Another damn blog http://thisisrjg.posterous.com More unedited thoughts from someone you don't know posterous.com Thu, 18 Aug 2011 03:31:53 -0700 Lightning tree and other symbols http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/lightning-tree-and-other-symbols http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/lightning-tree-and-other-symbols

Follyfoot is too early for me to have seen it, although it was repeated several times. I still didn't see it because drama series about horses have never appealed to me (they're for girls). For that matter, much of the made-on-film children's drama of my childhood didn't appeal to me. It was usually stultifyingly dull, worthy and often ended with a message, sometimes quite divorced from the plot, a message that we should be nice to each other or look both ways before crossing the road or obey our teachers or not leave your grandfather's house to go live with Fräulein Rottenmeier or the like. Fuck that: I wanted adult drama, where the message, if there was one, was a bit more subtle. Often.

But I may have missed out. The theme tune, by The Settlers, is a jaunty, folky number that I really like, albeit sadly not anything whatsoever to do with the plot of the show as far as I can see (the show was about horses, not exciting fires in fields). Also, Steve Hodson, the male romantic lead, is very cute by 1970s standards. Probably less so now. Also also, it had Desmond Llewelyn in it! Q! I now think I'd quite liked to have seen him read out words in Follyfoot, having seen him read out words in a number of other things.

Best of all: the above video has the YTV frontcap left on. I loved frontcaps -- you always knew what you were getting next. Silver man-horse-flag combo: something shot on cheap video. Big white star/cross thing: something shot on film in the countryside/near the sea/both. Ilk lee-moor bah-taaaat!: something more worthy than it should be by rights. Big gold ship (amazingly rare): programme on film involving Plymouth in some way. Silent pointy G: something even more worthy than Yorkshire was putting out.

Them were the days.

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http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1121843/Photo_26.jpg http://posterous.com/users/heO3O71sMMJYe Jamie Graham thisisrjg Jamie Graham
Sat, 30 Jul 2011 07:00:55 -0700 BBC trust http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/bbc-trust http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/bbc-trust
Img_1102

Previously on 'Another Damn Blog': I wrote to the BBC to complain about a minor matter of them getting telephone numbers deliberately wrong on-screen.


I know this is a petty point, but it's one that annoys me. And, as I said at the time, "[i]f the BBC can get its own telephone number wrong, can they be trusted to make a documentary without cutting such basic corners?"

The reply came from BBC Complaints and seemed to be deliberately trying to prove my point. It said that they put numbers up on screen incorrectly because they were easier to remember that way. Bollocks. What a load of cobblers. I wrote back, saying that I didn't mind the brush-off, but did mind them actually lying to me. If they weren't lying, then they would produce the research that the BBC had done that showed people could remember telephone numbers more easily when they were wrong than when they were right. After all, they must've have done that research to come up with that answer.

But, I warned darkly, if they'd done no research and this reply was just a lie, it was time for them to 'fess up or I would prove the lie by requesting a copy of the research myself. BBC Complaints never replied. So I had to carry through with my threat and I made a formal Freedom of Information Act request to see the research -- warning the FoI department that they wouldn't find any but that two could play at the timewasting game.

BBC FoI came back to me: they could find no evidence whatsoever that the BBC had commissioned or received any research on the formatting of telephone numbers on screen or elsewhere. In other words, the guy at BBC Complaints had lied his little socks off to make me go away. As I say, I wouldn't mind a brush-off, but this default that now exists in the UK of telling a lie, no matter how implausible, rather than just telling the truth has to stop.

I first had an organisation tell me an obvious and implausible lie a few years ago. After being very ill and having the NHS strangely reluctant to treat me (indeed, receiving open hostility from some staff) I sought a copy of my hospital notes. Lovely: as correspondance was passed between departments, I was referred to on multiple occasions as "this homosexual". As in "this homosexual first presented to me on..." and "I would like to refer this homosexual to you for further tests" and the like. This, clearly, would not do. So I complained to the chief executive of the hospital. Here comes the whopping great porker: he wrote back and said this was normal practice for all patients and they were all referred to that way in notes. Yeah, right. Do you even believe for a moment that your notes, assuming you're straight, say anywhere, anywhere at all, "this heterosexual presented to me on..."? Uh huh.

I went to the then-Healthcare Commission about this and they gave the hospital a mighty slapping down because of it. The chief executive had to write to apologise to me personally, the writers of "this homosexual" had to attend special courses in not writing "this homosexual" in notes, and the Trust had to employ a 'Diversity Officer' (no, me neither) to make sure this never happened again. But nobody had to apologise for the great fat lie the chief exec told me in his first reply. It was seen as entirely acceptable to try to make me go away by lying to me. It isn't.

A similar, if less outrageous in its detail, thing happened last month when a WHSmith employee told me a barefaced lie to my face rather than admit a mistake had been made. As I say, it seems to have become the default in British society, at least in larger organisations, to tell lies rather than deal with consequences.

For the BBC, this initial lie isn't going to go away. Today I've written to the BBC Trust, what was the governors, to ask them if they agree with me that trust in the BBC is important and lying to stakeholders undermines that trust. I'm expecting the BBC Trust to give me the brush-off and I won't mind that. I just hope they don't take the opportunity to lie to me at the same time.

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http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1121843/Photo_26.jpg http://posterous.com/users/heO3O71sMMJYe Jamie Graham thisisrjg Jamie Graham
Sat, 23 Jul 2011 12:56:00 -0700 The yearbook mystery http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/the-yearbook-mystery http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/the-yearbook-mystery

Yearbook_mystery.m4v Watch on Posterous

Here's a little thing I put together for Transdiffusion's MediaBlog.

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http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1121843/Photo_26.jpg http://posterous.com/users/heO3O71sMMJYe Jamie Graham thisisrjg Jamie Graham
Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:06:00 -0700 Doctor Two http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/doctor-two http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/doctor-two

I'm not a fan of most (any?) YouTube "mash-ups", where people assume that taking the pictures from one thing and the sound from another and putting the two together equals some sort of art. It doesn't, it equals mindless crap and shows how mindblowingly unoriginal many YouTubers can be.

I make the exception for this video. How could I not: a great piece of title music (from a truly execrable programme) added to an unfairly treated Doctor Who - the second Doctor, Patrick Troughton. It was under Troughton's reign that most of what we think of when we think of the character of the Doctor was properly established: from regeneration to the mad-man-with-a-box persona. The series wouldn't've worked without William Hartnell's superbly strange performance to start it off, but Pat Troughton ensure that the character, and thus the series, had longevity built right into it. The thing that makes the current series, supposed production problems aside, so enjoyable is Matt Smith's actorly choice to bring some of Pat's mannerisms back to the show, despite Pat having left well before Matt was born and the BBC doing their level best to erase much of the second Doctor from the archives in their 1970s bonfire-out-of-vanity.

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http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1121843/Photo_26.jpg http://posterous.com/users/heO3O71sMMJYe Jamie Graham thisisrjg Jamie Graham
Thu, 02 Jun 2011 09:04:00 -0700 That was the news that was http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/that-was-the-news-that-was http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/that-was-the-news-that-was

A nice little find on YouTube - some of the BBC Nine o'Clock News from 1978 and Jim Callaghan announcing that he has a better chance of winning an election if he goes to the country next year.

Ah, if only. What Jim didn't know was that Labour had peaked in the polls. He was hoping that the rise in support would continue, but Labour, Old Labour, was about to be brought down by the unions over the winter of 78/79 - with help from the rabidly Tory press. Prime Ministers are usually good about knowing when to go to the country. This is what makes Callaghan's decision to stay on in 1978 stand out. Gordon Brown did the same when he became PM in 2007: Labour had got a boost in the polls from Blair's resignation and the party wanted to use this to call a snap election and get a new mandate. Brown eventually decided against it, fearing that being re-elected with a reduced majority would hole his premiership under the water. We now know it was already taking on water and the 'credit crunch' we were starting to hear about collapsed into a financial meltdown and spelt the end of Labour's hard-fought reputation for economic competence.

This clip from 1978 shows how much television has changed too. When did you last see a clock on TV? Clocks on TV were once vital, if nothing else because many people didn't have clocks - reliable clocks were historically expensive items. TV news now, Sky's thundering presentation aside, doesn't go for that urgent-clattering-typewriters-HERE-IS-THE-NEWS type of music any more. Our newsreaders are now journalists, rather than the actors we employed back then. Whether this is helpful or not for a straight reading-out-the-news role isn't clear, but then TV news doesn't go for that style any more either. TV news prefers to show us journalists talking to other journalists about what a third group of journalists are thinking. Radio news still employs the actors to read the stories in a clear voice at least, albeit not Kenneth Kendall and Angela Rippon any more.

The cold open on the PM's statement is also something you wouldn't see now - a shame because it's very effective - but you often still get the instant rebuttal from the Leader of the Opposition, more so when it was Brown/Cameron than we're currently getting under Cameron/Milliband (not sure why that should be - media bias or Labour still in disarray? Probably a bit of both).

For the sake of balance, here's some of ITN's News at Ten from the same year (different day, duller stories), plus some ads (including Vila from Blake's 7 eating Stork!) and some Thames continuity (but no clock).

Look, it's Denis Howells! Best. Minister. Ever. Made Minister for Drought and two days later: flooding! We don't see action like that any more.

I miss many elements of the BBC presentation of news, which works very well even now - on a busy news day. However, the ITN clip proves that this type of presentation on a slack news day is so very very dull. Or at least very very dry. Mind you, current news presentation on a slack news day doesn't work either: journalists demanding that Something Must Be Done about very little is just as nerve-shearing as journalists reading out facts to fill space was back then.

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http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1121843/Photo_26.jpg http://posterous.com/users/heO3O71sMMJYe Jamie Graham thisisrjg Jamie Graham
Sat, 21 May 2011 13:40:00 -0700 0208 if you're outside reality http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/0208-if-youre-outside-reality http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/0208-if-youre-outside-reality

Some will say this is petty, but it's worth pointing out.

Just before Doctor Who, the BBC ran a trailer for the return of the John Barrowman cheap variety filler programme "Tonight's The Night". They were begging for idiots in the audience to apply to humiliate themselves on television. In order to take part in this ritual humiliation, they need to call the production company.

Just call 0208 576 9785, they said. Except this number doesn't exist. The Subscriber Trunk Dialling number for London is 020. It used to be 01, as we probably all remember from childhood when the BBC would often tell viewers "Call for more information on 01, if you're outside London, 811 8181", helpfully ignoring that 85% of the country are outside London. Then they split London into inner 0171 and outer 0181. Then they combined both again into 020. When they created 020, they added 7 or 8 to the front of the local number to make more numbers. Since then, they've introduced 3 at the start of the number for some subscribers, with 5 to follow soon.

Similar changes of numbers have happened elsewhere too. Leeds was 0532 (0LE2 on the old dials, see?) but they changed it to 0113 and put an extra 2 on the front of the subscriber number. So a Leeds number is 0113 2XX XXXX. It isn't 01132 XXXXXX. Locally, you have to dial the 2, even if you don't have to dial the 0113.

So when the BBC said to call 0208 576 9785, they meant 020 8576 9785. Why is this important? Because these little things are important. If the BBC can't even research correct telephone numbers for a trailer, why should we expect them to research correct background information for a news report?

If the BBC can get its own telephone number wrong, can they be trusted to make a documentary without cutting such basic corners? If there's a phone vote, can they be trusted to count the calls correctly? If they can't even get a phone number right, can anything they say be trusted? From such acorns do mighty oaks grow.

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http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1121843/Photo_26.jpg http://posterous.com/users/heO3O71sMMJYe Jamie Graham thisisrjg Jamie Graham
Fri, 20 May 2011 03:01:13 -0700 Picture Box of DOOM http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/picture-box-of-doom http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/picture-box-of-doom

I have no real idea why this title sequence still gives me the creeps to this day. Is it the sinister, faintly out-of-key, oddly muffled steel drums music? Is it the sinister, out of focus, oddly rotating at an unpleasant speed box thing? Is it Alan Rothwell and his sinister and most probably sweaty palms in the continuity studio in Quay Street because Granada was too cheap to build him an actual set?

Perhaps it just it reminds me of pretending to be ill to avoid school and then finding that staying home watching daytime TV in the early 1980s was no laughing matter either.

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http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1121843/Photo_26.jpg http://posterous.com/users/heO3O71sMMJYe Jamie Graham thisisrjg Jamie Graham
Mon, 25 Apr 2011 08:52:00 -0700 A tour around the ether http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/a-tour-around-the-ether http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/a-tour-around-the-ether

DXing-small.m4v Watch on Posterous

I'm an Air Force brat - both my parents were in the RAF when they met, although my mum left to have me. This meant I moved house somewhere between every two and every three years between being born and leaving home at 16.

The main result of this merry dance (known as "being posted") was I grew up with a fine understanding of the regional nature of British television before Mrs Thatcher wrecked it. Every time we moved, more or less, there was a new local news programme from the BBC and a new ITV logo to see.

Roughly, this works out as Tyne Tees, Yorkshire, Anglia, Yorkshire, Central and back to Tyne Tees (not including HTV back home in Ebbw Vale). That's not the whole picture: RAF stations are generally in flat places in the middle of nowhere - flat for the runways, in the middle of nowhere for the Russians - and flat places in the middle of nowhere have a habit of being in the famed overlap areas for transmitters.

Oh, the joy of this in the days of three-channel television, when each ITV region could differ markedly in its schedule, even in peak time. Living in an overlap area gave you a use for the ITV-2 button on your set, a channel of hiss in other people's houses but in ours the slightly-further-away region would be tuned in. Suddenly, you had FOUR CHANNELS. It was like Christmas.

My regions therefore were actually TTT/YTV, YTV/ATV, Anglia on its own alas alas, YTV on its own, Central/YTV/Anglia and back to TTT/YTV (not including HTV/ATV back home in Ebbw Vale). Many of these were actually quite poorly receivable, so I was the only one watching the alternate option; and it was made harder in the period between Channel 4 launching (and taking the ITV-2 button) and my parents getting a TV with more than four buttons. Damn Decca and their everlasting wooden television sets.

One of the things that I noticed early on - and I mean very early on, in the late 70s before I was even at primary school - was that the poorer reception ITV channel was often completely invisible in the winter but better quality than the 'main' region on unseasonable stiflingly hot days in the late spring and early autumn. Yes, I'm such a geek that I independently discovered "atmospherics" when I was about 4.

I dimly recall a change of aerial in our house in the very early 1980s making the old, incompatible with the transmitter, aerial surplus to requirements. For fun, my dad wired a plug on to the trailing cable and plugged it into the crappy Chinese portable monochrome TV I'd got for my best-ever birthday present. It didn't make much difference to picture quality, but what it did reveal was a silent, very hazy Yorkshire Television picture visible with a slight turn to the right of the tuning knob from BBC-1 East. When we next moved, the reverse became true - with the big aerial, hiding to the right of BBC-1 North was to be found a wavering Anglia. This is, of course, the most exciting thing ever ever ever.

Flash forward to 1991. That summer was a hot and listless one. I was about to leave home to go live somewhere - anywhere - where chicken shit and crop rotation weren't deemed interesting subjects by the locals, discover I wasn't nearly as grown up as I thought I was and come back again 5 months later. I had finagled a portable aerial into something a bit more useful in order to escape Tyne Tees and watch the slightly-but-only-slightly more cosmopolitan Yorkshire. I was in my room watching said Yorkshire. The picture got better and better and better as the afternoon wore on; then it started to get dramatically worse and was soon surreally overlaid by the same programme a millisecond or so out of sync. This new programme soon took over entirely and I was delighted beyond measure when, at the end, up came an ident for Central. Good golly gosh!

I didn't go to bed that night. I got to watch an episode of Prisoner Cell Block H on Central South, then something else on TSW and finished with a bit of TVS. Then I watched a bit of BRTN (Belgian-Flemish) before finishing the spell around dawn looking at test cards from Switzerland. Then the atmospherics blew themselves out and this event has never happened to me again. For shame.

The closest I've got is sometimes being able to see, but not hear, TV3's output from Ireland on similar days; but analogue switch off locally means I rarely remember to bother to surf between Channels 21 and 69 looking for stations when there's nothing at all there 99.995% of the time.

What I do instead is periodically knock my Freesat box into a "discover" mode and let it play across the transponders it picks up blind without Freesat's EPG as a guide. As a rule, I find nothing of interest to anybody. Sometimes I get stuff that looks interesting - is that Sky Atlantic unencrypted?! No, it's a promo for Sky Atlantic that happens to be unencrypted - but usually, it's nothing in particular. Which fairly well describes the (BBC) test transmission above, which is nothing in particular at all but does have a curious hypnotic quality.

DX television also has that curious hypnotic quality. Unlike the test transmission, however, DXing is - or was - actually exciting.

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http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1121843/Photo_26.jpg http://posterous.com/users/heO3O71sMMJYe Jamie Graham thisisrjg Jamie Graham
Sat, 23 Apr 2011 01:25:37 -0700 On being a Whoer http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/on-being-a-whoer http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/on-being-a-whoer

He's back... and it's about time. The new series of Doctor Who starts tonight and I am unreasonably excited, as I have been for nearly every new series since about 1981.

My earliest memory of watching Doctor Who is accidentally stumbling upon Warriors' Gate in 1981. I must've come in part way through an episode part way through the adventure, but I was instantly and irredeemably hooked. Then, a couple of months later, the Doctor fell from Jodrell Bank and turned into a completely different person. From that moment, I ceased to be hooked and became obsessed.

I think this works the same for all fans of Doctor Who. They enjoy the series until their first regeneration, at which point they become addicted to it. I remained addicted all through Peter Davison's tenure, despite the BBC moving the series to somewhere harder to find in the schedules. I even gave up a club I went to on Monday evenings with my best friend of the time in favour of watching the show.

I stuck with the series through Colin Baker's time, although by this point the series was beginning to flag, even for me. No fault of Colin Baker - a fine actor to this day - but the series was clearly unloved by the BBC and needed a rest and a change of production management. In the BBC of the day, only the pause was possible, and the series disappeared in 1985 for a year and a half, but sadly returned with a smaller budget and the same tired executives in place. I stuck with it.

The Doctor regenerated again, and Sylvester McCoy, a truly great Doctor, appeared. The series was freshened up and really started to catch fire again. So the BBC cancelled it.

Seven years passed and I moved on to other interests - Star Trek: The Next Generation launched and I got obsessed with that instead. The BBC tried again with a one-off backdoor pilot for a new Doctor Who, made in Canada, but it relied on (a) money from Fox that wasn't forthcoming and (b) intimate knowledge of the show's backstory mixed with the ability to ignore the places where they had changed that same story. So that wasn't going to work.

Time passes, and in 2004 the BBC announced that the show was coming back. It didn't sound hopeful: it was to be made in south Wales, of all places, written by a guy best known for comedy and children's TV, and starring a teenypop girly singer known as "Billie". Still, I'll watch it, I thought, if only for the nostalgia.

In the run-up to it going out for the first time, I had actually started to get excited, even while doubting that it could be as good as I remembered (if you go back and watch episodes of stuff you enjoyed as a kid, it is often surprisingly dull). On Saturday 26 March 2005 I popped to my doctor to have a blood test, with plans to nip to Sainsbury's to buy booze and snackfood to consume in front of the TV that night.

At 7pm on that Saturday, I was lying in a hospital bed, having 4 pints of blood put into me. Something had gone terribly wrong. I hurriedly paid for the terrible Patientline service to get BBC-1. I was foiled: during the title sequence, the junior doctor arrived, and having heard me say how I'd been waiting for this moment for 9 years, announced that this was the only time she had available to perform some tests. These tests involved looking up bum, which made watching TV difficult, and it would've been nice if she'd bothered to close the curtain around the bed, but when you're ill, the NHS makes you better in return for your dignity. (I later learnt that the hospital had decided that, since I was bleeding to death internally and would ultimately need a large, murderously-inclined part of my bowel removing, it was obviously my own fault because I was a filthy queer - hence the, er, less-than-caring attitude of the staff. Once I was well, I had to take action against them. I won)

Still, I watched the rest of the series as my life ebbed away. The new series was brilliant. Wales is a great place to make television, it turns out, with some of the most talented production crews in the entire world - that shouldn't surprise a Welshman like me, but there we are. Russell T Davies, that comedy and children's writer, had also written Queer as Folk, the series that directly brought about a change in society's attitudes to homosexuality and relaunched serial drama as a television phenomena. The series was more than safe in his hands: it was in perfect hands. And Billie, teenybopper, was actually Billie Piper, award-winning actress of real talent.

Time passed, I was cured, and I kept watching as the 'new' Doctor, Christopher Eccleston, regenerated into the newer David Tennant (I cried), then through Tennant's years in the role, falling deeply in love with his Doctor. And then he regenerated (I cried for days and still do if I see the regeneration scene) and Matt Smith took over, after - correcting the injustices of the past - a decent break that built expectations and a change in production management that kept the format fresh (and brought another comedy/children's writer to the helm, the equally brilliant Steven Moffat).

Tonight is the second series of Matt Smith's Doctor Who. I'm not in love with the 11th Doctor in the sexually-perverted way I was with the 10th (although I'm nursing a crush that could squash him) but I'm just as excited as I was in 2005, and in 1981. That is effectively forever in television terms, which shows the true power of a format invented back in 1963 by Sydney Newman and Verity Lambert. For the ball-and-chain, who saw the first ever episode go out the day after JFK was assassinated and was also instantly hooked, the excitement is no different, even almost 50 years later.

So tonight, I'm buying the booze, he's buying the Chinese takeaway and we're sitting down in front of BBC One HD at 6pm.

I have no blood tests planned.

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http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1121843/Photo_26.jpg http://posterous.com/users/heO3O71sMMJYe Jamie Graham thisisrjg Jamie Graham
Thu, 21 Apr 2011 00:25:05 -0700 Handling irregularities http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/handling-irregularities http://thisisrjg.posterous.com/handling-irregularities

In the on-going fight between the ball-and-chain's Collyer Brothers Syndrome and my slightly neater ways, sometimes things I forgot we owned push their way to the top of a pile. Earlier this year, I stumbled on my collection of early-1990s VHS releases of ATV's Sapphire and Steel.

S&S was a strange old series, following two agents sent by a higher authority to solve problems caused when time "leaks" out from its true place and seeps into real life - turning nursery rhymes real, bringing old photographs to life - or where humans have forced time to leak by attempting to travel back or by nursing a strong grievance against others.

I watched these at the time, as a very (very) small child. I'm at a loss as to why my mum was letting watch ATV at 7pm when I was 4, especially since S&S is still terrifying to this day. My better half had also watched them, from the comfort of his late 20s, and vaguely recalled liking the series. So we decided to watch two episodes a week (on average). It's been ten years since I last watched the tapes, so we picked a strange order for the series, based on what I remembered were good adventures with the less good ones hammocked in between.

That meant we watched the "Assignments" in the order 3, 5, 4, 1, 2, 6. And my memory was wrong: there were no "less good" adventures. The entire series bombs along quite happily without needing my intervention.

The 1991 ITC VHS copies were truly terrible in quality. Unremastered transfers with awful sound problems and a fluttery picture, plus 20 years of poor storage and being carted hither and yon as I've moved house, so I gave up and ordered the Network remastered DVD versions. These were much better quality and, as a bonus, the later episodes kept the famous ATV Zoom 2 ident on the front, which doubled the pleasure had from the episodes for some reason.

While the series is slow by today's standards - they'd write each adventure as two 45-minute episodes rather than up to eight 25-minute ones now - each episode manages not to drag. If I sat down with a video editor, I think I could trim a maximum of 3 or 4 minutes out of each episode to improve the pace, which is nothing. The series is tightly plotted, so you don't really notice any drags. Given that it was made on an ATV budget (all the money goes on the stars and the production has fourpence to play with), only in one place is there a ludicrously poor 1970s foam monster; the rest of the time, the terror is nicely psychological.

S&S has really stood the test of time (pun intended) by being completely riveting thirty years later, so much so that we're going to rewatch them again later in the year, in the correct order.

Oh, and also try to solve a seeming mystery in the production of the series (mainly by speculating until we hit on what sounds like a likely answer rather than doing any actual research). There are two versions of the opening announcement (probably voiced by Francis Matthews):

"All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Trans-uranic, heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: gold, lead, copper, jet, diamond, radium, sapphire, silver and steel. Sapphire and Steel... have been assigned!"

and

"All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Trans-uranic, heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: gold, mercury, copper, jet, diamond, radium, sapphire, silver and steel. Sapphire and Steel have... been assigned."

Subtle, but clearly two recordings. But then there appears to be two versions of the music, one brass-heavy, one more on the strings. Both announcements are used across both pieces of music, meaning there are four versions of the title sequence, fairly freely mixed together.

Finally, in the last ever episode, it becomes clear that ATV/Central didn't have a clean copy of the title sequence available (how come??) and therefore dropped a copy from a previous episode on to the tape, with a very very clunky edit at the start and three or four notes of the background music of the older episode left on the front!

We're going to really concentrate and take notes next time we watch, because we are, quite simply, very very big geeks.

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http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1121843/Photo_26.jpg http://posterous.com/users/heO3O71sMMJYe Jamie Graham thisisrjg Jamie Graham