BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

Sounds like an interesting project from BBC4:

http://www.a516digital.com/2016/08/b...f-british.html

The first night of broadcasting is to be restaged.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

A reminder that this is on on Wednesday:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0817s4g

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

:tu:

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

Looking forward to watching it.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

Me too.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

I think you'll find the first night of TV was rubbish, some dotty bint singing for half an hour, and a repeat of Emmerdale ....

Unless you have a 405 line TV, BBC4 HD will have to do the opposite, ie. downgrade the definition.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

The BBC dramatised the story for the 50th anniversary in 1986. "The Fools on the Hill" seems to be on YouTube in its entirety: https://youtu.be/jCtijZAQJEY

I remember watching and enjoying it at the time.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

Well, I'm trying to get converted to UHD, so I am not motivated to tune into some boring programmes in barely watchable grainy black and white images. I really do not see the fascination with that.

But then again, I'm just a typical renegade youngster!

Oh, wait... is it really 2016 already? Change that to cantankerous old git lost in a space-time vacuum!

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

The show is also about recreating the technology as well as the broadcast by the looks of it, so it won't all be in the old format

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

It's a science/technology show OB. The idea is to rebuild the equipment in order to understand the challenges they faced as well as to see what results they got, because there is no surviving recording from that first night's broadcast. The whole thing has been shot in 1080HD, as is now standard for BBC productions.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

I was just being playful, Chris. I'm sure it will be rivetting viewing. :beer::zzz:

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

So, what did we all make of this?

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

It was about an hour too long. The tecchy stuff of the 2 camera systems was interesting, but it's a story that's been told many times before.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

I enjoyed it, but think that they should have made it into a 2 or 3 parter to cover more things will less rushing.

I'd like to have seen what happened with regards to the break for the war and when they reopened, even up until the start of competition from commercial companies in 1955.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

l thought it was excellent and gave viewers a real insight into how it all started.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

But it was only about the first live TV broadcast. Anything else would be a different show.

I did enjoy it

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

True, but I think that they could have expanded things a bit more by, say, making part one about the start of live TV broadcasts and then maybe a couple of more episodes.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

If they had that as a plan I am sure they would have but they were simply celebrating the anniversary of the first live broadcast and to me they did their job well.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

Yes, I also found it to be very informing as well as enjoyable.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

In 20 years' time, someone's going to pull that old Tivo box you stuffed in the loft in a fit of pique when you refused to send it back, and you will be lamenting about how enjoyable this little piece of technology was!

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

I've heard the story before, mainly in the 1986 drama I linked to earlier, but what I hadn't appreciated before was just how impractical Baird's system was. I knew the camera was immobile, but I hadn't appreciated how it needed to work in a dark box and wasn't even a camera as we'd understand the term today.

It was the classic example of a technological blind alley, complete with complex workarounds to cover shortcomings that ought really to have killed it off long before opening night. I'm probably going to watch The Fools on the Hill again now just to be sure, but I don't recall them really going into the reason Baird's system got the gig, and how it survived for even half its contracted six month trial. Even last night Dallas Campbell skimmed over it with a one-line reference to Baird's personal influence in having pushed for development of a TV service in the first place.

Of course the system was so utterly impractical that BBC4 couldn't actually recreate it at all. A 3ft diameter disc spinning at 6,000rpm in a vacuum chamber ... a massive machine to process film stock and deliver it to another Baird camera in time to delay the "live" broadcast by a mere 54 seconds ... beyond the budget of a single documentary and doubtless ruinously expensive back in 1936 too.

Absolutely fascinating though.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

I couldn't believe how big and expensive and really impractical Baird's system was and even that early TV sets had a switch to change between the two systems, it really was experimental and a real shame that no real documentation exists in regards to the machine.

Imagine if that system did in some other reality win, then TV as we know it would not be here.

Still as you say very fascinating.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

I wondered this too.

After a bit of research I found this after someone asked what we were thinking:

'We still use mechanical TV systems. Blu Ray, DVD and VHS are all mechanical systems involving motors, even PVRs have mechanical parts.

The Apollo Television and early Space Shuttle TV used a version of the Baird sequential system which later went on to DLP with rear screen projection TV's using the Baird colour filter wheel as late as the 1990s'.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

Don't think you can really call hard drives and disc drives the same thing though. They maybe mechanical in terms of moving parts but they still require electricity to work.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

If it turns out that I won't be staying with VM, they're welcome to pick it up.

It is an interesting point though, think how many people disposed of their old VHF TV's after BBC2 UHF started, their monochrome TV's after colour started and their CRT TV's after DSO believing them to be worthless?

If it weren't for the odd person keeping them, there would be none available for historical TV enthusiasts to pursue their hobby and we would be historically poorer.

What was regarded as rubbish is now worth money again all these years later!

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

Get more enjoyment gourging out my eyes with a blunt spoon full of butter.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

I have a Pye 13U TV (bottom RH side of picture) stashed away. They were used by the BBC as studio monitors and later as props in Monty Python (mostly the 11U). With a bit of work it's probably a goer even now.

http://www.cableforum.co.uk/board/at...9&d=1478250112

The turret tuner has the normal 12 VHF channels, and the UHF position but additionally a square and triangle for the video direct inputs though the one I have does not have the extra components for that function.

Attachment 26769

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

It might be worth something to a collector, even if it doesn't work.

If you don't want to sell it, I'd definitely hang onto it after all this time.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

An interesting post from another thread:

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

A hard drive has moving parts - a HDD uses magnetism to store data on a rotating platter, and the read/write head floats above the spinning platter reading and writing data.

If it didn't have moving parts, it wouldn't work.

Unless, of course, it's a SSD (Solid State Drive)...

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

Will laser drives still need moving parts?

Not heard of these until Horizon mentioned them in another thread:

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

Do you mean laser disc?

If so, yes, as something needs to turn the laser disc round.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserDisc

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

And the laser LED and photo detector itself is in a moving mount with a voice coil to enable it to track the movements of the "groove" on the disk.

It seems to me that with the rapid increase in the size and compactness of solid state storage devices that these will become pre-eminent in the future and displace all optical mechanical systems such as Blu_ray and DVD.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

Thanks, so it seems that moving parts are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

As these are more prone to break down, you'd think that someone would have invented something that doesn't move by now!

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

I remember in the early 1990s someone prominent in the computer industry predicting that hard discs would be replaced by battery-backed RAM by the end of the decade, as at that time RAM prices per byte were dropping much more quickly than discs. But a couple of years later the HDD manufacturers really got their act together and they have never looked back.

They have, but not for the same price.

Re: BBC4 to recreate the first night of television.
 

Ahhh right, if they're expensive, it's probably more cost effective for VM to repair/replace boxes as needed then.