Spaces of Preparation: The ‘Acton Hilton’ and Changing Patterns of Television Drama Rehearsal

Hewett, Richard

doi:10.1080/01439685.2014.937179

Cited by 5 publications

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“…8 The diminution in rehearsal was a gradual process, the roots of which can be traced to the decline in multi-camera studio production from the 1980s onwards. By the mid-1990s, the BBC's specially commissioned rehearsal rooms at Acton were falling into disuse (Hewett 2014).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Changing Determinants of UK Television Acting

Hewett¹

2015

Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Te

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When considering the history of screen performance in academic studies, it is notable that leading contributors such as Charles Affron (1977), James Naremore (1988) and Andrew Klevan (2005) haveperhaps unsurprisinglycommonly utilised textual analysis as a means of unpacking either the signifiers and signified of selected scenes, or the particular styles of individual actors. Comparatively few, however, have chosen to focus on the contextualising background factors which combine to produce the performance ultimately seen on the screen, Roberta Pearson's Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films (1992) and Cynthia Baron and Sharon Marie Carnickie's Reframing Screen Performance (2008) providing notable exceptions. While the majority of the above works focus on Hollywood 'star' performers, comparatively little work has been conducted with regard to their small-screen equivalents, and what has been written continues this primarily text-based approach. The fleeting attention paid to performance style in major works on British television history by John Caughie (2000) and Lez Cooke (2003) generally fails to consider the extent to which this was affected by production practice and historical context, changes in which have been so varied and significant over the intervening decades that some form of examination is surely now long overdue. Otherwise, any attempt at analysing the small screen acting of yesteryear risks being distorted by the passage of time, Caughie's reading of performance in Rudolph Cartier's Nineteen Eighty-Four (BBC, 1954) being notably coloured by condemnatory phrases such as 'stagey' and 'stilted' (Caughie 2000, 49). In this way Caughie falls into the analytical trap

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Changing Determinants of UK Television Acting

Hewett¹

2015

Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Te

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“…Director Mike Leigh makes a similar point about regional BBC film crews working out of Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham:the guys…from Pebble Mill, they were working on Farming Today for most of the year…and they just spent the whole year shooting nodding heads…and out they’d come to shoot a Play for Today film and they’d gradually get more artistic as the days went by, but it was pointing a camera at things, throwing light at it and shooting. (quoted in Cooke, 2012: 148)One of the earliest major applications of OB drama was the BBC’s Survivors (1975–1977) which began production as the then-standard mix of 16 mm location filming, followed by extensive rehearsal at the BBC’s purpose-built Acton rehearsal building (Hewett, 2014), then multicamera video recording in studio. From its seventh episode, Survivors shifted to a location OB production.…”

Section: Ob and Television Dramamentioning

confidence: 99%

Performance, place and screen

McNaughton

2018

Critical Studies in Television

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Screen performance is characterised by the interaction of performance, place and screen, but has suffered from critical neglect. Most accounts of this collaborative process focus on the performer in front of the camera rather than on the activities going on behind it. This article examines how performance is shaped within the BBC’s Outside Broadcast (OB) drama production paradigm of the 1970s and 1980s. The interactions of performers and camera operators combine to construct on-screen performance, since the generation of the screen frame necessarily ‘frames’ performance both literally and figuratively. Camera operators therefore offer ‘invisible’ performance through their manipulation of the frame and the choreography of their interactions with actors. The article’s key case study is The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978) , the BBC’s first drama serial to be made entirely on location on OB videotape, and also considers OB production on Boys from the Blackstuff (BBC 1982) .

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“…However, the same tradition of actor-focused research does not currently exist in relation to television drama. This is not to say that some very valuable interventions have not already been made in this area (Caughie, 2000(Caughie, , 2014; but also Pearson, 2010;and -more recently -Fife Donaldson, 2012;and Hewett, 2013and Hewett, , 2014and Hewett, , 2015, but there is still significant ground to cover, particularly in investigating the ways in which actors mobilize and adapt their training and techniques of preparation and delivery to meet the demands of televisual storytelling. Caughie too recognizes this conspicuous lack within television scholarship, in stating that 'the absence of theoretically informed critical writing about [television] acting is surprising', and that while there exists 'a considerable body of writing about film stardom, and some about television personalities ... there is very little attention to reading the actor ' (2000: 162).…”

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Cantrell

Hogg

2016

Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Te

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This article argues for acknowledging and exploring actors' processes in critical considerations of television drama. Theatre studies boasts a tradition of research privileging the actor, including a century's worth of actor-training manuals, academic works observing rehearsals and performances and actor accounts. However, such considerations within television studies are relatively nascent. Drawing upon continuing drama as a fertile case study for investigating the specificities of television acting, the article concludes that the only way to understand television acting is through the analysis of insights from actors themselves, in combination with the well-established practices of analysing the textual end products of television acting.

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Spaces of Preparation: The ‘Acton Hilton’ and Changing Patterns of Television Drama Rehearsal

Cited by 5 publications

References 1 publication

The Changing Determinants of UK Television Acting

The Changing Determinants of UK Television Acting

Performance, place and screen

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