British Kinematography (1953)

January, 1953 DORTE : B.B.C. TELEVISION NEWSREEL 13 being reported visually, some which it will anyway be impossible to film for any one of several reasons, and others which will rank as neither news nor documentary by the time they can be televised. Sport is much more effective when televised " live." A great deal of sport is so televised so that Television Newsreel should thus only carry sport when it occurs outside the range of the Television Outside Broadcast Units or when an important sports event has been broadcast during the course of a normal working day when the television audience will have been very small. The B.B.C. is essentially and rightly impartial in everything : if Newsreel covers a byelection it must give precisely the same space to the candidates of the main parties, even to the extent of allocating identical footages to those portions of the story devoted respectively to sound and silent coverage of the candidates. It follows that if they cannot be impartial the story cannot be touched at all — as might happen, say, in the case of an industrial dispute if one side is prepared to make a statement before the cameras but the other side is not. With all that in mind and with the knowledge that although a purely documentary story really has no place in a newsreel (although the invaluable statistics produced by our Audience Research Department show that our viewers like documentary stories in the programme), the pattern becomes clearer: Television Newsreel must, for prestige purposes, carry a quota of stories which the majority of viewers will regard as dull but which, nevertheless, are news and will have a strong minority appeal, for example, International Politics as seen at one of the United Nations or North Atlantic Treaty Organization meetings. Newsreel can carry stories, the details of which are, due to Sound Broadcasting and newspapers, certain to be known to viewers before they see them on their television screens, but which justify space because of the interest of the pictorial background. It can include stories which will appeal mainly to viewers with technical minds — new inventions, novel processes, engineering exhibitions and so on — provided always that these are balanced with stories having a majority appeal. For the benefit of its female viewers, Newsreel can reproduce at length the latest Paris fashions, but it cannot normally devote much, if any, space to the latest beauty contest. This does not mean that trivial stories can never be shown in Television Newsreel ; it means that where a main story runs on average 300-400 feet, a story, if unimportant yet of passing interest and in good taste, will be found a space of 100 feet or so in a section called " Here and There " which is made up irregularly, as and when there are sufficient stories of this length to justify its production. A typical " Here and There " was projected. Telefilming. I referred to events occurring during the day of a working week which should be included in Television Newsreel even though they have been made the subject of a live broadcast at the time. We sometimes achieve this coverage be recording the outside broadcast from the tube face and editing the result down to the required length. This process can result in a noticeable drop in quality but it does save sending a film unit as well as an outside broadcast unit to site and, if the site is very far from base, it saves very many hours of time as the actual film cameras are, of course, in London, and the film is thus near to the laboratories, the cutting rooms, the dubbing theatres and the film transmitting equipment. This technique will be developed more and more in the future and I originally intended therefore, to project a specimen here to-night ; but even as I was preparing this paper, we took the decision to go over, in the New Year, to another, quite different, and appreciably better system of telefilming which has just been developed by our Research Department, so I finally decided against showing the results of a process which is now of only academic interest. Staff camera units shoot at the present time wholly on 35mm. film, and, of the footage which we commission, purchase, or obtain by exchange agreements, the bulk of this is on 35mm. film too. What comes in on 16mm. film at the present time, blow up. The film editors thus work solely on 35mm. film, and the preparation of Television Newsreel