O/T: Q about BBC broadcasts from film in the 70s

[David Huggins]

Thanks Mark Tinkler and timmunton for your replies - great info!

I would love to see a proper release of this film. I found it hilarious, especially the scenes in which David Warner's character accidentally sets off all the automated machinery in his boss's office. Great turn by Elizabeth Spriggs too.

Hopefully all the film elements are still intact and in good condition in Universal's vaults. It would be amazing to see it scanned in HD off a good print or negative, given the very poor quality of the version currently in circulation. Perhaps Network might consider it for their British Film range.

Some of Delia Derbyshire's music for "Work is a four Letter Word" is available on the Standard Music Library's 1969 album of electronic music (ESL104), which has since been reissued on CD by Trunk Records. For that album she reworked elements of her music for "Work Is..." into the following tracks:

B7 Tentative Delia (0.20)
B8 Delia's Idea (0.20)
B9 Delia's Psychadelian Waltz (0.35)
B10 Delia's Resolve (0.04)
B11 Delia's Dream (0.39)
B12 Delia's Reverie (0.21)
B13 Delia's Fulfilment (0.21)

You can hear Delia's Psychadelian Waltz on this official trailer for Kara Blake's 2009 documentary, The Delian Mode.



The versions heard on the film soundtrack sound like different assemblies of the same original material, and freely combine multiple elements heard in the above tracks. In the film Delia's tracks are used alongside a more traditional score by Guy Woolfenden, who had previously worked with Delia on the music for Peter Hall's 1967 RSC production of Macbeth.

To bring it slightly back on topic, various other tracks from the ESL104 album were extensively used in The Tomorrow People, Timeslip, and the Doctor Who story Inferno.

[David Huggins]

Interesting archive clip here - in 1986 the BBC's Did You See? reported on experiments by Sony, IBA, and BBC R&D with 1250-line widescreen HDTV.

Thought it was worth mentioning here as the topic of aspect ratios came up earlier... this item includes a comparison of how a scene from the film "Absolute Beginners" looks in 4:3 pan & scan, versus letterboxed in the original CinemaScope aspect ratio.

[Simon B Kelly]

Feb 15, 2017 20:55:15 GMT David Huggins said:

Interesting archive clip here - in 1986 the BBC's Did You See? reported on experiments by Sony, IBA, and BBC R&D with 1250-line widescreen HDTV

Thank goodness digital technology improved and we didn't end up with any of the analogue HDTV systems that were being proposed. The Japanese NHK proposal was for 1080i, 1125 lines, 30fps, 5:3 (i.e. 15:9) whereas the BBC were originally working on 1501 lines, 8:3 (24:9). As we were all using CRTs back then, the 8:3 size would have been a challenge for manufacturers to produce - in fact, the demonstration in the video with the HD ship was shown using a 4:3 set...

[Richard Marple]

The French 819 line system was technically interesting, but used a lot of bandwidth, so it wasn't surprising it wasn't used for SECAM.

[richardwoods]

Mar 12, 2017 12:26:50 GMT Peter Stirling said:

Feb 15, 2017 18:30:43 GMT Mark Tinkler said:

...but if a Channel's policy was to pan and scan, that's what had to be done - it was down to the telecine operator to decide which side of the action was the one to be seen.

I guarantee that films like THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY were shown in 4x3 in the 1970s before people though about panning & scanning - that must have looked very odd!!

IIRC Pan and scanning was going on in the early 70s at least ..as parodied by Benny Hill

From memory, at the start of the film, the titles would be optically squashed so that they would fit the screen, as the titles ended the picture would open up wide and the pan and scanning would start. In the 1980s the pan and scanning moves was taken over by a pre-programmed computer..

Ready made 4x3 versions of widescreen films were available on 16mm. Which obviously saved technician costs in TV or small theatre costs in supplying anamorphic lenses.

Yeah, that's right, I remember Summer Holiday having a really squashed bus & tall thin people during the opening & closing credits when screened during the late 60's on the BBC.

[John Wall]

I recall an episode of Star Trek where the film broke.

[brianfretwell]

Going back to the change from TX from telecine to TX from tape I believe (from an article in a film magazine I read) that on some ITV stations there was an intermediate time when although TX from telecine was taking place there was a back-up tape playing that could be switched to in case of trouble. I suspect someone thought direct from film gave a better picture.

[David Huggins]

Sad to learn of director Peter Hall's passing today.

BBC Arts have published several archive videos in tribute, including a longer clip from the behind-the-scenes footage of Work is a Four Letter Word posted earlier in the thread.

It's from a documentary series called The Impresarios, originally broadcast 9th October 1967 on BBC2 (BBC Genome). There was also another report on the making of the film, broadcast 1st June 1968 as part of the arts programme Release - details on BBC Genome)

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p028f0x6