BBC Parliament - Discussion

Not really surprising, the Parliament EPG is quite regularly either out of date and/or makes references to programming that bears no resemblance whatsoever to what's actually been going out.

Appreciate it bends over backwards sometimes when live Commons coverage overruns which it quite regularly does, but then spends the rest of the evening running behind schedule. Mind you, for the amount of viewers the channel actually attracts (literally next to nothing) I suppose it's not a major issue in the grand scale of things.

Parly are doing their own programme for the State Opening today. I just flicked over to it and caught the end of their election montage, and it sounded like they were using Arthur. Which is almost as good as BBC One's using an Elbow track...

If you're lucky, you'll be able to watch it again at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00slnmq later - it's about five minutes in.

BBC Election 70
Saturday 9 October
9.00am-11.00pm BBC PARLIAMENT

BBC Parliament gives viewers a chance to relive the historic 1970 General Election, which resulted in a surprise win for the Conservatives under Ted Heath.

The 1966 Labour Government had been dogged by economic crises, forcing the devaluation of sterling in 1967. Industrial relations were consistently poor and the government upset many of its own supporters by backing the American war in Vietnam. Prime Minster Harold Wilson was also humiliated by the UK's rejected application for membership of the European Economic Community and the unpopularity of the government was shown in a record number of 15 by-election defeats during the course of the parliament.

more….

WWW.BBC.CO.UK/PRESSOFFICE
23-09-2010 @ 14:25

Was the the one with Desmond Wilcox in Trafalgar Square on a dreadful night weatherwise, with only a couple of people to interview, and after his couple of minutes on air, and after saying he would be there all night - was never seen again?

Well, he did three elections in Trafalgar Square, in October 74 he only appeared once while in February 74 he was shivering in the dark because of power cuts. In 1970, he's in it quite a lot, until about 3am ("I would have liked the cost of living to be more discussed!" "Well, it was!"). Although why you'd go to Trafalgar Square on election night, I dunno.

Well, for anybody who missed it, it's on the iPlayer, or the first two hours of it is anyway. Advertised as a 13hr slot on the EPG, 6hrs on the programme website, and only two hours of it is up for viewing. What is up with that?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00v9jgf/BBC_Election_1970/

I notice significant amounts of what I can only presume is either damage to the source tape or tape dropout. You can see significant distortion and rolling picture at various points, and (on the TV transmission anyway) copious black-and-white inserts from various OBs and regions despite being "computerized and in colour".

Obviously the picture problems wouldn't have gone out like that in 1970 being live. I suppose I should presume the region contributions and a handful of black-and-white OBs as recorded weren't B&W on original transmission?

The picture rolling is almost certainly caused by non-sync cuts causing the record VTR to lose lock for a few seconds.

These days all remote OBs go through something called a synchroniser, which locks their pictures to the studio sources so that they can be cut in-sync. Synchronisers only really arrived for mainstream use in the mid-to-late 70s (they were the beginnings of the DVE - Quantel had one at the 1976 Olympics). Prior to this there were two options.

1. Remotely sending genlock signals to the OB, or sending a control signal (audio tones down a phone line) that allowed the pulse generator at the OB to be controlled remotely by the studio to ensure it arrived in sync.

2. Cope with the non-sync cut.

The picture rolling was far less noticable on a TV at home (and common place in London on LWT/Thames transitions...) than on the recordings on 2" VT machines which took time to re-lock.

There were also issues with black and white contributions without PAL bursts into colour studios...

Was NATLOCK in place by 1970? I was surprised that the picture was breaking up several seconds before a cut to a non-sync outside source.

Surely the broadcast was just taped in its entirety in London rather than being pieced together again at the end?

As Spencer points out over in the Metropol thread on this, colour was still pretty new in 1970 and I presume just as how widescreen and HD started in entertainment and moved to news slowly the same was true of colour?

Sorry, what I meant was as it was presented on Parliament, some regional and OBs were in black-and-white. I meant to ask was were the contributions from the regions added in as black-and-white originally as aired? Colour only being available mainstream since 1967 and I suppose a lot of regions didn't acquire colour transmission capabilities until after 1970?

That was very much as transmitted, as several have said. Well into the 1970's there were frequent BW inserts into news and CA programmes advertised as in Colour. Indeed Nationwide would always be a kaleidoscope of mixed sources. The lock loss is easily explained by the recording not resynching as fast as live programming would have been.

Yes, in fact of all the regional studios only Glasgow was in colour, and obviously there was only a handful of colour OB crews. Blue Peter was still in black and white in June 1970!