Page 90

At 90 pages in I thought I might indulge myself a bit with various stuff...
I'm a customer of ntl, now the UKs only cable supplier. I take the whole package - tv, broadband, phone. When I had an extremely average customer service experience recently, from a company who's bad service is legendary, I was wandering around the internet looking for similar experiences. I found this - the best customer hate mail I've seen - enjoy.



A better way of organising....

As I write this, there are nearing 120 pages on this website. I started out just making up simple straightforward A4 type pages, and have continued to do so, though as my connection has gone faster and my webhost has allowed more space the pictures have got bigger. In a conversation at The Cricketers (see lunches) someone was trying to come up with a better way of organising the material. Well, always one for a challenge on a wet day, I set out to see what I could do. I bought some textbooks ("PHP and MYSQL for Idiots" and "Teach Yourself SQL"), and started work. The results so far are here. I'm quite proud of having made this much of it work, but what has slightly defeated me is the fact that each entry of the database has to be hand entered. This is why all the pics appear so far to be on page 10, which of course they aren't but entering "Page 10" 300 times is easy! I can't decide whether or not it's worth continuing - perhaps I just need an eager indexer....



If you've still not seen Google Earth, download it now!


When I started this site early in 2002 I paid around £80 per year for 50Mb of space. Later it was slightly grudgingly upped to 100Mb by my then host who later refused any more free upgrades. The current webhost for this site - IX Webhosting of Hopkinsville, Kentucky has just upped the space available to me to 5Gb with two domains 4 databases and unlimited emails accounts. Cost $80 a year. I'm not sure what to do with all the space...
Aug 2005


Here's something as off topic as the rest of this page, but for once it's someone else's material. An excellent essay on how it was... by Roger Bunce



NTL just increased my connection speed again - from 750 to 2Mb/s without increasing the price - which brings one step closer the moment when it all switches round and television is just part of the great mass of information this machine can access. Come to think of it, it can already via the Hauppauge (Hop-hog, apparently) card, but that's cheating.
So far, since I moved from dial-up, I paid £25 per month in December 2003 for 512Kb/s, which went up to 600 then 768 now 2Mb/s. I think there may be quite a lot of space to increase some more down the fibre optic.



Are we all familiar with Divx? - an MPEG4 compatible codec which allows compression ten times as great as digital tv's MPEG2. It means that a whole DVD's worth of material can go on a CD. When they convert digital tv to the more modern standard (when...), it means you can have ten times the number of channels. There's something to look forward to.

August 2004


Broadcast Quality

In the mid eighties sometime the Presentation studio at BBC TV Centre - see it below - was given a new-fangled CCD camera to try out - a small box with a lens on one end and a cable at the other. They were just on the market, and the engineers were thinking of using it for our new in-vision kids presentation starring our discovery Phillip Schofield.
The engineers connected it to the mixer as camera 4 so we could see how it looked. One afternoon I needed to pre-record a lit candle for some reason I don't remember, and as well as one of the Link studio cameras we pointed the CCD camera at it. The picture from the CCD was amazing - a quality we hadn't seen before - and I decided to use that instead of the Link tube camera output.
A while after the session was over, one of the camera crew came back to the studio to tell me that I couldn't use the material I'd recorded because it wasn't broadcast quality. Apparently someone somewhere - maybe in the union - had declared all CCD cameras to be below spec. As a now senior member of BBC Promotions I did feel a certain desire to make a strong retort (would he have said the same thing to Stewart Morris or Jim Atkinson - I think not) coming over me, but being a nice chap, and ex-cameraman, I thanked him for his input, got on with the job and used the material.
Later, I wondered if technically they (whoever) had a case, so I had the engineers point a Link camera and the tiny CCD at the official setup chart.
Well, they had part of a case - the Link camera, with its huge lens, was sharper in the middle of the chart where the main graticules were, but then it went softer and softer the further you went from the centre. The CCD was a touch softer in the middle, but stayed the same right to the edge. In addition it lacked the tube lag and various electronic sharpeners built into the Link camera. All in all, subjectively the CCD was better, and went into use in the quiet corner of BBC Continuity without any complaint from anyone.

Twenty or so years on, and indeed before, I've had many many discussions on what is or is not broadcastable, and the most recent was at a get-together in London in 2004. Someone told me that DV and digital transmission are just not broadcast quality. This is slightly flying in the face of the facts, because both are going strong all over the world, but I know what he was saying. And it did light up in me the old question - "what actually is broadcast quality?", as in "how do you define what is technically allowable?" Someone was asking for submissions for the GTC Zerb magazine, so I wrote a piece on broadcast quality. I suggested that maybe the person I had the original discussion with could refute my ideas, and they'd have an interesting article.
Somehow it didn't quite work that way, because the published result rather metamorphosed into the on-going "producers can't camera as well as cameramen" DV stuff - something else entirely. So, as a person who enjoys a good discussion, I thought that maybe some people other than me would like to have their say on the subject. As well as sending in more pics (always appeciated of course), anyone who wants to write a piece to refute, qualifiy, extend, or whatever, please email it, and I'll tag it onto the end of the page I'm creating which starts with my original text - here

June 2004



Some pictures recently found...

BBC 1 Network control rooms come and go much faster than studios.
This is the third generation at Television Centre and soon itself to be replaced. My wife Pauline is in charge just before she left the job of network director 		 
     
     
In the late '80's I used to direct a kids morning sequence called Now on 2. One day they wanted me to fix it for Jim, or rather a little girl who wanted to be a tv presenter (she must be around 25 now). Anyway, the film had a lot more of me than her in it in the end, and this is a still from my VHS. The much younger me is sitting in Pres A at the Grass Valley 300 mixer, then the largest in the world.
I met the engineer who took the studio apart the other week, and he tells me that the Grass Valley went for spares for another in Manchester. Sad - I would have liked a chunk to keep, I spent a good number of years sat in front it. 		 
     
A few years later - about 1993 - here I was as producer of Points of View, hanging around amongst the Autocues - hair going grey!  



The controversial subject of DV

Just before I left the BBC in 2001 some stuff I read wound me up enough to write an article about the changing market in tv as applied to the camera area - ie DV.
I thought then that the various arguments were pretty old hat, given that by that time I'd been pointing one for more than five years. I was somewhat amazed therefore to hear all the old stuff again the other day in August 2004, three more years on. I thought I'd say my piece again, so here's the original article written for the Guild of Television Cameramen Newsletter May 2001.




This is me with the BBC's first DV kit in 1996 having fun in a rescue helicopter over the North Sea. It was a three DV camera shoot - one on the ground operated by the researcher, one on a boat operated by the reporter, and one in the air operated by the producer (me).
The rushes just blew us and everyone else on the team away - I was pretty sure we could deliver something worth having, but they were magic, and I still have them stashed away to prove it. Cost of the days shoot - well, the dv kits cost £4000 each and were used for a long time and I still have one here and workable 8 years on, so lets say £10 each for the day. Cost of three tapes - £30. Cost of hire car, production staff, hotels etc - same as they would have cost anyway, less crew T and D. So operating cost for the day's three camera shoot - £60. That's why the market has changed.


Webcam Test

I don't actually have anything interesting to point the webcam at yet, but there's a family of bluetits in the nesting box, and I thought maybe next year...in the meantime, this is a test.

This is a Java applet which updates automatically every 30 seconds




Peter Woodley told me about this book, presumably long out of print, though who knows with modern print-on-demand. Anyway it was easy to find by the magic of Amazon (£4.50).
It's a huge compilation of stories and a few pictures which add up to an excellent insight into '40s and '50s television in the UK.

(Dennis Norden/Methuen)
     
Here's one story from someone we all knew and loved...
     
And that famous picture from my youth of Paddy Russell, and is it Peter Frieze-Green, on a Rudi Cartier play  

This site gets a lot of admiring comments from new arrivals, which is very pleasing, but I'd love to see a whole pile of one liners like that one from Mother. People tell these short stories over lunch or a drink, but they'll be gone forever if you don't write them down.



Where next...?

Inevitably when old friends get together, you talk about what you have in common, which is of course, the "good old days". Actually, for me there were very good, good, indifferent and really bad - when the only thing you'd done for three months was cable-bash, that was no fun at all. Still, I think it's not just opinion but a truth that those of my age saw the best of television, just as earlier generations saw the best of radio, the music-hall, or Charles Dickens part-works.

Each form of entertainment has its moment, and then just becomes a part of something else. Anyone with 100 or so tv channels realises that when so much is on tap it loses its value - if you can see Fawlty Towers tomorrow, the next day and the next day, you don't actually watch any of them. We all own videos of precious things that we never ever watch, its enough that it's there if we ever wanted to. These days I have a huge amount of tv available, watch very little, and almost no BBC.

So where is it all going? What's next? The answer has to be of course, that you're using a part of what's next right now. I now spend many more hours sitting right here these days than I do in front of a tv. This machine does my work - scriptwriting, editing, sending invoices and much more - and it's a lot of my pleasure. Chatting with friends on email, discovering old school friends on FriendsReunited, listening to music from the other side of the world, playing Unreal Tournament 2004 or whatever with my nine-year-old and people around the world I will never ever meet. I belong to a number of list servers, and can ask a question about Final Cut Pro, or a DV camera or if necessary my Aqualisa shower unit, and back come the answers. If it can be done, someone out there has done it and will tell you about it. I can watch the sun rise over the Sydney Opera House and watch people in the rain in Times Square.

I think all this is only the beginning of the beginning. Though I was the first person I know with internet access (producer Points of Views 1993), I only got broadband a few weeks ago. I didn't think I needed to go that fast, after all I have the time now. But since I started using it, I can do so very much more. And when the NTL people went down our street and put in the pipes, the outer one was about 10cm diameter, and they put a 1cm diameter cable inside - there's an awful lot of space for more bandwidth, and one day we will use it.
March 2004

Some eclectic links
Galavision tv, one a number at http://www.webtvlist.com, and running very cleanly on the machine whilst I type.
Times Square
Unreal Tournament 2004 - the hottest download on the web at this moment - go on, indulge the child in you - you won't regret it.
Google groups - all human knowledge is here somewhere
KFOG - "world class rock for the Bay area", and everywhere else
Strange maths
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/transmission3.htm Change gear - a brilliant diagram
www.nakednews.com The future of television?



Thank you for not complaining, Ian

A small thanks to the man at the bottom of the page. Every page on this site has the same graphic at the bottom. I only had a few pictures to fiddle with at the beginning, so this became part of the original graphics style, and I still like it enough to leave it there. It's a cutout of Ian Ridley on the front of the Nike crane pictured on the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show which also starred Glenda Jackson. Alan Rixon and I were swinging, and Wayne Mottershead was driving - the full picture is on an early page, but I still don't know who took it.