BBC Election Replay - 1970 and 1974

Didn't manage to see the show - but in 1970 it was still pretty tricky to make sure that OBs and remote studios were "in-synch" with the main studio (and the network) - and almost impossible to do cleanly when cutting between black and white and colour sources. Viewers at home would have just seen a slight flash, or possibly a picture roll, but VTRs were far more susceptible (as the video heads are a big flywheel) to timing problems, so the colour could drop out, and the whole picture roll / slide / disappear completely on the recordings.

Chances are the recordings look worse than the live show did at home.

By the mid-late 70s it all got easier - as techniques were improved to lock remote OBs to the studio, or to "synchronise" the OBs to the studio via a digital frame-store or similar. (The first real synchronisers appeared in 1976 I believe - followed swiftly by their relatives - DVEs)

It was in full 4:3 (with pillars) on Sky

well it was after the first hour. That was transmitted in 14:9 until someone realised the astons were all getting cut off

Did anyone else notice how fantastic the theme they had back in 1970 was??

Now that's PROPER BBC with all the trimmings. Yes, the studio did look like the inside of a biscuit tin, but nevertheless I enjoyed the hour or so i saw of it.

This was pure bliss. The epitomy of two political AND two TV engineering eras coming together/handing over.

I was actually expecting to hear some sort of explanation as to the two styles of vote captions - along the lines of "any viewers who are wondering as to why some captions have a slightly different appearence to others, that's because some of them are actually being generated by this computer you'll have heard us talk about..." but they never did.

Aaahh - the good old Chiron and its UGLY, UGLY font - takes me back to cricket scores on Grandstand and the subtitles on NEWS REVIEW. I wonder how large the circuit boards for it were? Must have been huge.

What I also wonder is what the team doing the OPTICAL captions looked like - i.e. how many people, what equipment they were using, how they were being captured - it certainly looked like they were being loaded into the NODD - as every other caption would have that tilted angular sweep.

Oh, and the Solari boards. Made by the same people as the old Departure boards at certain major railway stations. Reminds me also of "Give Us A Clue" - the Michael Aspel/Grange Hill theme years. And as for the signwriter extending the swing-o-meter live On Air because 6% wasn't enough...

What amazed me was how jovial it all was - even the news reports. Most anecdotal 'evidence' of TV broadcasts of the time imply a sombre, stuffy mood, and in fact I thought the studio atmosphere was light years ahead of the David Dimbleby years, which DO seem stuffy by comparison, fancy graphics or no fancy graphics. Love the bits about having "half a roll in my mouth" or "a shot of whisky gets us through the night", etc. ... oh yes, and after Robin Day plugs an autobiography or two, Cliff says "Hmmm..... advertising won't get any of us anywhere!"

Whayt I noticed is that there were no filmed reports as far as I saw during the programme. A modern day election programme would be full of them.

The Beeb weren't using Chyron in 1970... The main source for electronic captions at the time was, I think, AnChar (analogue character generator) - an amazing bit of technology that was a digitally controlled analogue character generator. I think this did the cricket scores for ages in the 1970s, as well as subtitles. It had a very distinctive fount.

Later Aston 2s and Rileys were the main digital character generators introduced (very early 80s?) along with some Chyron 4s in sport and some regions.

I noticed this too - I saw a bit when Cliff Michelmore was making some amusing self-deprecating comment about his weight! I guess it all comes down to the personality of the presenter and, while David Dimbleby is an excellent broadcaster, he's not quite as witty and spontaneous as some of the great presenters of the past.

I didn't see that much of the programme, but what I did see was very interesting to watch - I hope BBC Parliament continue to show more of this sort of thing. It would be great if they also showed some of the rolling news coverage of major events from the past few decades. Just an idea...

I think this is typified by the clip that can be found on TV Ark or something like that - Richard Whitmore's last news programme. The bulletin ends with the production staff singing to him! Now that would NEVER be seen today!

Damnit - of course noggin, you're right. There was another name for it jangling about in the back of my head, but I was sure Chy(i?)ron came first. It was of course AnChar, and now you've reminded me what it stood for that makes sense.

I couldn't help thinking it was made up from analogue waveforms, because you can see where common elements are joined up to produce the various characters - for instance, the slopes of the capital letter A are exactly the same angle as the left-hand upwards vertical stroke of the numeral 5, the ampersand (&) is exactly the same as the numeral 3 but reversed and with an extra horizontal bar... I suppose it was the earliest attempt at a precursor to TruType, in that they realised that the shapes would look better if produced by curves rather than dots. After all, weren't those dot-matrix displays awful?

I believe the AnChar worked via Phase Transform Synthesis, if I'm not mistaken - based, presumably, on the theory behind audio synthesisers at the time, where electronics experts realised that various sounds could be made by adding waves together (as in the Moog and of course earlier than that the Mellotron) and that the same could be done for basic video signals.

Yep - AnChar had a bunch of circuit boards creating analogue waveforms that were added/mixed together to create letters. It was controlled digitally but generated the characters using analogue means.

However ISTR that the Mellotron wasn't a waveform synthesis device as you mention - wasn't it a pre-cursor to modern samplers, with a small strip of audio tape with a sample recording and a playback head per keyboard key? Or am I confusing this with something else?

Yes - the Mellotron was more of an analogue sampler in that the sounds it played were recorded and played back. However I believe the later models expanded on this - and I can't honestly remember whether they were from Mellotron or a rival - that rather than having a 'flute' tone or a 'trumpet' tone, sets of basic waveforms would be etched into 'toothwheels', and you would 'build' a sound by selecting levels of various permutations of these.

In this way, you would create a new wave profile and hence a new sound timbre.

I may be confusing it with something else, but yes, the original Mellotrons were tape-based (as heard famously on Beatles records), whereas the later ones I'm thinking of have toothwheels instead.

In fact, I think even earlier than the Mellotron there was another machine that worked on the same principle - the name of which escapes me - used in the early 60s by the likes of Joe Meek here in London and Del Shannon over in the States (who was bigger in the UK than in his home country). Joe Meek produced records such as The Tornados' "The Ice Cream Man" and Del's hits "Runaway", "Hats Off To Larry" and "So Long Baby" are excellent examples of this.

Anyway, we digress...!