I spent a lot of time at the conference last week writing down the names of TV shows I had never heard of before, in order to try and locate them later. Example Number 1 would be The Liver Birds (1969-1978!) which was one of dozens of Liverpool-related shows and movies that Julia Hallam discussed as part of an extraodinarily ambitious project to collect every important moving-image document of the Port of the Empire. Not only does her team have an archive of 1700+ elements, but they've geo-coded them all, so they can be accessed via a city map. The website is forthcoming. Every community in in the world should be doing this!
My panel was in the Bob Kayley theater, which turned out to be a rather beautiful Black Box experimental theater, with seating on three sides. If I had known about the space I would have prepared dance moves. Rooms against chronicles: houses on Edwardian TV generated some gasps and laughs, as hoped. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
My talk was followed by Daniel Ashton's sharp and droll analysis of the Jane Austen TV series-inspired tourism industry. He made a beautiful argument about the National Trust's role in transforming "heritage properties into heritage props."
I confess I secretly sighed when Sarah Cardwell announced that her talk would be about aspect ratios--I get more than enough on this topic from film archivists--but she made this topic fascinating and significant. It was a master class in attentive viewing, comparing three screen versions of Persuasion, unpacking the dramatic implications of the 4:3 format of the 1971 TV series in contrast to the 2007 and 2012 wide-screen versions.
Plus there was Billy Smart's discussion of the spatial dramaturgy of Within These Walls--a women's prison TV drama series that deserves a place beside the dictionary definition of "Camp." And Leah Panos on an arcane anti-naturalistic TV musical about The Troubles, and Richard Kilborn and Lothar Mikos doing a hilarious dialogue on German adaptations of British TV comedies like The Office....
It's frustrating that concerning the panel discussion on the early days of Color Screen Offset effects I can't even find still images of the BBC's 1976 Chester Mystery Cycle, which was a crazy beautiful mix of medieval illumination and disco era SFX--featuring Tom Courtney as Jesus!
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