At the risk of showing my age, not only do I remember it well, but it was also the subject of the first-ever radio feature I produced - for hospital radio - and included vox-pops from the good citizens of Harrow as well as an interview with someone senior from the Decimal Currency Board.
In those days the interviews were recorded into cassette and then dubbed onto quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape which could then be edited.
This was done using razor blades, editing blocks, chinagraph pencils and splicing tape. Can you imagine dealing with the inevitable pages of a Health & Safety risk assessment you would need to go through in order to do it like that today? Let's also not forget the inherent dangers of working with reels of tape spinning at high speed without any safety guards or covers. Trying to stop a metal reel (or even a plastic one) by hand is not advised!These days, of course, it's all done digitally with not a razor blade in sight.
For those of you whose first experience of editing was via a (probably) hacked copy of Cool Edit Pro the above method must not only seem old-fashoned but also rather slow and cumbersome, but it worked well and in the hands of a good editor could actually be done quite quickly.
Having an ‘Undo’ button makes life so much easier and avoids having to rummage through the bin in order to try to find the bit of tape you discarded earlier. It could be argued, though, that the old-fashioned method did tend to make you think more carefully in the first place before making that cut.
(To the best of my knowledge no copy of that 1971 programme remains in existence).
(To the best of my knowledge no copy of that 1971 programme remains in existence).
The romantic days of radio production...
ReplyDeleteSome tape machines had a shelf mounted on the trolley to hold leader and splicing tape handily above the machine. There are tales of razor blades falling off these shelves onto fast spooling reels of tape and being hurled across the room hard enough to embed themselves into the wall.
You could tell how long a machine had been in service by the width and depth of the guides in the diting block. A new one would be quite snug and the blade would give some resistance as it went through, but wear and tear led to the groove widening and deepening until the razor just swished through.
I used to keep my chinagraph pencil in my back jeans pocket, and it was the act of getting this out and putting it back that first caught my wife's eye across a crowded newsroom. As I said, romantic days.