20 years since the death of Princess Diana

In that piece, John Ryley says that the Queen's address on the Friday evening was pre-recorded rather than, as it famously was supposed to be, live. Although he seems to only base that on there being a VT clock before it, which while being a good clue, doesn't completely rule out it being live - especially something like that where it would have needed to have been taken at the correct point by numerous outlets around the world with various delays etc.

If anything transistors and ICs definitely improved things... I remember valve TVs looking pretty dodgy. The pictures you got from a decent IC-based set in the mid-80s were definitely better than those you got from valve-based TVs.

The highest quality pictures you could see as a domestic viewer in the UK were usually BBC One and BBC Two off-air from Crystal Palace. When you saw live programmes, particularly high quality UK shows, on those transmissions they were usually very good indeed. Wimbledon in particular could look incredible. Other transmitters were never quite as good as CP as the distribution path knocked the edges off...

If you avoided shows that had been fed over satellite, recorded to 1" VT, or fed via a complex microwave path, or fed through lower quality synchronisers - you could get very good 4:3 pictures.

The rot set in once digital compression arrived in production, and when TVs started doing digital frame-store based processing (often only 6 bit...)

The early DVB-T/DVB-S SD MPEG2 stuff actually looked pretty good - as bit rates were pretty high. The first SD MPEG2 DVB-S channels I watched were using 8-10Mbs bitrates...



Well by then the SD digital compression was terrible - compare off-air recordings from BBC One / BBC Choice in the early 00s to those of 2006 and you'll see a massive increase in compression artefacts.

HD downconverted to SD at home would by then look a lot better than the SD broadcast.




That's NOT early HD... Early HD would be c.1990... That's around the time I first saw HD stuff - both the Japanese HiVision and European Eureka 1250 stuff. I even remember seeing 3D HD in Brighton at IBC in a cinema around that time...

Yes, why any journalist would choose not to listen to coverage of the big story she's travelling in to work on seems bizarre. I suspect she did but it's a a case of time blurring memories. I hope they didn't use the copy from her tape if that was the case


The really interesting bit for me is the bit about the Queens broadcast not being live. I'd not heard that before. I wonder if it was live but there was just a VT clock on the start of the feed as was normal for a live broadcast. They would have wanted the lead up to it blanked out after all and although it was a clock start, a countdown is always useful

Isn’t this also why people say the original Harlech ident looks bad now - because it actually looked fine on 405 line sets.

Hmm.

What was the story with Candle in the Wind? Maybe one area where TV coverage actively influenced the funeral?



Hmm.

And what's John Ryley's point about the Queen recording her speech? Is it that Buckingham Palace were dishonest about it?

Nobody would've demanded it be live. Apparently some of the Christmas speeches aren't live either

A bit of quick research tells me that the show at the start of this clip is the short-lived Saved by the Bell: The College Years, episode 3 'Zack, Lies & Videotape'. You can see the ending here: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x543zog

This mustn't be entirely correct then:



Looks like it was…

6.00am - The Art of Landscape

11.15am - Saved by the Bell: The College Years

11.45am - The Waltons

12.45pm - Film: Summer Madness (also known outside the UK as Summertime)

2.50pm - Football Italia

…interspersed with news updates.

I'm sure there was other kids programmes on ch4 that morning between the new updates. Unless my minds playing tricks.

ITV News uploaded this to their YouTube channel today:

And here’s Tim Willcox again, earlier on with ITN’s first newsflash

Although that wasn't the very first moment Dermot spoke of the reports. Not sure if this has been posted yet in this thread but here's the moment ITN broke into The Chart Show (just so happened to interrupt a utterly terrible song IMO, every cloud etc).

Skip to 7:15 for how ITN initially broke the news that she was, according to PA, dead.

A review of the TV news coverage of Diana in 1997: pic.twitter.com/iTkQpnozzF

— Adam Beckwith (@AdamNostalgia) August 31, 2017

Interesting the Sky piece mainly focuses on Kay, considering it was Martin who initially reported that she'd died for a while, before the official announcement which Kay delivers.