- 1 year ago
Category
🎈
FunTranscript
00:00A 9.99 special tonight, 9.30 BBC One.
00:1910, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0.
00:291, 2, 3, 4.
00:34Broadcast news is very important to tell people about the world.
00:38And to be a trusted source of information is something perhaps in this country we take for granted.
00:43And English, of course, is our currency. Words is how we do it.
00:47The plane, a twin-engined MD-83 belonging to Air Tours,
00:50was bringing back holidaymakers from Las Palmas in the Canary Islands.
00:54An inquiry has begun into the circumstances of the crash landing.
00:59I think news matters because it is a daily record of what is going on.
01:04The basis of news is not necessarily to interpret or to analyse,
01:07but it actually is to give it straight. It's a tablet of record of the day.
01:11Cut. Thank you.
01:12Broadcast news has come a long way.
01:18Seen in the early days as very much the poor relation of the press,
01:21the first bulletins were often newspaper stories, simply read aloud on air.
01:27What television news has evolved into
01:29is a distinctive way of using pictures and words together
01:32that seems to tell us the truth about the world.
01:35It's the brash self-confidence of the news that can make it an easy target for parody.
01:50Those are the headlines. God, I wish they weren't.
01:53The day today is set out to be important.
01:58It is the most important news programme that has ever existed for eternity.
02:05Globe after globe representing different facets of the news.
02:08There's the science globe, the geography globe,
02:11The technology globe, the money globe,
02:14bursts out at us from this background mush,
02:17the primeval swamp of graphics.
02:19It announces itself as the most important thing that has ever been on television.
02:25Hello, sir.
02:26The musical chords go on for slightly too long.
02:31And that's the key to understanding the day-to-day.
02:33It's exaggeration of something that already exists.
02:36We didn't really create a new way of speaking.
02:39All we did is took what was there and pushed it a teeny bit further.
02:43The day today.
02:45Because fact into doubt won't go.
02:50And we've just heard that areas in three of Britain's biggest cities
02:53are being evacuated due to suspect dogs.
02:56The fictional news series The Day Today was first broadcast in 1994.
03:02Sometimes re-voicing existing news footage,
03:04but more often using actors to manufacture its own.
03:08It set out to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction.
03:11But as the remains were being taken for laboratory tests,
03:15a second dog ran out from the crowd.
03:18It could have been a bomb.
03:20The aim of The Day Today was to authenticate the absurd.
03:24People did turn on during The Day Today
03:26and think it was another news programme
03:28until they came across something there
03:29and they just thought, hang on a sec,
03:31that can't possibly be true.
03:33Policemen can't be going around shooting dogs.
03:36It looks true.
03:37It seems true.
03:38The editing is true.
03:40The shots are true.
03:41It breathes news.
03:43This evening, a monument had been built,
03:45marking the end, perhaps, of the relationship between man and dog,
03:49which today went from this to this.
03:56Right.
03:57We now move on to scripting moving pictures.
04:00The most exciting skill in the television journalist's armoury.
04:03These young journalists are right at the start of their broadcasting careers.
04:09Selected for the BBC's prestigious journalist's course,
04:13they're eight weeks into their four-month training.
04:16Having spent time in radio,
04:18this is their first taste of making television news.
04:21Remember, you know, like radio, they only hear it once.
04:26So try and make it easy for them to absorb.
04:30Their first task, to script a set of shots
04:33about freezing weather in Moscow.
04:38They can draw on a press release giving the background to the story,
04:42but it needs condensing into a ten-second introduction
04:45to be read by the newsreader,
04:46and then a script that fits the 24 seconds of picture.
04:50We've done some work in radio before,
04:53but this is the first time most of us have come across
04:54to work in television, so it's a new experience completely.
04:57It's fairly easy to know what the story's about.
04:59It's more difficult to match the words up to the pictures.
05:02You have to think about the picture that's coming on screen
05:05and try and match the words up,
05:06and that's fairly difficult, letting the timing right,
05:08getting the right numbers of words for the minutes that you've got.
05:11A cold mass of air has swept across the former Soviet Union,
05:15sending the temperatures plummeting to minus 20 degrees centigrade.
05:18Scientists at Russian's Meteorological Institute
05:20say that the severe weather is on its way to Europe.
05:23The Russian countryside is always prettiest
05:24when it's under snow,
05:25but people are struggling to cope with the adverse weather conditions,
05:28which is cutting off roads
05:30and is causing delays on the Russian's rail network.
05:36In television, a vast amount of the information
05:40is delivered by the pictures,
05:43and that, to begin with,
05:44I think people coming from radio or print
05:46find that very difficult to understand.
05:49The more words you have
05:50doesn't necessarily mean the more comprehension.
05:52In fact, what we often try and stress to the trainees
05:55is that actually less is more.
05:57Monitors at Moscow's Meteorological Institute
05:59show that November's temperatures
06:00have broken all records this century.
06:02Moscow may look pretty in the snow,
06:04but eight people have died,
06:05and many are being treated for hypothermia.
06:07Whilst Britain won't get that cold,
06:08sub-zero temperatures could lie in store.
06:10You wouldn't go up to somebody in a pub
06:12to tell them about the bad weather forecast
06:14to say sub-zero temperatures could lie in store.
06:17It's not the way you talk.
06:19You'd turn the television on,
06:20and there is a human being telling you the news.
06:23And there is a barrier, an artificial barrier,
06:26if you get the impression
06:27they're just reading you a script out loud.
06:29Well, the style that you use is quite tabloidy.
06:31It's quite simple.
06:33It's a case of letting the story be told by the picture,
06:36so the viewer doesn't want lots and lots of detail,
06:38doesn't want lots of background,
06:40just basically wants to be able to watch the pictures
06:41and have you explain the background
06:43and explain what you're seeing, really.
06:46Moscow scientists say the cause
06:47was a massive anticyclone from Siberia,
06:49bringing with it temperatures of minus 20.
06:52It seems like you need maths.
06:54Basically, you've got to add and subtract
06:55and work out how long every word is going to take you.
06:58So, inevitably, I've had a few pauses, a few fluffs,
07:00and the first time I overwrote, I wrote too much,
07:03which looked a bit daft,
07:05and so I've had to learn my lesson and cut down.
07:09The essence of writing to pictures
07:11is not to view each picture in isolation.
07:15It's to try and gather and collect some pictures
07:17and then write in a sequence to those pictures.
07:21The danger when they start
07:22is that they get very tied up with the mathematics of it
07:25at three words a second,
07:26and as most pictures in television news
07:28last approximately three seconds,
07:30they feel that their words
07:31are having to chase each picture in isolation.
07:35The day today,
07:37the last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town.
07:41It's like a kind of double-barrelled shotgun.
07:43The message is coming at you simultaneously.
07:45The words and the pictures have to work together,
07:47and I think it's making sure they're complementary.
07:51The main thing is not to allow the words
07:53to simply describe the pictures.
07:55Oxford Street in London
07:57with three policemen and a knotted tape barrier.
08:00A stray dog was spotted here an hour ago
08:03and everybody ran out.
08:06Police then isolated the area containing the dog
08:09and told the public to clear off.
08:12As well as location reports,
08:14the day-to-day team parodied another news staple,
08:17the graphic sequence.
08:18The only way police can neutralise bomb dogs
08:21is to spray them with a resin coating
08:23which hardens instantly to contain any explosion.
08:26The inside of the bomb dog is obviously destroyed,
08:29but the outside stays the same shape.
08:32One thing graphics would do
08:33is to break things down into a lot of stages and levels
08:36and try and clearly label those stages of animation,
08:41so to very naturally lead the viewer's eye
08:44and explain a story.
08:48Normally, their key word's actually taken
08:50from the journalist's narration going over the top.
08:54Not only did the words explain the graphic,
08:56but were used to quite comic effect.
09:00If the underside is not covered,
09:02a highly directional blast launches the animal vertically
09:05to a height of over 1,000 feet.
09:07I think the intention behind the whole programme
09:10was that it shouldn't be a programme which is funny
09:13because things go wrong or because things are badly made.
09:19The intention was to make it super efficient,
09:22super clean, super real, super newsy, like News Plus.
09:26Everything that you would want to do in a news programme,
09:29but you quite often don't have time.
09:32So there's the beginning of time globe.
09:34The following globe
09:38is a more up-to-date representation of Earth as we know it,
09:44but with the slightly ridiculous self-importance
09:47of having Great Britain oversized
09:49compared to the rest of the world.
09:51Again, the background to that pound coin globe
09:57shows images of people in stock exchanges
10:00and takes patterns from currency.
10:05So everything should relate.
10:08Then we have a sports globe.
10:09The background layer has a videotape
10:13of the snooker player.
10:15We would combine that video with a texture,
10:19that texture related to the generic feeling of the show,
10:22but also within that texture
10:23were lines taken off of sports reference,
10:27so football pitches or athletics tracks.
10:29There's as many sports clichés in one graphic.
10:33The animations are quite dramatic.
10:36All of these globes and things pouring out towards you.
10:39In some ways, it's quite threatening.
10:41And maybe that's something news does,
10:43is it very much imposes itself upon the viewer.
10:46It says, this is what we're going to tell you.
10:49You look at this.
10:53The Bank of England is in chaos
10:55following the discovery that the pound has been stolen.
10:58The pound was stolen at 1.30 this afternoon
11:01by thieves dressed as cleaners.
11:03They drove a white Montego.
11:04The key thing is about dramatising the news.
11:08Obviously, their opening titles are incredibly dramatic.
11:12They love to have that sense of urgency.
11:14We are live, live for no particular reason.
11:18It's glossed over with a kind of mateyness.
11:21And it produces this kind of other world of the news studio,
11:25which is unlike any other world we've all experienced.
11:28Yeah, but you can't be saying we should get rid of the speed limits.
11:31The day-to-day studio is in impressive, dark,
11:34slightly menacing tones, bigger than is necessary.
11:37Chris Morris sits at an enormous desk
11:39with his very own Star Trek control panel.
11:43Three little monitors and other big monitors
11:45scattered all over the place.
11:47We wanted to give the feeling that the news was happening
11:49and rushing down and pouring onto his desk
11:52from every corner of the globe.
11:53Which then means that when we do our comedy stories,
11:57we completely undermine that and create the juxtaposition,
12:01the believability that the bollocks that we're telling is true
12:05because it's told in apparently such a genuine, intended way.
12:09Travel now from Valerie Sinatra in her pod
12:12a mile above the centre of Great Britain.
12:14Valerie, talk me some road.
12:15Another presentation issue was the choice of voices and presenters.
12:20Gender, accent and styles of delivery
12:22were all used to particular effect.
12:27All the actors took it in turns
12:28to play different presenters of different items.
12:31And those we tended to base on sort of local news journalists.
12:35We tended to give them slightly, not exactly regional accents,
12:38but slightly off-standard accents
12:40or the odd speech impediment or something
12:42just to imply that perhaps they hadn't quite made it to the main news
12:46and that was why Chris Morris was presenting the main bits
12:49and we were all pushed out to the periphery.
12:52Finally, a look at the capital, which is London.
12:55Worse than ever tonight, I'm afraid,
12:56lots of cars on Oxford Street being slowed down by their own lights.
13:01And remember, we want somebody to do graphics as well.
13:07We've got a graphics hour.
13:09Varon's going to do graphics.
13:10So if you can think of a story that would lend itself to graphics
13:13and try and do something, you know, cast around.
13:15I mean, look in the newspapers even, Varon.
13:17Three days later and the next step for the trainees,
13:20bringing studio, location reports and graphics together
13:24in a 15-minute bulletin.
13:26The deadline, three o'clock.
13:28Whether there'll be anything new coming in, I imagine there will be.
13:31Confirmation's not till 3.30, so we won't get that,
13:33but I think you can do a kind of a preview.
13:35Short, sharp sentences, keep it simple.
13:38They get completely blinkered by the computer screen.
13:42They're tapping away.
13:44And we always say to them, look, stop, read this out.
13:47And they are very much confined, as it were,
13:49by writing in one medium for broadcasting in another.
13:52James, try and think of the headline for this television channel thing.
13:57It's saying the bids are ready to run Britain's fifth television channel.
13:59Will Rupert Murdoch add another something to his media empire?
14:03I can't think of the something.
14:04The theme is always trying to develop good spoken English,
14:08as opposed to journalese.
14:11Obviously, tabloid journalism is in love with short monosyllables,
14:16which are punchy and dramatic.
14:18Bid, probe, shock.
14:20And it is very easy to believe that this is the right currency for news.
14:24It's trying to make sure the vocabulary is a natural spoken vocabulary.
14:43And the other type of journalese is this phraseology,
14:47which is one that we've just come to expect.
14:51Fleets of ambulances rush the injured to hospital.
14:54Well, why are ambulances always in fleets?
14:57And, well, yes, they normally take people to hospital as quickly as is sensible.
15:01It's just one of those phrases.
15:03Asset.
15:05Asset.
15:06That's it. Asset to his media empire.
15:08Brilliant.
15:09Adjectives are really taboo.
15:12I mean, not entirely,
15:13but you don't actually need adjectives the way you do in other media.
15:17That's partly because the power of the pictures
15:20is actually conveying the words and the sense.
15:22So, for instance,
15:24if you're talking about somebody wearing a stunning outfit,
15:28you could either see that as being editorial.
15:31I mean, who am I to say that it's a stunning outfit?
15:33Viewers may think it's the most appalling dress
15:35that's ever been seen on television.
15:37Secondly, if it is that stunning,
15:39then the viewer can see that for themselves.
15:41You don't need to waste words describing in television.
15:45What you're always trying to do in television
15:47is actually add something to what you're seeing.
15:51This is your first time in a...
15:53Yeah.
15:54I've seen other people doing it.
15:55Yeah.
15:56There is a picture, just to warn you,
15:58about a minute in, I think,
15:59there is a picture of people hoisting white flags outside buildings,
16:03and I could write into that.
16:04OK.
16:05The trainees have 30 minutes in an edit suite
16:08to put their stories together.
16:12It's a very severe discipline.
16:14It's like the art of Pracy,
16:16trying to make sure that not a second is wasted,
16:20that the pictures do actually give a balanced,
16:23brief portrait of what went on,
16:25not distorting the event.
16:26And trying to put all those things together
16:29into a fairly disciplined, maybe 120-second report
16:33does take a great deal of work.
16:36Everyone's learning how to do it all the time.
16:38Shot list time for you, I think.
16:41The day-to-day team chose to deliberately unlearn
16:45a lot of what they knew about putting television together
16:47in order to parody particular news styles,
16:50like the distinctive differences
16:52in the way different countries shoot and edit the news.
16:55America now, and this report...
16:58Milwaukee's state penitentiary,
17:00and on death row, it's wedding bells, not execution, yells,
17:03as condemned strangler Chapman Baxter
17:05prepares to tie the knot with female felon Charlene Gray.
17:09The look of the American stories was very important.
17:12You had to believe that they came from America.
17:14It's more than just Barbara Wintergreen's American accent.
17:18Barbara is queen of alliteration.
17:21Meanwhile, Baxter's fried-to-be
17:22is busy with last-minute preparations
17:24for her impending ending.
17:26Did you ever kill anyone?
17:28Ali, my dog.
17:29The Americans are far more hack-and-slash than we are.
17:32They use a few too many shots,
17:35and there's no finesse in the editing
17:38because all the shots are grabbed.
17:40You just slap it in
17:41to illustrate the point that you're currently making.
17:44We chose to use all the wobbly shots that we could find.
17:50We used all the zooms that we could find.
17:53Generally, the ones that didn't resolve and focus at the end
17:57were the preferred takes.
17:59It's the morning of the nuptacution,
18:01and everything's ready to give these newly deads a sizzling send-off.
18:04I'm just going to take the shot
18:07as if it's been grabbed through a melee
18:09of other cameramen and photographers.
18:12I'm going a little bit further,
18:13so the zoom's already started.
18:16It's always a good thing to let something come into frame
18:19and also to exit it if you can.
18:22In news, you don't have that luxury.
18:24So the way that we do that,
18:26and it all sounds very repetitive,
18:27you just come in bang on the zoom.
18:30The editing is the way by which you apply the grammar,
18:35if you want to talk about it as a language,
18:37which you can either follow or not,
18:39depending on what you want to do.
18:41Good grammar would be to pause,
18:44let the camera pull back, pause on the end, cut.
18:46But we're using very bad grammar here.
18:48We've really worked hard at, you know,
18:51we've given him his own room,
18:52he's got his Bon Jovi posters, you know.
18:55The transfer of the material
18:58from their television system to ours
19:01comes across very badly.
19:04And we put it through a whole load
19:06of different electronic processes
19:07to actually create the look
19:09that you actually see on the screen.
19:11You've been smashing Nadeye, is that true?
19:13Yeah, we smear you have Nadeye.
19:14And of course, it's a hundred times worse
19:16than it would really appear on the TV.
19:19But everybody is convinced by it
19:20because it looks so real.
19:22At this fallopian factory, people come for a...
19:25The final element, the performance.
19:27Body language, intonation and dress,
19:29all adding to the effect.
19:32Marcia, the wardrobe woman, and I went shopping
19:34and bought bright orange trouser suits,
19:37bright yellow skirt suits, all sorts of things.
19:39Everything that was bright, sort of vivid colours
19:41and gold buttons, it was all mock Chanel,
19:44it was mock Christian Dior.
19:45She looked like she had a lot of money.
19:47The wig that Lisa Cavalli-Green gave me
19:49was immaculate.
19:50The make-up was inches thick.
19:52All of that combines to give you a complete posture.
19:56You have to smile in a particular way
19:58if your make-up's that thick.
20:00You know, you can't move your head too much.
20:02Like, I mean, I, in normal speech,
20:03tend to move my head around a lot,
20:05but Barbara couldn't do that.
20:06She had to be very poised.
20:07The nails dictate that you hold the microphone
20:09in a particular way.
20:11Barbara Winogreen, CBN News
20:12at the Natas Institute, San Sperdo, California.
20:19It's roughly done, that film.
20:23Thank you, mate.
20:26Berlin is Terry.
20:28Which item number, is it?
20:30If the wrong name comes up, don't worry, alternate.
20:32I'll cue you over the correct camera, hopefully.
20:34Here we go, stand by.
20:35A bomb attack on the Croatian capital, Zagreb,
20:39has killed three people and left many injured.
20:42The attack is a severe blow
20:43to the United Nations' efforts to make peace.
20:46The bids are in to run Britain's fifth national channel.
20:48Will Rupert Murdoch add another asset to his media empire?
20:54Television is about teamwork,
20:56not only in terms of the technology,
20:58but actually in the authorship of the words you're writing.
21:00You may start off writing a script,
21:03which will be then checked by several people up the chain
21:06before it actually is delivered to a presenter
21:08to read it on autocue.
21:10They're changing it actually in order to speak it
21:12in their particular personal style.
21:15It doesn't make it right or wrong,
21:16it's just the way they read it.
21:19Today is the 50th anniversary of the fall of Berlin
21:21to the advancing Russian army.
21:23The event marked the end of Nazi rule.
21:26They're only seeing three words in one line,
21:28and at any one time they're probably only seeing three lines.
21:32And if they don't feel that the sentence is ever going to end,
21:35we get the frightened rabbit and they stare at the screen
21:38and it all looks horrible
21:39and the viewer gets very upset and stops listening.
21:42After two weeks of battle, the flags of surrender went up
21:45and over the Reichstag building, the Soviet flag was hauled.
21:49Today, after years of division...
21:51The main junction that I wanted to hit was
21:53it went from the black and white archives picture
21:56of Berlin during the war
21:57and then it cut to the colour picture of Berlin today,
22:00hey presto, and that happened.
22:02There'll be no formal celebrations today to mark its fall,
22:05but events of 50 years ago helped make Berlin what it is today.
22:09A little bit of electric excitement.
22:12The trainees have come a long way.
22:14When it's going well, it looks and sounds like the real thing.
22:18The supply of bomb raid came shortly after 8.30 this morning,
22:21sending plumes of smoke billowing across Zagreb.
22:24All the visual and verbal conventions they've been learning to use
22:27come across as natural and transparent
22:29and we seem to be looking straight out onto the real world.
22:33Now the main news again.
22:35War has returned to the Croatian capital, Zagreb.
22:37It's only when things go wrong or are pushed to the limit by parody
22:40that you realise how carefully contrived these conventions actually are.
22:44Apparently by a hacksaw falling from a tree onto her head.
22:47There's always a danger that we'll fool ourselves
22:49that this is a totally natural process, whereas it isn't.
22:53And there's an irony there, isn't there?
22:55Remember when the famous American anchorman, Walter Cronkite,
22:59finally retired, and he was a very, very successful and popular man.
23:02He was asked what was the secret of his success,
23:06and he said, sincerity.
23:08If you can fake that, you've got it.
23:10That's all for now from Sarah and me.
23:13There'll be more news at 4 o'clock.
23:14Good afternoon.
23:15Bye-bye.
23:40Bye-bye.
23:41Bye-bye.
23:42Bye-bye.
23:43Bye-bye.
23:44Bye-bye.
23:45Bye-bye.
23:46Bye-bye.
23:47Bye-bye.
23:48Bye-bye.
23:49Bye-bye.
23:50Bye-bye.
23:51Bye-bye.
23:52Bye-bye.
23:53Bye-bye.
23:54Bye-bye.
23:55Bye-bye.
23:56Bye-bye.
23:57Bye-bye.
23:58Bye-bye.
23:59Bye-bye.
24:00Bye-bye.
24:01Bye-bye.
24:02Bye-bye.
24:03Bye-bye.
24:04Bye-bye.
24:05Bye-bye.
24:06Bye-bye.
24:07Bye-bye.
24:08Bye-bye.