20 years since the death of Princess Diana

You're right I think, it wasn't

I've heard the same thing by those who remember 405 line TV, it never looks as good as it did originally (though of course there wasn't any aspect ratio conversion involved)

When you crop, zoom, stretch and filmise footage it looks like ****- whod've thought it?

Personally speaking, when I got HD for the first time, I thought most of it was like the analogue TV I used to watch. I noticed a big difference between digital SD and digital HD but the difference was much much less pronounced between analogue SD and digital HD (save wide-screen of course)

Watched the ITV and Channel 5 programmes on her funeral, not many interesting bits TV pres wise, though Sir Trev made an appearance as a talking head in the ITV doc and clips of him presenting the funeral coverage for ITV were shown. Channel 5 had a clip of Dermot Murnaghan ‘interrupting your usual ITV programmes’ for the funeral coverage.

Channel 5’s doc had Ian Hislop as a talking head which immediately made it 10x more interesting. At one point he talked about how the point when he realised the public reaction had gone over the top was when he was listening to a radio phone in and heard a man saying he cried more for Diana than when his wife died… which of course was a clip featured in the BBC’s doc on Sunday!

The Channel 5 doc also featured the MHP clip of Mike Dickin breaking the news on Talk Radio UK, which sounded like they must have ripped it from a YouTube copy of the original low bitrate RealAudio file (better version available on https://telly.site/diana /shamelessplug)

Anecdotally, this is a factor of changing perception?

I can recall my first (UK) exposure to HDTV. It was from a Sky+HD box about 12 years ago. As well as an output into a projector there was UHF PAL into the co-ax distribution. When the thing was fed into a 4:3 fairly modern CRT TV, my initial reaction was to think: "Wow, this is how TV used to look!"

So, only anecdotally. But, UK analog TV did seem to degrade from the '70s to the '00s. I don't doubt that this was actually my perception, but it may also have been the transition from well maintained and calibrated thermionic based electronics to chip based stuff with (elementary) firmware processing and multiple compromises.

Even so, component HD digital video down-converted and passed through the PAL encoder of an early (Thompson?) Sky+HD box didn't look too bad.

(Strweph I'm getting old.... reminiscences on early HD! Huh?)

Alright... fess-up time.

The comparatives for these remarkable HD sources were:

DVDs (the benchmark possibly)
Clean but weak Hannington
Strong but compromised and multi-pathed Crystal Palace
MPEG2 SD digital over DVB_T

I know that if I'd bothered to get a decent log periodic or two, chopped down a few trees and moved from under the North Runway glide path, analogue may well have stood up to better comparison.

I had been out the night before and when I came home I had fallen asleep in my parents living room with the tv on. I woke up to a slide on channel 4 with the CA making some announcement about Diana which I didn't really understand. I had had a few drinks so wasn't really following what was happening although I knew it was strange for channel 4 to be making this announcement. I can only guess this was around 4am. It wasn't till the next day when i heard the news that I realised what had happened. I have searched YouTube for any early morning footage of channel 4 that day, so far to no avail.

Coincidentally I came across this on YouTube earlier:

It was the same with the royal wedding, with some people clearly caring about it more than one of their own family members getting married, or caring more about George and Charlotte's birth than they would one of their own family members having a baby. It's one of the things I don't get about royalism (or celebrity worship in geneal), people caring as much, or more, about people they've never met than those that are actually a part of their everyday lives. I'm sure when the queen dies yet again we'll have sections of the country mourning (and likely sections of the media expecting us to mourn) more than when a friend or family member dies.

Me, I'd rather save my energy for the people I know and care about, and who care about me. Doesn't mean I have no sympathy of course, but it's hard to invest too much emotion in someone you don't know, and who themselves isn't aware you even exist. Good that they're getting married or having kids, sad that they've died, but I'm not going to take much time out of my day to care about it either way (and certainly not put my life on hold for it like some people do). They wouldn't be watching my wedding or funeral after all.

How Sky News reported Princess Diana's death 20 years ago
On the anniversary of Princess Diana's death in Paris, Sky News' employees recall how they reported the event 20 years ago.
http://news.sky.com/story/how-sky-news-reported-princess-dianas-death-20-years-ago-11013173

This from Kay Burley in that article is interesting



Kate Thornton tells a similar story of the ITV show she was working on that day.

Surprised that Kay wouldn't have had the BBC Radio coverage or LBC on as she drove in.

The main reason for that is almost all the 405 line TV we see has been archived film recordings - where the video was tele-recorded onto film, rather than a VT copy standards converted from the 405 VT recordings to a 625 VT format.

As a result you see terrible resolution, film artefacts, and half the motion rendition. Proper 405 line B&W VT from decent cameras didn't look massively different to 625 line B&W VT - particularly on the screen sizes typical of the era.