Is nothing to do with Christmas at all, but thanks to people on Twitter to alerting us to its existence.
Basically it’s a gallery recording of Talking Telephone Numbers. But not just any episode of Talking Telephone Numbers, the famous episode where a show purported to be live suddenly started fast forwarding through Richard Digance’s act.
These days it’s fairly common knowledge that in live shows, especially one with lots of elements, some of it may be recorded ‘as live’ earlier in the day and dropped in at the relevant point – some of the Strictly group dances and X Factor musical guests for example. Sometimes this is because the guests have to run to a different schedule, sometimes it’s to give the stage hands more time to set a later segment up. Viewers don’t tend to mind if they can’t see the joins.
But when this happened on TTN it blew our tiny minds. Does this mean the whole show is recorded then? Is the whole thing a fix? It isn’t and it wasn’t but it’s not the greatest shop window for a show that asked people to phone in to them (although unlike the more recent and for legal reasons completely different Magic Numbers, I don’t think 0345 was premium rate even then).
This clip shows us what was going out on television, but more crucially we can hear all the panic that’s going on in the gallery. What’s quite fun is the production willing the callers to lose because they have six minutes to fill with the endgame when evidently they’d usually only have about three. Schofield and Forbes look unflappable. Also it sounds like live direction of a musical act (The Human League in this case) takes a huge amount of concentration, “I can’t talk to presentation!”
There’s one interesting comment from the gallery, early on: “we’ll take three calls”. And sure enough, they take three calls. I’ll bet they asked people what their answers were in advance, randomly picked two wrong ones, and then randomly picked one right one. Which would be sort-of-OK-for-1995-I-guess, unless caller 1 corrected his answer in the meantime…
Highly fascinating. I spent a (very) tiny amount of time in a control room before “in s-t-e-r-e-o (where available)” was a thing, but I don’t get all the counting during the Human League’s performance.
Were each of the 99 camera shots precisely mapped out and timed to each beat of the music in advance? That seems the most likely explanation, but when the cuts come rapid-fire, there’s no time for the technical director (?) to call the change before it’s already done. And it’s just calling cuts sequentially, not giving directions to take camera 1, camera 2, etc.
I gather this is (or was) standard practice, but can someone provide a more accurate description of what’s happening during that part of the chat?
You’ve pretty much worked it out already. I believe it’s the voice of the PA you’re hearing ‘counting bars’ as it’s called, and she’s also dropping in the sequential shot numbers as the Vision Mixer (called a Technical Director in the US) is cutting to them. As you can hear from the counting, with some of the cuts there’s just no way you could count that fast, so she just picks up at the next reasonable point with the shot number. The PA counting is more to keep everybody up to speed, rather than to actually ‘run the show’, if you like. The vision mixer is doing pretty much all the hard work here, and I’m afraid I can’t offer any insight into how they keep their notes, etc. organised so they know how to cut the very fast sections.
All of that will have been rehearsed in advance, so each camera operator will have a sheet with all of their notes, the shot number and what the shot is so they’re ready when it comes to them. There’s no ‘direction’ to make as in theory it’s all been worked out in advance. Without the PA counting anyone could lose track of where in the song they’re up to, so end up not offering a camera shot at the right time or in more complicated performances miss things that need to be moved on stage, etc.
One alternative I’ve seen is a system called Cuepilot, which basically automates everything
skip to about 0:40 to see their demo of it in action). They’ve used it on Eurovision the past couple of years for the performances although I would still love to know what the backup plan is if it completely fell over in the middle of the live show.
Thanks! I figured those pesky humans were going to be removed from the equation eventually.
I cannot now hear Tell Me When without someone in my head counting very intensely all over it. Two – two – three – four – fifteensixteen – two – two – three – four…
White totally off topic. On my facebook today i saw a link to a Fort Boyard Experience in Oslo.
https://www.facebook.com/fangenepafortetoslo/
Oh that’s cool, thanks for sharing. Compare to Boda Borg, mostly in Sweden but with stray outposts in Ireland and Boston, MA. If The Crystal Maze is sufficiently well-known an intellectual property that an escape-room-like experience can be derived from it in the UK, why can’t there be similar Fort Boyard-derived escape-room-like experiences where that IP is well-known… like western France?
I think it looks very cool, but it clearly has none of the branding or visual elements of the show so I’m wondering what official links it has, if any.
I’m amazed and amused that this tape, specifically with the gallery commentary, was ever kept and that Paul Allan (whose name doesn’t appear in the credits) made it available to the public. Are gallery commentaries the sort of thing that are habitually saved for the ITC (or Ofcom these days) and spectacular ones like this subsequently used on a TV production course as an example for how to get out of a hole?
I saw a game show recorded from a control room in the US once (in 1996, due to well-connected friends in the industry; can’t remember what, something short-lived and not terribly exciting) and the staff, while totally professional when doing their job, were hooting and hollering along with the contestants and willing them to win. I also saw an episode of Whittle recorded from the control room in the UK (more than 100 audience members on that particular taping, so not everyone got to play every game…) and it was strictly, strictly business.
Hmm. I can’t think of a reason why Ofcom/ITC would want to hear the gallery chatter for any post-broacast compliance issues.
If VT didn’t decide to respool twice in two minutes, and the TX went out minus technical disasters, then the linked clip really would only have been of interest to tv gallery geeks (like myself – I often ‘shadow’ direct during programmes where my attention has wander off out of the room) or any budding tv directors wanting to learn the ropes away from the monitor stack and mixer desk.
It also proves the ‘line number’ display, wasn’t a random number generator running the same program that ‘Cecil’ is on Countdown.
That was the spectacular “Wait ‘Til You Have Kids!!”, and how dare you for not remembering The Show That Changed Everything. 😉
Amazing clip.
I want to believe that’s Schofield himself in your right ear at 14:13 coolly retorting “he can wait at least five f***ing minutes”.
It really is quite amazing how presenters such as Phil seem to make live TV presenting look so easy when you have all that waffle and in this case panic coming down your ear!
I understand there are two types of talkback, some presenters only get the stuff that’s relevant to them, I read somewhere that Phil asks for open talkback so if there’s something going wrong behind the scenes he’s got an earlier heads up on it. Which I find amazing.
There’s a very funny clip that used to be on Youtube but I can’t find right now where Phil and Holly are discussing I’m a Celeb on This Morning and someone’s evidently said something like “they are good value” in their ear only for both of them to agree “they are good value, that’s true” and then a second later realise what’s just happened.
I’d think they also kept this for a CYA situation- you know someone probably got sacked over this (or at least got a severe dressing down)…
On an unrelated note- I was perusing that massive DoND data sheet that was posted earlier, and I figured out that all the players (excluding any bonus prizes and the like) only won about 60% of the total amount that they actually had available in their boxes (the box totals ended up just under £75 million, and the players ended up winning about £45 million)- I don’t know if overall that meant that players were more cautious, they just got unlucky with their picks thus lower offers, or what (you could probably write a thesis paper based on these stats)…
I can’t vouch for the veracity of the claim, but I gather we had the most successful Banker of all the versions.
Although wasn’t it all supposedly the bankers money?
How does £45m compare with what Millionaie gave away (though over fewer shows). I doubt any daytime show gets even close to giving away £100k a week now, or primetime for that matter.
P.S. Where is this spreadsheet?
It’s Mister Al’s and it’s in the DOND on Tour thread:
https://www.bothersbar.co.uk/?p=9619&cpage=1#comment-452656
Thanks
While I was a student, I was occasionally offered the chance to do little (£10s of pounds) gambling experiments for the economics students to write their theses about. I reckon there’s more data on risk aversion in that spereadsheet than said economists could ever dream of. I endorse Brig’s description of Deal as the most wilfully misunderstood show ever.
Now, I’m not an economics student, but I shall endeavour to poke the data and see what I can come up with.
On an unrelated note I caught 10 minutes of the Xmas Robot wars, and it seems to be quite different (at least visually) from the summer episodes, which might bode well for the 2017 series.
Yes, some great new shots which show off the scale much better, and I quite like the new graphics.
Pity the bouts were so rubbish – most of them were over in twenty seconds, the ones that lasted not especially interesting.
The problem I had with Robot Wars Xmas (Only watched the first one mind) is because the battles were quite short and there was no pre qualifier there was so, so much filler content from ‘last series’ that I started getting a bit bored and skipping through a lot
Still, I suppose they weren’t going to spend a lot of time and money knocking together some throwaway robots for the celebs to have a go