Film and TV Technician (1957)

May 1958 FILM & TV TECHNICIAN I'll!) can't even hire the furniture in the provinces!), cans of film, gramophone records and properties he lumbers up to Manchester, does the show and brings the whole lot back to London, having wasted the best part of five hundred pounds on transport, hotel bills and trunk calls. It is not regional and it is idiotic. " Let's not Deceive Ourselves " Let us have as much genuine regional television as possible, but let us not try and deceive ourselves and the public as to what is genuine and what is phoney. One would have thought that the place to build new studios was London. One would have thought that it would have been sensible for the provincial companies to have got together to build and share London studios specially designed and equipped for this type of entertainment. One would have thought that the I.T.A. would have seen the logic of the case and have relaxed the rigidity of its rules for this type of show. What else would one like to see happening in the future ? I, for one, would like to see more flexibility in the programme planning; fewer series and serials and fixed spots at fixed times so that there was more room for the off-beat, exceptional and individual programme that does not lend itself to the conveyor-belt system and at present finds no place. Importance of Writers I would like, too, to see a more genuine realisation of the supreme importance of the writer in television. He is our life blood. We cannot live without him and we are not treating him properly. At present we are consuming scripts faster than they are being written. Soon we shall run out. We are already scraping the bottom of the barrel and producing stuff that ought never to see the light of day. We are not encouraging the firstrate writer to write for television. This we shall have to do if we are to survive. At present a writer can make much more money writing a novel than he can by writing two or three television scripts. He can make twenty times the money by writing a play for the theatre than he can by writing the same play for television which is seen by a hundred times more people. If we, ourselves, are going to live, then we must give the top grade writer a living in television and compete with the other markets for his work. We must strive, too, for more professionalism. Too much of television production and direction is slipshod, amateurish, underrehearsed and unpolished. Producers and directors must fight for more rehearsal time but they must also learn how to use it when they have got it. The one-run-through and bash-it-on-somehow days are over. There is no excuse for them any more. Let us look at the precision and polish and exactitude of the tip-top, first feature film and the slap-up, West End theatre production and set our sights as high as these. Poor Lighting And what about the technical side of television? There is room for improvement here. There is still a great deal of lighting that is poorer than it should be. There is still a great deal of set designing and direction that takes no notice of the lighting man's problems and makes his difficulties greater than they should be. A lot of telecine projection work is poor and a great deal of film is shot for telecine which is not suited to it because no exact standards have been codified and issued to film camera lighting men and processing laboratories. But it is in the field of television receiver manufacture that the greatest room for technical improvement lies. For instance, we must insist that D.C. Restoration is included in all sets sold to the public. For those who are as untechnical as I am, let me try to explain D.C. Restoration. D.C. Restoration D.C. Restoration is that essential part of a television receiver that is designed automatically to control the brightness and contrast of the picture, to balance the blacks and whites. Unfortunately it costs a little money, around five pounds, I believe, and, in order to reduce the cost of manufacture, a very large number of the makers of television sets have agreed to omit this component from the models that they sell. What is the result ? As long as the picture is a brightly lit one, the quality is acceptable, but as soon as the director wants to do a dark scene, moonlight for instance, or some dramatic " effect " lighting with bright highlights and deep shadows, the domestic picture, far from being satisfactory, will render, instead of black and white, an all-over, pallid, foggy, fuzzy grey. His effect and the general quality of the picture will be gone. On the control gallery monitor which has D.C. Restoration the result may be fine, but the picture on the home set which has not got it will be a mess. This hampers and hamstrings the director to a terrible extent. It means that if the script says " The room is dark, the door opens, a shaft of bright light falls on the figure on the sofa, a man stands silhouetted in the doorway ", he can't do it. He has to write that scene out of the script. . . . the picture will be ;i mess The elimination of the D.C. component from modern television receivers is one of the major scandals of the industry. We should all do everything in our power to put an end to it. And what of the establishment of a training school ? Most of the companies run an occasional, perfunctory training session, but these are mostly inadequate. There is no concerted and complete effort and organisation. The newcomer to the industry usually half learns his job by being allowed to hang around and watch for a bit and is then kicked into the deep end to sink or swim, with the result that a proportion of television is slipshod and messy and displays a wide ignorance of the elementary grammar of camera work. One hopes that the production companies, in their own interests, will soon get together and combine to establish a really first-class staff training college. I suppose one cannot write an article on the future of television without saying something about colour. The B.B.C. has an experimental colour system which gives remarkably good and effective results but it is still in the laboratory stage and is far from being either a practical or a commercial proposition. One of the senior (Continued on page 270)