Critical orthodoxies around British television drama suggest the ‘developmental model’: a transition from a ‘theatrical’ production mode based around live performance mediated through multi-camera studio, to a ‘cinematic’ mode utilising film, post-production editing, and location shooting. As Jacobs (2000) has argued, the introduction of videotape in 1958 arguably did little to change the model of studio production until the late 1970s: ‘… segments of drama lasting up to 30minutes continued to be recorded on videotape in continuous time ‘as if live’ until the introduction of time-coded signals on the tape in the mid-1970s … In this way some of the style and aesthetics of early pre-1955 television had considerable longevity’ (Jason Jacobs,The Intimate Screen: early British television drama, Oxford, 2000, 24). Drama produced in the multi-camera studio could be transferred to film, but this ‘telerecording’ method—filming straight off a monitor—was deemed low quality and was largely unsuitable for sale to the lucrative US market. This paper examines an abortive attempt by the BBC to develop a method of combining multi-camera studio production with outputting direct to film. Known variously as ‘videofilm,’ ‘Video Film Recording’ (VFR) or ‘Intervideo,’ this process attempted to combine electronic multi-camera technique with the medium of film to provide high-quality film programmes without compromising the speed and efficiency of multi-camera studio production. The resulting programmes would maximise studio use and require minimal post-production editing, but would produce high-resolution filmed programmes for the international market. However, the system was never developed to the stage where it was used in regular production. Drawing on files at the BBC Written Archive, this paper examines the development of the VFR system in the 1960s and the reasons for its failure

Critical orthodoxies around the multi-camera television studio characterise it as a ‘theatrical’ space, driven by dialogue and performance. Troy Kennedy Martin (1964) decried television drama's essential naturalism, demanding a more filmic form of drama in a polemic which has strongly influenced critical thinking on multi-camera studio television. Caughie (2000) suggests that Armchair Theatre created a ‘space for acting’, but in the main, the studio is seen as a constraining and interiorising dramatic site, in thrall to liveness and reliant on theatrical unities. This article draws on research at the BBC Written Archives to extend current understanding of the determinants working upon multi-camera, studio television up to and into the 1970s. It shows how the actors’ union Equity insisted on preserving continuous performance as a specific feature of television drama. While other determinants (technical, institutional and economic) of course come into play, Equity's insistence on ‘theatrical’ continuous performance inhibited the narrative and aesthetic possibilities of studio drama, resisted the move to rehearse-record studio taping, and delayed the turn to all-film drama production at the BBC. Drawing on key productions which acted as contentious ‘test cases’ for negotiations, this article explores tensions between institutional and artistic determinants, complicating technologically determinist accounts to argue for a greater understanding of the role of Equity in dictating material conditions of production in the multi-camera studio paradigm.

This article examines two adaptations of John le Carré's 1974 novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the 1979 BBC television serial and the 2011 cinema film, in order to investigate critical orthodoxies around the aesthetics of television and cinema. It examines the dialectical relationship between space and place, concluding that filming location acts as a 'framing place', shaping production practices and effecting a dialogic interchange between production space and narrative place. Drawing on original research interviews with production team members, it illuminates the process of production and demonstrates the interaction between material space and social space in the interaction of location and practitioners. The article concludes that the television serial's mimetic fidelity to its source novel results in a text which is at times more 'cinematic' than the cinema version. The cinema film features a more fully developed visual concept throughout its aesthetic, in the motif of the cages, grids, and boxes.However, in its narrative compression and unsubtle use of signifiers of place, the cinema adaptation is at times less 'cinematic' than the television serial.

1970s television drama, using close analysis of the BBC's I, Claudius (1976) to consider the proxemics of performance both in front of and behind the camera. Cantrell and Hogg (2016) differentiate between 'television acting' (actors portraying characters), and 'television performance', that is, 'adjacent performative components within the construction of text' (285). They warn against the danger that 'the particular contributions of the television actor become obscured within the larger technical mechanics of constructing Deleted: s a television performance' (286). This chapter, however, builds on Cantrell and Hogg's distinction of 'acting' and 'performance' to argue that the 'invisible performance' of camera operators can be as important as the 'television acting' of actors, and therefore demands further investigation. As well as furthering critical understandings of onscreen television performance, the chapter draws attention to the off-screen contribution of camera operators in the framing of performance in 1970s television drama. It therefore suggests that there are two categories of performance at work here in the interaction of actors and camera operators: 'visible' onscreen and 'invisible' off-screen performance. Intimate screens and dramatic rooms Assumptions about the limited aesthetic capability of television have meant a neglect of its production processes in favour of considering the writer as the creative figure in television. Academic orthodoxies consider television in general to be a visually impoverished medium (Geraghty 2003), whose multi-camera, vision mixed aesthetic and notan 1 lighting normatively generate only functional images within a tightly constrained frame. Helen Wheatley has pointed out the way in which theorists have privileged the 1960s studio as an innovative and dynamic space but dismissed the 1970s television studio as 'clumsy, dated and inexpressive' (Wheatley 2005: 145) with dialogue-driven close-ups confined to Williams's (1968) 'dramatic room'. However, as Panos and Lacey (2015) comment, studio multi-camera technique merits a critical reassessment: Television scholars are increasingly returning to the electronic studio era and attempting to understand it on its own terms, tracing practical, material and conceptual factors that influenced studio production and drawing out the dramatic and aesthetic consequences of multi-camera recording and the studio as site. (Panos and Lacey 2015: 2) Likewise, performance in television has been little studied. The teleological 'developmental model' assumes 'a broad movement away from the interior world of studio production, as also moving from a theatrical precedent' (Macmurraugh-Kavanagh and Lacey 1999: 60) Deleted: S Deleted: D Deleted: R comprising 'moments of change' in technology and aesthetics (ibid.). The 'developmental model' has implications for screen performance, assuming a move from studio's 'intimate screen' model (Jacobs 2000) of dialogue-driven close-ups to a more naturalistic mode, as well as a tendency towards more 'cinemati...

This article examines a significant, but neglected, Glasgow-set STV drama serial from 1979, Charles Endell Esquire. The article examines the way in which Charles Endell Esquire exploits and subverts classic tropes of Scottish identity in order to construct a liminal narrative and generic space between comedy and drama, subverting the stereotypical models of Kailyard and Clydesideism. Using the idea of 'place-myth', the article examines the ways in which the series' use of location filming sets up a structuring paradigm between tradition and modernity within the city of Glasgow, and between gritty urban Glasgow Clydesideism and the rural Kailyard of the Scottish countryside.