This gets a little technical, but bear with us, there is a point to it all somewhere. Dating decades by the film or video stock they’re most often recorded on isn’t an exact science, but it’s a fair rule of thumb that if it fuzzes with not-quite-there-yet video brightness, the programme you’re watching is from the ’80s, when video cameras first stalked the land outdoors as well as in. Likewise, if it’s not in black-and-white, your ’60s or ’50s film will most likely be shot in the elaborate and much-mourned Technicolor process, producing those hot pinks and azure blues that make everything look like an all-American advert for the latest ‘frigidaire’, even if the subject is just Cliff and Hank Marvin trying to chat up Una Stubbs on the first bus out of Borehamwood.
But in between – what, exactly? Think of ’70s films, those murky browns and very deep greens, grainy shots of traffic, skies that look overcast even when the sun’s out. That’s Eastmancolor, Kodak’s cheaper rival to the elaborately processed, lighting-hungry methods of the Technicolor boys, which had all but ousted its rival by the end of the 1960s, bringing costs down, and the colour palette with it. Purists moaned their usual low moans of aesthetic doom, but look at it this way – is there a more honest way to depict those times? Grainy, brown-tinged, and seemingly half faded away even when the film’s just come back from the chemist’s – well, those are our memories of the 1970s, at least. (Except when we went indoors, of course, when everything suddenly became really bright and colourful, and in front of a studio audience. But that’s another story.)
Top Of The Pops was a pot pouri of film types/colours: The black and white film of the late 60s, where bright spots are turned black by the camera, and the early colour transmissions in the 70s where bright lights left a trail on the screen as the camera panned around..
Is that still from Confessions of a Driving Instructor?
I remember well into the 1980s a lot of programmes had grainy exteriors & super-sharp interiors.
Eventually shows either went all videotape, or all film with better quality film stock. One Foot In The Grave was the last show I can think of that had a mix of styles.
It’s confusing that some shows today are shot on videotape & then tinted to look like film.
The out-takes on The Office DVDs show what the “before” looks like.
I have been watching the second series of Auf Wiedersehen Pet, made in 1985, and I concur with Richard that the location fiming does look grainy and a bit washed out in places, while the studio based parts of the show have much sharper colour quality.
Must be due to the fact that when outside, handheld 16mm film cameras were used while inside you could get it right with those huge video cameras on the wheely telescopic mounts that glid (glided?) around on the studio floor.
What is name of film?.
10 slaps with a trout for the Monty Python reference!
even in the 21st century I still write off whole days for not being properly overcast like they always seemed to be in the seventies