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Post by williammcgregor on Jul 2, 2018 10:53:19 GMT
Hi,
I've started this thread to try and go d out when certain aspects of TV today originated?....that is if anybody has an idea?
Part 1.
Does anybody know when the really annoying habit of almost every documentary or almost every programme across all stations seems to always have to have music in the background.
It's as if the TV producers seem to think that viewers cannot enjoy a programme without the constant need for the background music.
I find it really annoying...anybody else agree?....or know when this started?
If you watch documentaries or programmes from the 60's no background music...unless absolutely essential to the programme maybe?
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Post by Stephen Byers on Jul 2, 2018 18:10:58 GMT
This riles me too - especially if the music drowns out the commentary. Then I have to switch the subtitles on.
But even more so the recent David Attenborough docos. have fluctuating sound levels - so at some times he's too loud and at others he's too soft. These varying sound levels are very unprofessional.
But then the whole Beeb org. has gone downhill in its programmng and technical competence since the late 20th c.
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Post by Ronnie McDevitt on Jul 2, 2018 18:17:45 GMT
I watched an item on Reporting Scotland this lunchtime looking back at the 30th anniversary of the Piper Alpha disaster. They interviewed the son of one of the deceased reflecting on his father -accompanied by a sad piano tune. This is supposed to be a news programme not a drama and personally I find this distasteful. I believe this practice began a few years back when Crimewatch began to include violin music when they considered it to be relevant. My own pet hate in modern documentaries is the way they start the programme with a sequence of quotes from the contributors - a bit like the news headlines - which we get in full later on. It often leaves me with the feeling I have already seen half of the production. This is what trailers are meant to be for. I recently contributed to a documentary and almost commented on this to the producer at one point whilst the programme was still in its infancy. He later spoke of his frustration that he had a 70 minute edit which he was loathe to lose any of to fit the 60 minute slot. When the programme was aired it was over four minutes (admittedly including the titles) before the programme actually started - not saying what it was though or the name of the producer! And don't get me started on the ammount of trailers on the Beeb! Rant over - lol!
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Post by Patrick Coles on Jul 2, 2018 19:43:13 GMT
A key factor is much if not all of today's TV is aimed purely at a 'Modern audience' whatever that is supposed to mean !
thus you get pop musak playing over alot of things - especially in football programmes, and sports in general plus often as stated above music supposedly to create atmosphere added on presumably as the show producers assume we need to be led by the nose and made to think and feel as they want us to...
I suspect 'modern' TV execs assume nobody has an attention span of more than a few seconds these days hence the infernal use of music all the time
more and more Television seems obsessed with an imaginary 'modern' audience, and must be alienating alot of older viewers capable of drawing their own conclusions who probably make up most of the viewing audience
I notice channels such as 'Talking pictures' when screening sixties TV shows are forever virtually apologising beforehand re the outdated views on racism or attitudes etc....when the show following is mostly concerned with showing how WRONG any such bigotry was...!
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Post by timmunton on Jul 2, 2018 21:19:51 GMT
I remember when Doctor Who returned in 2005 how it was often quite hard to make out dialogue because of loud 'background' music ( & to a lesser extent sometimes indistinct verbal performance - but nothing to do with it not being 'rp') - whereas the original is almost always crystal clear.
I think I read somewhere this was partly to do with compression for the transmission versions & that the DVD versions are clearer ( not that I mind too much now as I fairly soon concluded that new Who imo is generally a travesty of the original in terms of both its aesthetics & its essence, & now rarely watch it ).
There were similar problems with the audio on 'Life On Mars' - & again; apparently on the home video releases it sounds a lot better.
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Post by tombeveridge on Jul 3, 2018 0:40:09 GMT
Don't get me started! My pet peeve is to do with documentaries. They plod along relentlessly, repeating the same points over and over, almost as though the producers are assuming that viewers have had total lobotomies. "Mr. X met Ms. Y in New York and they did something (fairly trivial)." we are told. Five, slow, painful minutes later, this important fact is repeated and, worse, word for word! Give me strength! Can we not assume that viewers can retain information for more than a nano-second? And, again, the same globule of insight, related in exactly the same tone of hushed awe, and in exactly the same form, will reappear just a few minutes later! At least, please rewrite the sentence: "New York was where Mr. X and Ms. Y met and it was there they did something trivial." The overall impression is, with many contemporary factual programs (not all!) that, either there just are not enough facts to fill up the required number of minutes or that the average viewer is assumed to be too dim to connect the dots without having the dots themselves made so enormous as to be unmissable. ...Calming down! Depressurizing! Deep breathing essential! ...Better now. BTW: Did you know that Mr. X and Ms.Y met in New York and did something fairly trivial? If you didn't, stay tuned, for the BBC is sure to tell you about it very,very soon.
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Post by PAUL WOOD on Jul 3, 2018 13:37:02 GMT
OMG - where to start?
On screen logos of various sizes littering up the screen (totally unnecessary)...
Forthcoming shows being trailered via on screen graphics during programmes (really distracting)...
End credits of programmes being rapidly & mercilessly squeezed when an episode has barely concluded (disrespectful to production teams)...
'Next' captions appearing before programmes have even finished (we've all got EPGs, we don't need this)...
Too many ad breaks (are you listening, ITV?)...
New TV shows being shot in wider picture ratios than 16:9 (no domestic TV currently on the market supports this; a personal gripe, I admit)…
But all of the above dwarfed by my main bugbear...
Hand-held camera work (the Hippy-Hippy Shake!)…
Apart from all the above, no gripes with modern telly particularly!
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Post by Dale Rumbold on Jul 3, 2018 16:31:25 GMT
But even more so the recent David Attenborough docos. have fluctuating sound levels - so at some times he's too loud and at others he's too soft. These varying sound levels are very unprofessional. Just make sure that it's not your TV making that happen : we were always noticing that sometimes the narration on documentaries (and other programmes) got very quiet, and at other times seemed overly loud, and I tracked it down to a setting on my TV (an LG) called 'Clear Speech' which I had switched on, by default. Whatever this processing is, which is supposed to make spoken bits louder than other sounds, just couldn't cope with variable background sound levels, ironically from annoying music etc. I also found it made a right mess of things like the opening credits to Match of the Day, with the sound level going up and down throughout. I switched 'Clear Speech' off, and all was well, though I did have to crank the overall volume up a notch.
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Post by richardwoods on Jul 3, 2018 17:31:28 GMT
A key factor is much if not all of today's TV is aimed purely at a 'Modern audience' whatever that is supposed to mean ! thus you get pop musak playing over alot of things - especially in football programmes, and sports in general plus often as stated above music supposedly to create atmosphere added on presumably as the show producers assume we need to be led by the nose and made to think and feel as they want us to... I suspect 'modern' TV execs assume nobody has an attention span of more than a few seconds these days hence the infernal use of music all the time more and more Television seems obsessed with an imaginary 'modern' audience, and must be alienating alot of older viewers capable of drawing their own conclusions who probably make up most of the viewing audience I notice channels such as 'Talking pictures' when screening sixties TV shows are forever virtually apologising beforehand re the outdated views on racism or attitudes etc....when the show following is mostly concerned with showing how WRONG any such bigotry was...! Blame Ofcom for pulling them up on the content of Family at War and not broadcasting warnings first. 🙄
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Post by richardwoods on Jul 3, 2018 17:35:45 GMT
All of the above points and probably more than anything the general dumbing down of presentation and content.
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Post by Stephen Byers on Jul 4, 2018 7:55:02 GMT
But even more so the recent David Attenborough docos. have fluctuating sound levels - so at some times he's too loud and at others he's too soft. These varying sound levels are very unprofessional. Just make sure that it's not your TV making that happen : we were always noticing that sometimes the narration on documentaries (and other programmes) got very quiet, and at other times seemed overly loud, and I tracked it down to a setting on my TV (an LG) called 'Clear Speech' which I had switched on, by default. snip No - I don't have that option.
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Post by williammcgregor on Jul 4, 2018 14:54:16 GMT
My next gripe is the way the BBC... (who used to have the wonderful Earth logo on screen before a new programme started) now resort to having groups of people standing in an allotment or cycling. pot holing, etc etc before the next programme.
Is it just to show diversity? or minorities?
How much of our money are they spending on this?
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Post by paul carney on Jul 4, 2018 20:24:50 GMT
I've mentioned before that I get really irritated when they add fuzz to archive pictures as if to demonstrate that we all viewed tele through a visual haze in the 60s. When in fact with a good set and the right aerial you could achieve a crystal clear picture.
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Post by Richard Marple on Jul 4, 2018 20:45:39 GMT
My next gripe is the way the BBC... (who used to have the wonderful Earth logo on screen before a new programme started) now resort to having groups of people standing in an allotment or cycling. pot holing, etc etc before the next programme. Is it just to show diversity? or minorities? How much of our money are they spending on this? Some of these have been used for many years so I assume they have paid for themselves by now.
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Post by petercheck on Jul 4, 2018 20:55:54 GMT
My biggest gripe is the way they, particularly the BBC, judge old footage by today's standards. Not just the censoring and re-editing, though that is bad enough, but having people sneering at how "wrong" everything once was. I was watching an episode of 'The Dick Emery Show' recently, and it struck me that these days it wouldn't even get through the opening credits without a twitter storm of so-called racism, homophobia, sexism, etc.
Rant over! : )
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