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The Sunday Post: The US Goes to the Polls

2016-11-13T10:00:00+00:00

The prize - the keys to this charming bijou residence...

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s US Presidential Election, Genome looks back at the ��’s coverage of earlier U.S. polls. While only Americans can vote in them, uniquely among elections the eyes of the world watch the results. The United States has a position in the world that makes their affairs everyone’s business, and though it often seems they take little notice of what anyone else thinks they must be at least a little flattered by the attention…

While other foreign elections are featured from time to time, no other but our own domestic polls is given anything like the level of coverage routinely afforded to those of the United States. The ��’s coverage has increased over time, in line with our acknowledgement of the US’s influence in the world, but also reflecting the amount of coverage of current affairs generally, and due to the technological advances that enhance the coverage it is possible to give.

While the 1924 election seems to have occasioned no special programmes, beyond the announcement of the result in the �� news bulletins, from 1928 onwards there were talks about the election process as well as its results. In 1928, when Herbert Hoover won over Al Smith, there was a preview of the poll by S.K. Ratcliffe, who had previously reported on the Primaries in the summer.

In 1932 Ratcliffe again gave a series of talks on US affairs, under the title Our Neighbours Today and Yesterday, in the run-up to the poll, but there was still no direct reporting of the election. This election was a landslide for the challenger Franklin D. Roosevelt, promising recovery from the Great Depression through his New Deal.

The election in 1936 was covered by Raymond Swing (also known as Raymond Gram Swing), a prominent American journalist who had been broadcasting on the �� since 1926. He contributed several talks direct from New York, as transatlantic broadcasting was now much easier technically. Other material about the election included Commander Stephen King-Hall’s talk in the For the Schools series History in the Making.

S.K. Ratcliffe, who surveyed the elections of 1928 and 1932 (though it's not clear what he's surveying in this photograph)

In the summer of 1940, while Britain was anticipating invasion and the Battle of Britain was underway, Gram Swing described the selection process of the Republican and Democratic conventions. The United States did not cancel its elections during the Second World War, unlike Britain, which did not go to the polls between 1935 and 1945. However, neither on the day of the 1940 presidential election, November 5, nor the day after, were there any special programmes about it on the ��, although there was coverage the following January 20 of President Roosevelt’s third inauguration.

By 1944, the �� took an American programme for the series Transatlantic Call People to People made by CBS, to cover election day. The British public were used to hearing US programmes by this time, through the great number of recorded programmes both on the main �� channels and the American Forces Network.

In 1948 the Third Programme, which had started two years before, broadcast The Presidential Election in the U.S.A., in which the ��’s Washington correspondent Leonard Miall, later a senior figure in the television Talks Department, looked at the forthcoming election.

There having been no real opportunity for it to do so pre-war, television took an interest in the US political process afterwards, with the 1948 election considered in the long-running series News Map, just one day before polling. Stephen Laird and famed wartime broadcaster Ed Murrow were among those contributing. While domestic politics on television was a controversial subject at the time, there were fewer qualms about foreign elections. The 1952 election was covered in much the same way, although by then �� Television had made its first tentative steps in covering UK General Elections, in 1950 and 1951. The practical aspects of reporting directly on American elections were far more challenging then of course.

The great Alistair Cooke visits home turf between editions of Letter from America. His broadcasting career began when he succeeded Oliver Baldwin, son of the then prime minister Stanley Baldwin, as the �� film critic in the 1930s

Alistair Cooke expressed the special relationship between the United States and Britain in the most consistent way; as an expatriate Englishman who took American citizenship in 1941, he presented his programme Letter from America from 1946 (it was called American Letter until 1949) until shortly before his death in 2004, taking in fourteen electoral campaigns from Truman’s victory in 1948 to George W. Bush’s at the millennium. Cooke’s elegant prose, his ability to get to the heart of an issue affecting the United States, and in his soothing tones, make it interesting and meaningful for his British audience, turned him into a broadcasting legend.

1956 was a difficult year for Britain, as the Suez crisis showed that the country’s influence in the world was on the wane, a fact that people had been trying to deal with since the Second World War. There was a little more coverage of the presidential election that year than previously, but with so much else going on at the time (the Hungarian uprising for one) and the relations between Britain and the US being somewhat frosty, it was not the time for overdoing things. One newcomer was Panorama, which had begun in 1953 as a general magazine programme, but was gradually including more and more political content, with its host Richard Dimblebya reassuring presence.

Prior to the invention of satellite communications, US elections would tend to be reported a little late by television, though radio could already provide direct coverage. Already by 1960 though there was beginning to be a new and more confident note to the coverage of politics, with programmes like Panorama and Tonight in full swing. Gradually the amount of programmes about US elections increased. 1960 saw the showing of the famous televised debates between the candidates, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, and there was much greater coverage of the campaign and the results. The inauguration of Kennedy the following January was also able to be shown fully for the first time on television.

The shadow of the assassination of President Kennedy, only a year before, hung over proceedings in 1964. The age of the satellite had dawned, with Telstar’s launch in 1962, and at last the other side of the Atlantic could be seen live. There was also greater ease in sending filmed reports via cheaper international air travel.

In 1968 too, with not only satellite images but with ��2 now offering news in colour, the impact of US elections was further enhanced. Coverage of the conventions to choose the candidates, in the programmes Breakfast Special and Morning Special, were an early appearance for breakfast television. The programmes sound modern, with live links to the conventions in Miami and Chicago, as well as Ian Trethowan, one of the ��’s top political pundits and a future Director-General, linking in New York for the Republican convention. Lyndon Johnson having declined to seek re-election in 1968, the Republican Richard Nixon, who had lost in 1960 to Kennedy, was to win the presidency that November, defeating Johnson's vice-president Hubert Humphrey.

Mindful of the vagaries of political life, Vice-President Richard Nixon contemplates a new career while visiting �� studios to appear in the series Press Conference in 1958

Coverage of US affairs was from now on a major strand in news programmes, with exchanges of film helping to add to whatever the �� could shoot for itself. By the 1972 election when Nixon was returned for a second term, the ease of receiving reports quickly and often from the US was no longer surprising. This meant that the disgrace of Nixon over the Watergate affair was able to be disseminated worldwide as it happened, and the �� was able to cover it in detail.

Flagship current affairs programmes like Panorama, 24 Hours and Midweek all covered American affairs in the early 1970s, and from the mid-70s to the end of the 1990s US election coverage was fairly comprehensive, given the limitations of airtime on the few channels the �� had (i.e two on television and four or five on radio). It started to become commonplace for correspondents to file frequent pieces from the States, and then two-ways with the news presenter became the new fashion.

The contest in 1976 between Gerald Ford, Nixon’s vice-president who succeeded him when he resigned over Watergate, and the eventual winner Jimmy Carter, saw greater coverage than ever – with interest in the United States being particularly highlighted by the bi-centennial of the Declaration of Independence.

The ups and downs of US political life through the late 70s and into the 80s were rarely absent from news bulletins, whatever the concerns at home might have been. The premiership of Margaret Thatcher in the UK was quickly followed by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and a new era of the Special Relationship between those two like minds.

Special Relationship: a Republican president with a showbusiness past and a female British Conservative prime minister - what are the chances of that happening again?

All things transatlantic were heavily featured in the news, with issues such as the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, Olympic boycotts arising from that, the nuclear arms race and the coming of President Gorbachev and Glasnost in the USSR heralding the start of a new era. The 1990s saw the consequent break-up of the Soviet Union, and the election of Bill Clinton following twelve years of Republican rule in the USA.

With the start of 24 hour news on the �� in 1997, the coverage of US affairs naturally increased even more, and the amount of time given over to them subsequently shows no sign of diminishing – indeed it seemed to be regarded with more importance than coverage of the European Union, despite the UK’s membership of the latter. Coverage of United States presidential elections is now expected as part of the political calendar, and the States’ unique position in the world can no longer be seen as incidental to domestic issues, as it might have been in the 1920s.

The presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, each covering two terms, have dominated the 21st century, with a new world order replacing the Cold War. In terms of covering the United States election process, we are now perhaps at saturation point, with complaints from some viewers and listeners that there may be too much of a good thing. The rise of on-line reporting has added another facet for the news junkie, and it is now hard to escape from the US election process when it comes round every four years (though of course the election campaigns are notoriously long…)

Britain, as the former colonial power, has always had a fascination with the United States. The range of programming that concerns the United States and all things American is a huge part of the ��’s output, given that it has such a large influence of our political life, our economy and our culture. The past election (the 24th since the �� was founded) has been fascinating. As the dust settles, we will have to see what the consequences will be. But be assured that the British obsession with the USA will continue to be reflected in broadcasting.

The Sunday Post: Enter Videotape

2016-06-26T09:00:00+00:00

The ��'s own home-grown video recorder, VERA. Good luck installing that in your living room...

Some time ago we discussed early methods of recording television programmes, and how they were all based around filming the image on the television screen. Now we're going to have a look at how this was replaced by an electronic method – videotape recording.

Film telerecording was expensive because it involved a medium which could only be used once. It also took time to process so it was not possible to instantly play back the recording that had been made. Early telerecording gave a much cruder result than the original television picture, and while methods increased in sophistication over the years, some of the drawbacks persisted.

The obvious answer to these problems was to devise a method of directly recording the electronic signals of the television picture, and by the 1950s scientists were hard at work on producing such a system.

The American company Ampex, named after its founder Alexander M. Poniatoff, was started in 1944 and became involved in developing captured German audio tape technology. Sound tape recording had been invented before the war and one version, the Blattnerphone, was used by the ��. This used steel tape which ran at very high speeds, and had to be operated in a sealed room due to the danger of the tape breaking, which could have had lethal results.

The Germans had developed a cheaper and safer system that used plastic tape, and it was this that Ampex made into a mass market product. The system came to the notice of Bing Crosby, who was attracted by the ability to record his radio shows, which had previously had to be performed twice, for East and West Coast audiences, due to the time zone difference. The networks had refused to meet the high cost of making disc recordings of the shows, but audio tape provided a more economical solution.

It was soon clear that a video version of this technology would also be highly useful for similar reasons. Avoiding the effort and expense of performing shows twice, it would likewise save the costs of telerecording (or in American parlance ‘kinescoping’) programmes, which resulted in a low quality picture anyway. Video tape (the term being originally an Ampex trade mark) gave a similar picture quality to live television, and had the advantage of being reusable – the recording could be wiped off and the tape used for another show at a later date.

A �� videotape suite in 1968 operated by a man in a �� videotape suit (very comfortable but you have to keep it away from magnets)

This ability would of course one day come to be a controversial feature, rather than an advantage. Videotape was relatively expensive but the cost was intended to be amortised over a number of uses, rather than being seen as an archival medium – if a recording was intended to be kept for historical reasons, it could be telerecorded onto film.

Ampex’s videotape system was demonstrated to the US television trade in 1956 and was soon employed in programme making. At first live transmissions were recorded as they were broadcast, but it was soon realised that programmes could be recorded at any time, for the artists’ (or anyone else’s) convenience, and several shows could even be made in one day, saving studio time.

Since 1952, meanwhile, the �� had been working on its own videotape system, called VERA (Vision Electronic Recording Apparatus) which was demonstrated publicly on Panorama on 14 April 1958. The system seemed to provide all that was required of it: it instantly replayed vision and sound, and the tape could be wiped and reused time and again.

After showing a clip from ‘The Star’ Ballroom Championships recorded earlier that evening, presenter Richard Dimbleby interviewed Peter Axon, head of the team who had developed VERA, and the machine was shown in action. However VERA used very large reels of narrow tape (Ampex tape was 2” wide with much smaller diameter reels). The tape travelled over the fixed recording heads at a great speed and could only record for fifteen minutes – it also had problems of picture stability. The proven effectiveness of the Ampex machine meant that VERA’s days were numbered and it never went into regular service.

By the end of 1958 the Corporation had taken delivery of its first Ampex machines and put them into service. The first broadcast use made of videotape by the �� was a trailer for the opera A Tale of Two Cities, but it was not long before it was being used for complete programmes.

It did take some time for the �� to see the full advantages of videotape however. The �� was not faced with the same kind of time zone issues as America, and there was a prevailing mindset that live television was somehow purer than recording programmes in advance. The fact that mistakes occurred in live programmes was seen as authentic and programme makers talked of not ‘cheating’ the viewer with what were then referred to as ‘bottled’ programmes.

Nevertheless, it was not simple to correct errors with early videotape, other than by restarting the recording of the programme, so it would be some time before productions would appear to be flawless – but some of the worst disasters could be avoided.

On the bus to East Cheam: Sidney Balmoral James and Anthony Aloysius St. John Hancock in a videotaped Hancock's Half Hour in 1960

Among the first users of videotape at the �� was the top-rated comedy Hancock’s Half-Hour. Tony Hancock was a perfectionist, but also a highly instinctive performer, frustrated by the technical difficulties inherent in any kind of broadcasting. When making radio programmes he had to be dissuaded from too much rehearsal in case his performance lost its spark. Television was another matter, for unlike radio he could not keep the script in his hand; he had to learn it, and in his live television episodes there was no way of correcting mistakes.

Some of his shows were telerecorded onto film for repeat, but still show him joking his way out of fluffs – on one notorious occasion however, in the episode There’s an Airfield at the Bottom of My Garden, a number of trick effects – bits of a house collapsing due to aircraft noise – happened before they were due to. The cast had no option but to muddle through the rest of the episode, but the experience was shattering for the highly-strung Hancock. (It could have been worse, fellow comedian Charlie Drake was once knocked unconscious during the climax of one of his live television shows.)

Videotape seemed to offer a way out of such problems. Hancock saw the advantage of being able to make his shows in pieces, rather than running straight through. His producer, Duncan Wood, had a fight on his hands to make that a reality. Electronic editing of videotape was not yet possible, the only way of editing was to physically cut the tape with a razor blade, and this had inherent problems.

As the video signal was recorded in a succession of short diagonal stripes, due to the arrangement of four recording heads on a wheel, it was necessary to make sure you were not cutting through any of these stripes. A fluid was developed which would make the stripes visible, enabling the engineer to select a safe place to make the edit.

There was also the issue of sound – it was not possible to have the sound recording head in the same place as the video heads, so there was a gap between where the picture and sound for a given shot were recorded on the tape. There were two ways round this – to cut when the picture had faded to black and the sound had been faded out, or to dub the sound onto audio tape and redub it later.

Since a physical cut could cause a fault in any new recording on the tape, making more than a handful of edits in any programme was severely frowned upon. Programmes then had to be recorded in a single session over a very few hours, as if they were live. Re-recording too many sequences would meant that the recording time increased, and with that the production cost.

Hancock was nevertheless soon an enthusiast for videotape. Duncan Wood demonstrated the possibility of editing smoothly by cutting some items out of an existing Stanley Baxter programme, and wary of upsetting one of their biggest stars, the �� agreed to the new production process.

The shape of things to come (once upon a time) - on the right a 1" tape machine assembly, dwarfing the comparatively portable D3 machine on the left.

It was still to be some time before videotape became ubiquitous for most non-topical programmes. Z Cars was nearly always ‘live’ in its original run, from 1962 to 1965. Other dramas such as Softly Softly, Mogul and play series Thirty Minute Theatre also had some live editions, in the latter case as late as 1968. Even these series were not averse to using videotape for sequences which it would be impossible to achieve ‘live’, as an alternative to pre-filming them.

By the late 60s it started to become possible to edit without cutting up the tape. This process was achieved by locking together the output of two or more videotape machines to produce a master recording on another tape. This was not always easy to achieve however, as tape could not be searched in vision. By the early 70s, videotape editors began to be credited on particularly complex programmes to reflect their increasingly important contribution.

By the end of the 1970s things would change again, with a system employing 1” wide tapes, which could be searched in vision. The machines were lighter and easier to use, and the tape was helically scanned, which meant that the recording was in a very long, nearly horizontal stripe along the tape, and thus would be impossible to edit physically – not that anyone needed to by then.

2” videotape vanished as a medium for new productions during the early 1980s, but it had been a versatile medium in its time which had revolutionised television production. Even 1” was not to rule for too long, with each successive tape format lasting roughly half as long as its predecessor.

Cassette tape media were coming in during the 1980s, and soon the buzzword would be ‘digital’ – superseding analogue technology, and the ��’s broadcast standard format was established as D3 in the early 90s. Few suspected that by the early 21st Century, tape itself would start to be on its way out too – and we would be looking forward to the brave new world of tapeless production and file based delivery.

Any retired technicians out there with tales of the old days of video recording? Tell us your anecdotes, and dazzle us with your knowledge of time-base errors. Was videotape a good idea? Or did video kill the radio star? You know where to tell us...

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The Sunday Post: The US Goes to the Polls

The Sunday Post: Enter Videotape

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