little red monkey [1953].

[Stephen Doran]

is this serial still in the archives?

[andrew martin]

It was probably never recorded, very little drama from that era was.

[williamM]

53, highly unlikely

[Mark Brown]

www.funfreepages.com/flash/little_red_monkey.php

[Nosmo King]

andrew said:

It was probably never recorded, very little drama from that era was.

Indeed .. several years away from any video tape recording facilities .. and very little was telerecorded onto film for reasons of both cost and resultant quality (not that great).

[williamM]

wasn't the problem to do with matching the speed of the tv image hence only 1/2 frame recordings

[Steve Roberts]

williamM said:

wasn't the problem to do with matching the speed of the tv image hence only 1/2 frame recordings

Nope, it was to address the fact that it was impossible to move 35mm film forward a frame and then stop it again in the very short interval between the end of one video frame and the beginning of the next. If you only recorded one video field you had a whole 20mS to move the film on, which was very easy to do.

In time they developed techniques to get round this on 35mm, notably the stored-field and partially stored-field recorders, which used the afterglow of the CRT phosphor to 'store' the first field as a glowing image on the CRT, during which time the film was being moved. The second field was then written to the CRT at a lower level, so that the camera saw the 'live' field and the 'stored' field at the same brightness level, hence an entire frame could be exposed onto the film.

Later in the sixties, fast pulldown mechanisms were developed for 16mm film that allowed the frame to be pulled down in the video blanking period.

Steve

[GH]

Hi all!
I havent come across this show before, a bit before my time. Would anyone care to fill me in on what this was about?

[John G]

This era was also arguably the start of HD TV.

In the late 1940s Arthur Rank was loosing money and wanted a cheap way of production. So a multicamera mixed to one source would save time and production. IE a TV studio might be the answer?.

So by the start of the 1950s a TV camera from Pye, providing a progressive scan (rather than interlace), a brilliant engineer called Collins and a lighting man called Vinten (yes the same one) had provided the answer at
Highbury Studios. Resolution was claimed at 1200 lines
which means it was suitable for cinema projection.

Why it failed to take off is another story, but the studios were bought by Rediffusion who reverted to their own methods.

HOWEVER , the very first "Double Your Moneys" were recorded in this fashion and if you can find a clean print they look quite stunning, for the camera technology that was available at the time.

[Andrew Doherty]

Interesting about the Highbury Film Studios.
The person called 'Collins' was Norman Collins who had been head of engineering at the BBC. He, along with Harry Towers, had set up this research and development facility at the Studios in 1949/50. The organization was called 'High Definition Films'. Another person involved was a certain Dr. Spooner, and that is as much as I know of who was involved.

The aim, apparently, was to produce film recordings that did not suffer the less than adequate quality of the 405-line telerecorded programmes of the time.

It may seem as though I have moved away from the topic of this thread, but I haven't. Quite simply, the Highbury Islington Centre was at the cutting edge of television film recording technology and the BBC, as well as future investors in commercial television, could not afford to have recordings that were of such miserable quality, even when the best 35mm film stock was used.

It was all about the potential of possible television programme sales to overseas broadcasters, which both the BBC and the future commercial television companies would need to be involved in, if they wanted to recover production costs (and make a profit).

In the mid to late nineteen fifties, half an hour's worth of programming onto 35mm telerecording would have set you back some £230. Now, you can work out in today's money what you, as a very wealthy individual, would have had to pay, i.e. if a television organization permitted you to pay for a private recording of your favourite serialized drama, say 'A Portrait Of Alison' (1956), to be made.

This anwers, in part, the question of the thread and, indeed, the web site, as to why there was great reluctance to record programmes in the very early days of British Television.

Andy Henderson found (from an American internet auction) and donated a 'H.D.' telerecording of a drama 'I Passed By Your Window', which was made sometime in the summer of 1955, just before the research facility closed down. A clip was shown at the 2002 'Missing, Believed Wiped' event. The quality of the film recording was, certainly better, than film recordings of this period.

In 1955 Ampex had developed the first fully functioning video tape recording machine and that meant the beginning of the end of telerecording machines. Although, it was another twenty years or more before telerecording machines were consigned to history, and, along the way, there were some quite substantial improvents such as the stored field system described by Steve Roberts in a previous posting. This method of telerecording was introduced at the BBC around the early part of 1957.

The Highbury Studios were bought by ATV (I believe Associated Rediffusion had expressed an interest) for their London production base, and the drama 'I Passed By Your Window' came with the package. It was broadcast in the November of 1955 and is thought to be the earliest surviving ITV drama in existence.

Yours,

[Andy Henderson]

As a bit of extra info on Andy's excellent information, I also have a copy of the HDF Demo film, which (of course) is in high definition. It gives a tour of the studios, also showing the film recording process. I don't think the BFI have a copy of this, so perhaps I should do something about this. The films are quite hard to identify as they do not look like typical 16mm film recordings. 'I Passed' may well be an optical reduction from 35mm. I also have an RCA demo film for 50s video tape recording, which is in wonderful, gleaming dye transfer Technicolor. Again, there may be only a few prints of this left, if that.

[lfbarfe]

andy said:

Interesting about the Highbury Film Studios.
The person called 'Collins' was Norman Collins who had been head of engineering at the BBC.

Just one correction: Norman Collins wasn't an engineer. He was a BBC administrator - he had been controller of the Light Programme, then controller of the Television Service in the immediate post-war era. He left the Corporation in 1950 or thereabouts and began lobbying for commercial television. HDF was a venture in which he had a business, rather than technical interest. He was also a fairly well-regarded novelist, his best-known book being 'London Belongs to Me'. He was the founder of the Associated Broadcasting Development Company, which was forced by the ITA to merge with the Grade Organisation's television interests, forming ATV (well, it was ABC for about 10 minutes in September 1955, until Associated British Cinemas said 'Oi!').

[Andrew Doherty]

Yes, like so many individuals at the time (and now), you could be the head of a department, but not necessarily be qualified in the departmental discipline.

Certainly, this is the case today, when an accountant can be the head of department or something more senior of , say, glassware manufacture, within an organization. A head of department is an administrator.

I have worked in engineering companies where this was and, probably, still is the case!

Yours,

[lfbarfe]

Andy, my point was that he was never head of engineering at the BBC or anywhere else. I suspect that what he knew about engineering could have been written on the back of a postage stamp in magic marker. He was a programme-maker (he began as a producer in the American section of the GOS), then a radio network controller, then the head of television. Should have made that clearer.

[Andrew Doherty]

I have checked up on my sources of information and, as stated, he was 'Head of BBC Television' (in other articles the title is given as 'Controller of BBC Television'). So, consider the job title to be amended in my first thread, with thanks.

But, I am reasonably sure I read in some article that he was in administrative charge of BBC Engineering. This article could have been wrong. I am not so sure, though.

However, he certainly was concerned with the development of television recording.

I give two short write-ups, one of which seems to imply a senior managerial responsibility for BBC engineering.

"Norman Collins, the BBC's Controller of Television, wrote in a BBC memo in September 1948, 'The economic possibility of running an extended television service depends on recorded television programmes or the access to other sources of film material. Possibly on both.' Following a visit to the United States in December 1948, he added: ' I regard the development of television recording as the first of the BBC Television engineering priorities, with development of microwave a close second."

"Norman Collins and some financial backers established a company called High Definition Films Limited in 1951, the stated aim of which was to improve the telerecording process (by which television programmes were recorded onto film for repeat broadcasts, sales or posterity), but which in reality functioned as an official group to lobby for competition in television broadcasting."

So, whether or not he knew anything about television engineering, there is no doubt that he was responsible for pushing the cause of better television recording for commercial purposes.

Yours,