BillyH's posts, page 11

ITV Programming Thread

The one I saw live in July 2016 wasn’t shown too late after, it had a Paralympic athlete as one of the contestants and from memory it aired in September during the Paralympic Games in Rio that year.

To my delight, Colin Baker from Doctor Who was also one of the contestants and absolutely stormed his round, an extremely clever chap.

EastEnders

Here’s a recent behind the scenes, showing that even the glasses are composited on using green screen:

We Love Are You Being Served

Yarwood is another act who I appreciate was genuinely colossal in his time but it's always felt like something from a completely different era for me. He did have a mini comeback in the early-mid 1990s with a well-received John Major impression at the 1993 Royal Variety Performance, and subsequently made a few appearances including on Have I Got News For You which had worked well for Bob Monkhouse and later would for Bruce Forsyth. He's still alive but rarely appears in public now.

Windows Technology

Windows 3.11 was the first for us too, when we finally upgraded the Amiga 500 we’d had since new to a PC in September 1996. 95 followed a few months later, followed by 98 in around 2000, XP in 2004, 7 in 2011 and last week they finally upgraded the downstairs computer to 10.

Astonishingly enough, the computer in my old room still works and has a hard drive dating back to 2000-01, meaning it’s survived two decades and two changes of Windows! It’s only been during lockdown that I’ve started backing up the important stuff to either USB drives or the Cloud, the optical drive is almost completely worn out but otherwise it’s working ok, still on Windows 7.

When I lived in Australia in 2015-16 I was a bit horrified that some library computers were still using XP, which meant some websites and applications would struggle to load correctly, but my last visit there three years ago saw they’d been updated. Wouldn’t be surprised if XP was still around in some countries though - 98 lasted well into the 2000s, and at least one family member was using it right up until the early 2010s.

We Love Are You Being Served

I struggle with a lot of pre-alternative comedy with the exception of Python and Fawlty Towers, the likes of M&W and The Two Ronnies has always left me cold - even as a child in the 1990s I remember trying to find them funny but wishing something like Harry Hill was on instead. Even by then a lot of them did seem like products from another time, and in the rare cases that they’d actually show a full episode you’d realise the few “classic” sketches always seen on clip shows actually went on about five minutes linger and got less funny as they went on. I did appreciate The Two Ronnies Sketchbook though for making a point of showing the full versions of every sketch and having them honestly admit afterwards if the punchline wasn’t that great and they could have done better, rather than the same 30 second clips usually seen with random comedians howling at how great it is.

There definitely were a few years when a new OFAH became Essential Christmas Day Telly, the final season of the show was back in 1991 and after that it only appeared as specials for the next twelve years. The ratings it got back in 1996 and 2001 are still colossal and very few programmes have ever topped it since, indeed I don’t think anything outside of the London Olympics (and maybe the odd England football match) has come close to what Rodney and Del Boy got nineteen years ago.

Smtv Live reunion

They should create it, massively advertise it months in advance, have millions tune in only for it to be just James Redmond in an empty studio for two hours.

The Crystal Maze

Here’s the original continuity announcement from November 2006 explaining the missing episode of DOND (plus adverts), the slot was filled by a repeat episode. It appeared on Challenge in April 2013 when they reached the same era of the show.

At the end of the episode a brief white-on-black caption was broadcast, saying something like “In memory of (name), relative of (contestant name) who was meant to play today. Our thoughts are with you”.

The Crystal Maze

Maybe they’ll end up on Challenge in a few years, they have a history of showing episodes many years later that were never broadcast originally. A 2006 episode of Deal or No Deal got its premiere on the channel in 2013, and I think a few later episodes of 100% also appeared on there to the point some assumed they were brand new episodes.

Channel 4

I remember thinking that one would have been so much better had there genuinely been a mystery from the start as to whether the special was real or not, it was framed as the pilot of a new light entertainment show with Derren acting like a Noel Edmonds type throughout. But instead it had an introduction from Derren explaining that it was a fake show and a test on the studio audience - making me wonder if the plan was to originally make it seem like a real programme, only to either get cold feet about it in case viewers complained or C4 bosses intervened and made them add the intro.

The mystery wouldn’t just be what would end up happening to the contestant, but whether Derren had “sold out” and turned into some cuddly mainstream light entertainment host - a pastiche he did on that pretty well.

APFS: Afternoon Programmes Follow Shortly Discussion

That reminds me how it’s very rare for retro-sounding announcers to sound “right” whenever mocks are made - they usually sound overly plummy or posh and essentially like a parody of someone rather than a genuine voice. Microphone quality also affects realism, as you can tell when someone’s speaking into a tinny distorted Windows microphone rather than one that a television channel would use.

APFS: Afternoon Programmes Follow Shortly Discussion

I remember doing some fairly creative edits to try and get the VHS “look” - for the colour patterns I’d make a layer of psychedelic swirling colours and subtly overlay it with minimal capacity, and for analogue “ghosting” I’d do a similar effect with motion blur. Doing a minor image blur and then sharpening gave images a better off-air look (removing sharp anti-aliasing which gave away that it was done on a modern computer) and a small rotate and altering the red/green/blue controls (removing the blue gave a good aged yellow effect) made things look more like a physical static slide. Not bad for a 14 year old in the early 2000s with a cheap copy of Paint Shop Pro 😅

Later on I would split the image into Hue/Chroma/Luminance, slightly move one of the layers sideways and rejoin them together, giving a nicely realistic VHS effect. Add some tape distortion at the bottom (either recreated through gradients and blurs or just pasted in from a real VHS capture) and it didn’t look too bad!

Earliest surviving 2″ quad videotape masters

The BBC footage was cleverly "recreated" for I think the 40th anniversary in 2009, with the original sound of Patrick Moore/James Burke's commentary (which existed on tape) matched up with the NASA footage. The following year's Apollo 13 BBC footage exists on 2" colour VT.