Until the 1990s, the majority of British TV was shot on video in the studio, with film used only for exterior sequences. What impact did physical space have on both changing modes of production and television aesthetics? Professor Jonathan Bignell, University of Reading, was part of a project funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) that ran from July 2010 to March 2015 exploring these links. Here he provides an overview of its findings.
About the author: Professor Jonathan Bignell is Head of the School of Arts and Communication Design at the University of Reading and Leader of the Television Drama Studies Research Group. His publications include: An Introduction to Television Studies (3rd edition, 2012); Beckett on Screen: The Television Plays (2012); Media Semiotics: An Introduction (2nd edition, 2002); Big Brother: Reality TV in the Twenty-first Century (2006); Postmodern Media Culture (2000); co-editor, with Stephen Lacey, British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future (2nd edition, 2014).
What a television drama looks like depends on where and how it was made. The Spaces of Television research project is about television fiction produced in the UK from 1955-94. It analyses how the physical spaces of production (in TV studios or on location, for instance) impacted on the aesthetic forms of programmes. Making fictional spaces on the screen meant negotiating the opportunities and constraints of studio and exterior space, film and video technologies, and liveness and recording. The genres of programme we study include the police and adventure series, soap opera, science fiction, period costume drama and sitcom. The project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and began in Summer 2010, running until Easter 2015.
Our research offers new insights into television history, by thinking about space in order to connect changing modes of production with television aesthetics. It is a collaboration between the universities of Reading, Leicester and South Wales, in which myself, James Chapman and Stephen Lacey have managed two post-doctoral research posts and two PhD projects. This sizeable team has published a lot of work, but for example Stephen Lacey and myself published a new edition of British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future, a collection of essays by members of our research team, fellow academics and TV producers. Among the contributions, Tony Garnett writes about his work at the BBC in the 1960s when he made Cathy Come Home largely on location, and Phil Redmond writes about how he devised Brookside to quickly shoot and edit on-site on a Liverpool estate. One of our postdoctoral researchers, Leah Panos, is editing special issues of the journals Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (2014) and Critical Studies in Television (2015) each of which will have a focus on production spaces and style in TV drama.
We have held two one-day and one three-day international conferences about spatial approaches to television drama history, and in conjunction with the British Film Institute, project researchers Leah Panos and Billy Smart programmed a season of TV drama screenings at London’s South Bank in 2014, showcasing innovative uses of the TV studio in drama programmes. At each of these events there were not only academic papers but also presentations by people from the TV industry who have worked with different kinds of space in drama. For instance, we invited production designers to recall the challenges of working with Colour Separation Overlay (now often called green-screen) in the 1970s to create fantastical, unreal spaces, the director Piers Haggard talked about his work on studio-shot Plays for Today in the 1980s, and Howard Schuman discussed writing the pop-music serial Rock Follies and borrowing the visual style of Top of the Pops.
Space and change The design of production space, technologies of camera and sound, and the cultural meanings of space change over time. Our period of study starts when ITV broadcasting began. In those early years, production facilities already established by BBC were expanded to include new studios, while the commercial ITV companies developed television studios and adapted cinema soundstages at Elstree and Pinewood, for example, to make TV. Production technologies gradually changed from multi-camera video in the studio to shooting on film on location. Meanwhile programmes had a hybrid or “piebald” form where scenes in the studio were edited together with film shot in a different place and time, and with a different visual quality. When Tom Baker in Doctor Who opened the door of the TARDIS in the studio, shot on multi-camera video, he could appear in the next shot stepping out into the alien landscape of the planet Skaro in 'Destiny of the Daleks' (1979), shot on film on location.
In the 1960s, The Avengers moved from black-and-white video, shot mostly in the studio, to bright colour film with extensive use of exterior locations. In the 1970s, Euston Films was established, making The Sweeney on film on location, while at the same time all-video serials like The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978) were made. In 1981, Brideshead Revisited combined the all-location, all-film approach with the long serial form that, until then, had been made on video or a mixture of film and video. By the 1990s filmed production began to be displaced by digital shooting and editing, and plans for High Definition (HD) production developed. In 1993, the BBC’s Cardiac Arrest became the first drama series made using digital video, marking the next stage in production. The last drama series shot on video in the BBC’s Television Centre studios was House of Elliot in 1993, and by 1994 when the BBC made the Performance season of single dramas, their studio production was noted as being exceptional and experimental.
The different uses of space affected the style and form of programmes in many ways. Actors in the 1950s and 1960s were accustomed to performing for multi-camera studio shooting, sometimes live, and almost always in lengthy sequences of action. There was limited physical space, a lot of close-up, and complex choreography by the camera operators working simultaneously on the studio floor. By contrast, shooting on film on location enabled the embedding of performance in real settings, and more complex lighting, but each shot was done separately, often out of story sequence. The television studio could produce an effect of immediacy and intimacy, whereas location filming signaled a kind of realism and political engagement with social space. Genre inflected these distinctions, for example period drama and comedy were conventionally made in the studio, while social drama and action series used locations and (in some cases) cinema soundstages. By studying space, we can analyse assumptions about the aesthetic specificity of television versus film, and the significance of performance style, setting, narrative and genre across television history.
Interlaced research methods The project uses a range of research methods. We do close analyses of programmes, looking at how they deploy spatial resources in the context of narrative, performance and genre. This is easier in some periods than others. The unavailability of many programmes from the 1950s (because videotape was only invented in 1958 as a programme-making technology) requires research on scripts, studio floor-plans, and logistical plans for location shooting, for instance. We also examine institutional policies for the creation, modification and resourcing of production facilities. For example, BBC was always keen to keep making drama in its studios, largely because that was cheaper than filming outside. There are records of audience response to programmes where viewers sometimes comment on the spatial aspects of programmes, for example in terms of realism. We also conduct interviews with personnel involved in production such as the designer and director Darrol Blake who worked on Doomwatch and The Onedin Line, for example, Piers Haggard who directed Pennies from Heaven and many other studio-shot dramas, and Roger Marshall who wrote Public Eye. Overall, the aim of the project is to look at the history of British television drama in new ways, by focusing on which spaces were used to make it, and how that affected what viewers saw on screen.
Jonathan Bignell
Details of the project’s published results, and links to programme databases, blog articles and other resources are available via the web page www.reading.ac.uk/ftt/research/Spacesoftelevision.aspx