Election 83

Glad I wasn't the only one who noticed that.

Currently working on uploading that bulletin to YouTube, in the meantime, the opening titles for anyone interested:

The news bulletin:

No DOG or year graphic for the whole thing, which was nice.

It sounds from what Dimbleby said in closing, as if it was TC1 with the set hiding the people working on getting results etc rather than them being part of the set as in other years.

If, as has been suggested, the studio was operated as two floors, with the visible set on the upper floor, how did that work for cameras? If they put up scaffolding etc to produce a temporary floor would that have been smooth enough for cameras to move across it?

Surely not? Even if they could get a floor smooth enough for cameras to ped across, surely the weight of, say 5 cameras, plus pedestals, operators, cables, floor monitors and crew would have been prohibitive for a raised floor just so that the people 'beneath us' could be out of shot? I'm just guessing that we're either reading way too much into his comment or that it came from Lime Grove where studios were literally on top of one another...

Go almighty that was exhausting.

A little digging reveals that it was TC6, with TC7 being used as the production office.

But there were some production people below the stage in TC6 with a convenient hole in the floor to pass notes up to the presenters if the technology failed!

http://www.bbceng.info/Eng_Inf/EngInf_13.pdf

Well I stand corrected!! What an extraordinary solution... at a staggering cost I should think. That newsletter makes interesting reading. The article about the extendible roof over Pebble Mill's courtyard for the 6.55 Special is also interesting - the bones for that roof remained in situ right to the end!

Must be one of the very few elections not to use TC1 - although the 1987 election was equally bijou. The other thing about this election is that the Radio Times were on strike at the time so there was only one issue for the whole of the UK, but they managed to stick in one page in the Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland editions to talk about their coverage, with the rest of the magazine having the network listings.

I would love to see some of ITN's Election Night Specials - does anybody ever think that will happen one day on some channel? Or would BBC ever consider showing ITN's stuff?

Also why did Alistair Burnett present Election 74 for BBC when he was a well established senior presenter on ITN and News At Ten?

The problem is that ITV doesn't have a political channel. They'd never in a month of Sundays run an archival election programme on one of the current networks. I agree that it's a shame as I too would like to see some ITN election programmes. A substantial amount of 1992 has been uploaded to YouTube though.

The reason Alastair Burnet presented the BBC's 1974 election programme is because he didn't work for ITN continuously. He started out in television at ITN in the 1960s but had a couple of spells at The Economist and the BBC during the 1970s. I think he re-joined ITN again in the late 70s when News at 5:45 launched and then moved back to News at Ten, which he had helped to launch in 1967. He then remained at ITN until his retirement in 1991.

Thank you for the information there.