 35 years ago.
Nice to finally watch Parliament in full screen after living with DTT for so long.
Just how tall is the podium the presenter is sitting at? It looks HUGE in the long shot.
It wouldn't have been there on the live transmission. The picture roll is there because the VT machine recording the output, couldn't cope with the timing errors between the outside sources and the studio.
Yep - this was in the days before the widespread use of digital synchronisers meant timing wasn't a problem!
In the "old days" they had all sorts of systems to lock remote studios and OBs with the live studio to allow a synchronous cut between them (usually requiring a spare audio circuit between TVC and the OB to remotely control the syncs of the remote source)
If these sources weren't correctly locked then there may have been a very brief frame roll on TVs (possibly with a short loss of colour) as the non-sync source was cut up on the main mixer. However VTRs take a much longer time to re-lock to a signal with different syncs - and we are watching a 2" Quad recording of the event, complete with big frame rolls on non-sync cuts.
(Incidentally the 1970 election was the first BBC show to use a handheld colour video camera I believe. They were the first - and only - PAL Philips minicams which BBC OBs had converted from NTSC. The BBC were the only people to ever get them in PAL - they were used a lot on the Boxing - and Golf because they could also work in colour, and be controlled remotely, via a radio link)
I watched a small section of the programme right at the beginning. It detailed a 'brand new type' of poll, in which voters were asked how they voted just after coming out of the polling station. It was carried out in Gravesend, which was said to be the most representative of the whole nation in the way it votes. The panellists pretty much rubbished the method, but it did predict a 1% Conservative lead over Labour, which I believe wasn't far from the actual result - well it was certainly closer than the Labour victory everyone expected.
Of course, this rubbished method went on in future to be a crucial and very expensive part of Election Night on the BBC - the exit poll. I had no idea it was conceived in 1970.
I think the last black and white region was Norwich - which I think went colour in 1974? Not sure if the Open University at Alexandra Palace (before they moved to the OUPC at Milton Keynes) was still black and white at this point - I certainly remember OU repeats in black and white well after everything else was colour!
The Channel Islands didn't get UHF colour transmissions until quite late - but that is a slightly different issue.
I think TV Centre, BBC Network production in England and BBC OBs in England (Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham and London at this point) went colour quite quickly. Not sure what the timescales were for the nations though. (The 1970 coverage included lots of B&W OBs from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - with the colour stuff more common in England?)
One of the big differences between now and 1970 is that the OBs for elections would probably have used lots of BBC OBs OB units (i.e. the same trucks that would have done football matches and Songs of Praise) - whereas now only a few of these are used (Downing St for example), with regions and news having lots of units of their own these days.