Trailer/promo voice overs

Always wondered, compared to now, with schedules confirmed in early December - how long in advance some people in the trails departement at TVC actually knew the schedules for Christmas Eve/Christmas Day ect?-
I'm guessing most of the Festive season trails were produced in early November, so it must have been quite exciting to know the BBC One Christmas Evening rundown way ahead of everyone else.

By the way - with you on the 2nd point. Not on the first.
The quality of clip selections were sometimes awful, and has all the hallmarks of receiving the final tapes late, and the need to crowbar them into the trails.

Go look at some 1980's film/drama trails from the BBC or ITV on You Tube. Clips taken from random points, not even representitive of the plot. Clip scenes with background music crash out mid scene, no attempt to keep a balanced audio flow going.
Comedy and gameshow trails were not immune to this casual nature. Comedy sketches with the punchline delivered totally our of context to the rest of the sketch. And i've lost count of gameshow promos I've browsed which didn't show any of the actual format - just the host, making some snide comment at the contestant about his/her job or hobby of interest, as a way of selling the programme.

At least the trails today have time spent on them, providing some context and flow to the nature of the drama, picking out the best bits of the film in 40 seconds or actually show the quiz show being played.

Your typical clip based promo is made 6-8 weeks ahead of TX. Christmas promos (clip based), October/November time (obviously if it's a massive campaign, will be more in the summer months)

Also, I agree we may b*tch about some promos but it's a long way from the random 'pick the best bits and chuck them together and slap on a voiceover' in the 70s/80s; there has to be a narrative/concept. But of course, there are some shows which are so bad that you can't polish a turd. Nowadays you don't always need a voiceover because its been cut like a story.

Just thinking about this, back in the day weren't some of the trails voiced live by the duty continuity announcer? I think Children's BBC continued this practice longer than the rest of the output.

Yes some of those line up promos you used to get wouldn't cut it today. You'd get a 5 second clip of Coronation Street which didn't sell the programme at all. Some would say we've gone too far the other way where trailers are too over produced, but that's better than just a random scene from The Bill being voiced by the duty announcer.

Regarding the dropping of line up trailers, It's also fair to say we don't have as many programmes in the schedule anymore and lots of filler around the edges. In the old days a line up trailer would have lots of half hour programmes and they'd still include stuff on at 11pm. These days there are many more hour long programmes, plus in the case of BBC One, I guess they wouldn't include The One Show, or anything post 10pm, so you're left with about 3 programmes, one being EastEnders.

Although in many cases that sort of thing was the main appeal of the show- Strike It Lucky being a notable example!

I don't see the problem with having a line-up trail for 3 or 4 programmes. For a start, it would give many programmes the publicity that they don't get. A quick excerpt from a key scene from each programme, slickly sewn together and voiced would work quite nicely. The BBC in particular seems to have a habit of picking out a very small number of programmes and publicising them to death - sometimes for weeks prior to their launch - whilst other, equally if not more worthy programmes don't get a look in. If nothing else, line-up trails would break up the monotony of the rotation of the same 4 or 5 trails in junctions for most of the week.

Elaborate trails of 30 seconds or more, when shown again and again and again, just make me reach for the remote control - and if I find something else that catches my eye, I may not necessarily return to the channel I was on. Short and snappy works much better - but still preferably not for bloody weeks in advance of launch.

Here's a classic Saturday Night on BBC One trail from 1996. Good selection of clips but just look at the way the voiceover has to drop the tone for Festival of Remembrance before picking it back up again for Match of the Day. That kind of thing happened all the time and it was a real skill to pull it off without sounding ridiculous.

I'm guessing these things vary from channel to channel.

My BBC experience is that delivery time scales vary somewhere between 1 week before transmission and 1 hour before transmission.

Yeah that's fair, especially when you're dealing with more reactive channels/live programmes. My experience has been the opposite when it comes to promos.

That sounds like bliss!

To be fair Other places have everything set in stone well in advance. Does This week or MOTD apply to this method of making trails?

Does the BBC hire an agencies for advice on how to create and use trails?

MOTD, Question Time, etc make 'as-live bumper trails'... these are recorded by the programme production team themselves through their own gallery. They can either be played down the line and recorded by playout for later transmission, or played out directly from Salford or the QT scanner, etc... with channel playout taking the trail as a live outside source (counting them on and off air).