The TV Question Amnesty Thread

Going back to the way ads were compiled and spliced together, I remember an occasion in the early 80s when during the long hold on the final ad of the break, you could faintly hear the soundtrack from a totally different ad playing. I assume there would be too much of a gap before any other commercials on the reel for this to be a “pre-print”, so could it be the effect of a reel of film being reused and not fully wiping what was underneath?

Could another explanation be that a “fader” was slightly open from another source, eg. the commercial running on another machine or a dirty feed from another station? The latter seems unlikely as it was only ten seconds or so before the News at One, and the ad you could faintly hear would have crashed the news even if no ident followed it on the other station.

Oh and another amusing thing I sometimes saw (albeit on a PIF about road safety rather than an ad): the freeze frame at the end would hold for only about 3-4 seconds, then the action would un-freeze again if it wasn’t faded out in time!! This happened several times and always when this PIF was scheduled at the end of a break!!

You mean 'Print Through' ? It affected Quad VT particularly, and was normally was a 'pre echo'. During dramas, it was sometimes a spoiler as to what was about to happen !

I think what you heard was probably a fader left slightly open somewhere

I remember hearing that when Challenge showed some of the Monkhouse family fortunes, where you could faintly hear the buzzer a second or so before the contestant actually pressed it.

Yes, “pre-echo” was the term I meant. It wasn’t uncommon at all to hear it on TV shows, but does it only affect tapes and not film? I do agree an open fader was the most likely explanation in this case.

Video tape is magnetic 'rust'. The sound track recorded onto it emits a low level magnetic field which can pass between the layers of tape and can induce a weak magnetic pattern into an unwanted area of the tape - hence a low level sound can be heard elsewhere on the tape under certain circumstances.

Film prints, and we're talking about actual physical cinema prints, have an optical sound track which is an exposed area of the film where the sound track is required. Being 'just' an exposed area of the film there is nothing to affect any other part of the film print.

Yes, you can get film prints with a magnetic sound track but the thickness of the film is many times greater than videotape so 'print through' is not likely to happen when the film is on a film spool.

There’s a PIF on the first of the Charley Says DVDs about making sure your pipes are lagged for winter, in which, rather than using a freeze-frame at the end, just has the family featured standing as still as they can. After about ten seconds some of them are clearly starting to wobble, and one of the kids is desperately trying not to laugh.

Edit: found it...

Can't find any examples of it online but I do seem to remember this advert for Tennents Special not having a freeze-frame at the end when it was the last advert shown in a break - IIRC the guy just continued stepping away until he wasn't on screen anymore!

I was reading about outside broadcasts in the 1970s when everything was done in house. I suppose that it was fairly easy for the BBC who allocated their units as required but what happened at the ITV companies? Did each region cover events in their own region or was there a pooling of resources and did certain companies specialise in certain area? Did Thames provide facilities at the weekend if LWT was tied up covering football? I read somewhere that Thames & Yorkshire specialised in covering racing much of which even though much of it was at the weekend. I think that many of the regional companies showed local games meaning that six or seven matches could be covered so I would imagine that resources could be tight.

There are many examples on of those unique end-caps where you get things like two entirely different ITV companies have produced something, there's a couple of examples here (albeit long after the 1970s), including the unique "Granada Production for LWT" endcap on Night & Day in 2001:
https://tvforum.uk/tvhome/interesting-endboards-43080

IIRC a lot of the sports output (if it was networked) on ITV was done at ATV (and later Central). There was probably nothing to stop Thames going out and doing some filming (after all the Monday news bulletins don't spontaneously appear out of thin air) or joining up with some other company to help film something over the weekend (it is extra money after all).