There’s also a report on the opening of the Point cinema in Milton Keynes. For a while, this was a regular haunt for me. The tickets were cheap, and having so many screens, it meant I could drive there early, and see two or three films in one day. Fun times.
Yet another tape full of 80s computer journalism, but not solely Micro Live this time.
First, yes, it’s still Micro Live. The big news is the rescue of Acorn computers by Olivetti. Also in the news, the Computer Software Copyright act, the tape Soft-Aid, and the publication of The Hacker’s Handbook.
There’s an interview with the new chairman of Acorn computers, Alex Reid.
Lesley looks at the new challenge from the organisers of the Micromouse competition, as John Billingsley unveils Robot Ping Pong.
Lesley looks at the importance of good office furniture.
Fred and Mac looks at portable computers – ‘laphelds’. There’s a wide range of machines available. Here’s an Osborne computer that has a 5.25in Floppy Drive built in.
The programme follows three winners of the Integrated Software competition, to win a copy of Lotus Symphony, and a computer to run it on.
Freff, in the UK for a visit, interviews my old colleague Douglas Adams about his adventure game based on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
After this, we move to Channel 4 for Four Computer Buffs. Jane Ashton has an interview with Clive Sinclair, and hauls him over the coals about the lacklustre launch of the QL, He even talks about a portable (which would end up being the Z88). He does make one correct prediction – that in the future all computers will be portable. It’ not 100% true, but it’s true to a great extent that most people have only one computer, and that’s portable.
Mike Thorne gives some ideas about hardware projects to try. The programme also broadcasts software by flickering a white blob on the screen, which you can read if you attach a light-sensitive sensor to the screen and run a program to decode the light pulses.
There’s a slightly cringe-inducing promo for Lotus Jazz, and a demonstration of the Macintosh business package by Lotus’ Tony Poll who, to be honest, sounds very nervous.
Then, Ben Knox presents ‘Modem Corner’ which usually looks at online services, but this week opts for some comedy. I often wonder about people like Ben Knox – what was their later career like? Do they spend the rest of their life telling people ‘I was famous once.’
And to follow the Muppets, Guy Kewney rides a C5 into the studio pulling a very large pizza.
After this, there’s a brief report on the 1985 Personal Computer Word show 1985 at Olympia, featuring Jack Tramiel of Atari.
Then, it’s an episode of Database, the sister programme to Four Computer Buffs, also presented by Tony Bastable and Jane Ashton. This also comes from the PCW show. Tony Bastable talks to Jack Tramiel about the recent launch of the Atari ST.
Jane Ashton talks to Commodore UK boss Nick Bessey about the Commodore 128 – but not, significantly, the new Amiga, not yet launched in the UK. I kind of feel sorry for him, not being able to talk about something so brilliant, and only having warmed-over Commodore 64s to talk about.
But the Amiga wasn’t totally absent from the show. Metacomco, who developed the Amiga operating system, had a demo behind closed doors, which Tony Bastable and Guy Kewney are very excited to see.
Jane Ashton talks to Alan Sugar about the new PCW8256 word processor.
Ben Knox talks about MUD, the multi-user dungeon game.
Mike Thorne looks at Oxford Pascal and talks to Alan Jones of Oxford Computing.
Jane Ashton talks to the winners of the Visicode competition.
Finally, Tony closes the programme with a precursor of the Apple Watch, Seiko’s multifunction watch terminal.
After this, recording switches again, and we get the end of a trailer for The Late Late Breakfast Show. Probably the last series, in which, rather infamously, a member of the public dies during a rehearsal for a stunt which goes horribly wrong.
Then, an episode of The Tripods. It’s the first episode of the second series, where our heroes compete to be allowed to play in a games which will then take them into the city of the Tripods. It’s as dull as I remembered.
After this, recording continues, with a trailer for Finningley Fly Past. Then, most of an episode of Terry and June. I’m slightly shocked at the level of sexism on show, and this was an inoffensive teatime comedy.
The tape ends before the episode finishes.
Update: Edited to remove a potentially actionable joke about Noel Edmonds and, far more importantly, to correct the number of series of the Tripods.
First on this tape, a repeat of the last episode of The Young Ones, Summer Holiday. I’m fairly sure there’s nothing I can add to everything that’s ever been written about it. But it’s still brilliant. “I was Paul Squires!”
Quick! Get the picture back before Elephanthead starts singing.
I love the fact that these insert gags are fully integrated into the main show – when Elephanthead is squashed when the picture of the living room slides down, he’s squashed under the carpet.
John Otway provides the music.
The reason the show includes a music performance in the middle of the show is so that it qualified as a light entertainment show, and so came out of the Light Ent budget, and not the comedy budget. Apparently.
Lenny Henry appears as a postman. “Give them a uniform and they think they’re Hitler”
Then, recording switches to Channel 4 and Something Evil, It’s an early TV movie directed by Steven Spielberg. Sandy Dennis and Kolchak himself, Darren McGavin buy an old farmhouse in the middle of the countryside. Strange things happen. The old gardener keeps killing chickens and pouring their blood over the field. Two guests at their party are killed in a car crash on the way home. And neighbour Ralph Bellamy tells them stories of having the devil in his house.
She gets interested in mystical symbols – they keep calling them pentacles, but when she draws one on the children’s bedroom floor, it doesn’t look like a pentacle – more than five points, for example.
She grows more and more unhinged as the film goes on, and husband McGavin is away a lot, working as an advertising executive, so he’s already the tool of Satan.
After a lot of atmospheric wandering around with some very wide-angled lenses, finding things in jars that cry like babies, she eventually realises that the devil has actually taken over her son, and rushes to rescue her baby daughter from his room.
It’s a good thing she drew that design on the floor, too, as she’s able to hold her son, giving a very convincing performance as a possessed child, and she drives the devil out by telling the boy she loves him. Which is a reassuringly simple conclusion to the story.
It’s not the best of Spielberg’s early work – that’s obviously Duel, but it’s OK. It does lose points for Darren McGavin’s character getting ‘infer’ and ‘imply’ the wrong way round, though.
After this, there’s a couple of minutes of International Athletics before the recording stops.
In the last episode of this series, the show opens with Ben Elton doing his topical monologue. Then there’s music from “old friends of the show” The Inspirational Choir, although I think this might be the first time I’ve had them on the blog.
Stavros is having to pack up and move out because his local area is being gentrified by ‘puppies’
Comedy from Canada with Rick Ducommun
Music from a new band, Boys Wonder. The singer has a tie with Sex written on it, and the guitarist has a Jim’ll Fix It badge on his guitar. Funny they never made it big.
Fry and Laurie (with help from Ben Elton) do Antiques Roadshow from the future.
Even Harry Enfield makes an appearance, looking like an extra from Mad Max.
Some queasy comedy from Frank Hovis aka Paul Sparkes.
There’s a eurovision entry from Star Turn on 45 pints
Ben has to read an apology to the Hounslow Informer for using their name with a fictitious newspaper article.
Rich Marotta and Twila Zone perform some comedy magic
Fry and Laurie do a sketch about fast food.
Ben Elton does some standup, and there’s more music from the Inspirational Choir, and the credits roll.
But it’s not over, there’s still time for a big closing number. A bit ramshackle…
After this, recording switches to Open Space and an episode called Did You Hear the One About The Englishman, which addresses the issue of racism, sexism and homophobia in stand up comedy.
It’s an uncomfortable watch, to hear a young comic say that he has to use racist material to get a laugh, and ‘at the end of the day you’ve got to get paid’.
There’s contributions from comedians on the other side of the argument, like Mark Steel.
and Jeremy Hardy.
Bernard Manning is particularly malevolent. “If you get a coloured gentleman in the audience he throws his head back and laughs. If he has any sense.”
Paul Jackson tells the story about how a scene in the Young Ones featuring a racist policeman actually led to more racism in playgrounds.
After this programme there’s an advert for French & Saunders live video.
Then there’s the start of Saturday Night Clyde, an arts programme from Glasgow. After a minute, recording stops, and underneath there’s an old movie, I Wake Up Screaming.
Then, the tape ends during an episode of The Twilight Zone called In Praise of Pip starring Jack Klugman.
Adverts:
Lloyd’s Bank – John Sessions, Leo McKern
Heineken
madame Tussauds
Old Spice
Pizza Hut
Cathay Pacific
Hertz – Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker, plus Jimmy Greaves
We’re bouncing back and forth through time with these tapes. Here’s a really early one, with an absolutely brilliant movie, The China Syndrome.
Jane Fonda plays a TV journalist who longs for something more than puff pieces to cover. Her position in the station is shown right at the start, as we see a TV camera’s point of view as she’s fixing her hair and makeup, and we hear two men speaking.
“The red hair was a good idea.”
“We talked about cutting it.”
“What did she say?”
“We haven’t talked to her about it but she’ll do what we tell her.”
“Good.”
After a short piece on singing telegrams, she’s told to go to the Ventana Nuclear Power Plant, for part of a special she’s filming about energy, accompanied by cameraman Michael Douglas (who’s also the film’s producer).
While they’re in the observation gallery for the control room, there’s an event, like a small earthquake. Then we see the action in the control room as Jack Lemmon, the man in charge, tries to deal with the problem. What starts as a routine ‘turbine trip’ goes horribly wrong, as an indicator of reactor water level is stuck showing high water, leading Lemmon to dump water, meaning the nuclear core is almost exposed. They spot the problem just in time, and with some quick thinking, the danger is averted.
This is a great scene. The performances by all the technicians (including Wilford Brimley as a rare old-timer) are great, and they all come across as people who know what they’re doing. It rings very true.
Annoyingly, the end of the scene is slightly marred by LWT mixing to an ad break just as we’re being shown computer printouts telling us it’s all over. Very poor judgement by presentation.
Douglas was filming the whole event from the gallery, but when they get back to the TV station, their boss tells them they can’t run the film. Fonda caves, as she wants to keep her job, rubbish though it currently is. Douglas is angry.
The company that runs the plant is seeking approval for a new plant elsewhere, so it’s rather keen to keep the story under wraps. Wilford Brimley is worried that he’s going to be made a scapegoat for the event. Lemmon asks him “What makes you think they’re looking for a scapegoat?” “Tradition”
Fonda meets Lemmon at the plant’s local bar when she’s looking for Douglas, and they talk about the accident. Lemmon doesn’t agree it was an accident. “The system worked” he tells her. But he’s still worried enough to inspect the pumps around the plant, and finds a small leak.
Douglas, meanwhile, is found at the safety hearings for the new power plant. I think here, the film really tips its political position, as a group of mothers hold up pictures of their small children and ask the panel to think about the children.
Douglas is there to show the film to an expert. His opinion: “You’re probably lucky to be alive. For that matter I think we might say the same for the rest of Southern California”
Lemmon digs deeper, and when he checks the welding x-rays, supposed to show the construction of the plant is good, he notices that a large number of the x-rays have simple been copied, meaning many of the welds have never been checked. When he confronts the inspector who signed off on the reports, he threatens to set his company security on him.
He offers to supply Fonda with samples of the falsified x-rays, so that an expert can use them to testify at the safety hearings, but Fond’a editor, who is taking them to the hearing, is run off the road. Lemmon drives to the hearing, but is followed by some shifty looking fellows, so he pulls off the highway and heads to the power plant to evade them.
He’s horrified that they’re going to run the reactor at full speed, but nobody will listen to him, even Wilford Brimley. So in desperation he grabs the gun of the security guard and tells everyone in the control room t get out. Then he demands to see Fonda, so he can make a broadcast and tell the world what’s going on.
Meanwhile, the executives of the power plant, personified by Richard Herd, who always seems to be cast as the evil management guy, try to think of ways to stop the broadcast happening.
It becomes a tense race between the TV broadcast starting, and a swat team preparing to enter the control room when the plant technicians scram the reactor to distract Lemmon.
This being the 70s, there’s no happy ending for Lemmon, but after the reactor is finally made stable, outside the plant, the plant’s publicity manager is painting Lemmon as a lunatic. “Yes, I did hear a report that he had been drinking.”
So when he wheels on Brimley to attest to the safety of the plant, Fonda asks him what happened, At first he’s monosyllabic. “I don’t know. It’s not my place to say.” But he finally find his courage to speak.
BRIMLEY
Jack Godell was my best friend. I mean these guys
are painting him as some kind of loony. He wasn't
a loony. He was the sanest man I ever knew in my life.
FONDA
And he had reason to believe this plant was not safe?
BRIMLEY
Yeah. I mean he wouldn;t have done what he did if
there wasn't something to it, I mean Jack Godell
he wasn't that kind of guy. I didn't know all the
particulars, He told me a few things. There's
going to be an investigation this time, and the
truth'll come out and people will know my friend
Jack Godell wasn't a lunatic. He was a hero.
Jack Godell was a hero.
This is a great movie, even if you’re uncomfortable with its very strong anti-nuclear position. Well worth watching if you come across it.
After the movie, there’s a trailer for Bonnie and Clyde. Then recording stops and underneath, there’s some kind of drama with Sam Neill. Some IMDb spelunking suggests it’s The Country Girls.
Then, there’s a bit of a treat, with an episode of Who Dares Wins – well, it’s actually The Unrepeatable Who Dares Wins so it might be a compilation. I don’t have much Who Dares Wins in my collection, so it’s nice to find another.
There’s a song called ‘The Welsh are Appalling’ from Philip Pope.
There’s a guest appearance by Frankie Howerd, playing a Frankie Howerd lookalike.
Rory McGrath even uses my home town, Hemel Hempstead, as the punchline to a joke. It’s a good comedy name, Hemel Hempstead.
the tape ends just after this.
Adverts:
trail: Giro City
Allied Sale
Safeway
trail: Ready Steady Go
Hertz
Heroin Screws You Up
Poly Hi-Lights
Quattro
trail: Swank – a fashion show presented by Dawn French, and featuring Alison Moyet and Helen Terry
Here’s another tape of 24. This one was recorded directly from the satellite box, and is therefore in widescreen, a fairly new innovation for me at this time.
I’m not sure, but this might be the first recording I’ve done from BBC Choice, one of the BBC’s first digital-only channels, and the channel that eventually became BBC Three.
I should point out that the Radio Times listing is wrong in listing this as 12-1am. It’s 12-1pm
Charmingly, even though this is a premiere of the episode, BBC Choice decides to squash up the credits to show a trail for 2 Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps.
Before the next episode, there’s the end of Japan TV about music in Japan.
Then there’s a trail for Fields of Gold. Then a trail for Jonathan Ross’s Japanorama.
Then, 1pm-2pm of 24 which is very much a filler episode. Lots of skulking around, Jack’s back at CTU but in custody, Nina’s looking after Terri and Kim, and Palmer is being blackmailed by his supporters. But at least it ends in a bit of a cliffhanger, as Palmer arrives at CTU wanting to talk to Bauer, whom he believes is the assassin.
Next, another episode, this one recorded off the TiVo. There’s a tiny glimpse of Sex in Japan before it jumps to the start of the programme – I suspect I paused recording to skip the trailers. Sorry.
This is another episode where not a lot happens. Palmer realises that Jack is an ally, and they both realise that Jack’s family is being directly targeted, rather than just to put pressure on Jack. And Jack is reinstated at Palmer’s request. Terri finds out she’s pregnant, but doesn’t tell Jack yet.
After this, there’s a trailer for Johnny Vaughan’s World Cup Extra. Plus a general trailer for Sunday Nights on BBC Choice. Then there’s the start of an episode of Diners.
Then, the TiVo menu appears, and after fifteen minutes of this, it flips into live TV, which claims to be Trisha Exposes but looks more like a movie, with two young kids who look like Elijah Wood and Jurassic Park’s Joseph Mazzello, flying a home-made aeroplane next to an airport, whilst being harassed by an abusive father.
That’s my guess, but the recording has no sound, for unknown reasons.
My guess would be Radio Flyer, which I’ve never seen, but definitely fits the pictures. It even has an uncredited appearance by Tom Hanks at the end.
There’s a bunch of Sky Movies stuff after this, but with no sound on the recording, I don’t think there’s much value going through it. There’s a Scooby Doo animated movie, and a bit of The Simpsons in there.
Yes, it’s back to BASIC again. I apologise to those bored by my marathon run through the BBC’s computer literacy project, but it’s my collection, good or bad, and this is how the tapes have fallen.
In the first episode of Micro Live on this tape, Lesley looks at the Game Killer – an add on that interferes with the sprite collision detection of games, and therefore makes them easier to win. There were lots of these kinds of devices – an earlier episode had one that slowed the games down for you.
Next, Freff meets eccentric future brain-in-a-jar Ray “Singularity” Kurzweil. A man so brilliant that synth pioneer Bob Moog was working for him.
His innovations here include a reading machine for the blind, an OCR system, and the Kurzweil computer musical instrument, a very advanced synthesizer/sampler.But his biggest project is an attempt to build a speech recognition, and unlike most of the reports in this programme, his predictions of having true working speech recognition as the norm in ten years time was hugely optimistic. Only in the last few years has speech recognition started to reach the mainstream, with things like Kinect, Siri and Windows 10’s Cortana.
Next, Fred looks at the new Sinclair 128K Spectrum, and talks to Alison Maguire from Sinclair Research.
Mac looks at AMX Pagemaker on the BBC Micro. Look at that quality.
It’s nice to see that Wordwise is one of the supported word processors it can import text from.
Mac’s very honest about his efforts to draw a Spectrum 128. “Well it doesn’t look good to me, it’s rather pathetic.”
Hey look, it’s a Watford Electronics digitiser. I bought my first floppy disc drive from Watford Electronics, back when they were based in a surprisingly small terraced house in Watford.
“Now seriously, we must say at this moment, if you’re going to publish pictures taken off the television, you do need copyright clearance from the broadcasting company.”
The next episode starts with a look back at how technology has changed work, and Shirley Williams is interviewed about the impact of technology on jobs.
In trying to explain why computers hadn’t yet taken over in the office, Fred takes a stroll down Incompatibility Lane.
Next, Mac Talks to Bob Latin, Chief Research Fellow of STC, about his prototype office of tomorrow.
This is possibly one of my favourite demos of the whole series. It’s like he’s bought a Fisher Price my first office, and he thinks it’s all real. “I notice there’s no cord on your telephone.” “No, it’s all cordless. Infra Red.”
However, let’s not scoff too much, as he’s got some things right. His big flat screen, with a touch overlay, is the Windows 10 touch laptops, or the iPad pro.
But, like Ray Kurzweil, his belief in speech recognition being commonplace in the mid 90s was optimistic. As was his proto-Skype.
“By the mid 1990s, you can expect to have the mainframe of today squeezed into a keyboard this size.” Not quite, but it’s more true today. a modern smartphone today has more processing power than the Cray One supercomputer.
I love this demo just for Bob’s absolute confidence that it will happen.
Fred looks at technology changes affecting banking in Italy, and Edward Feigenbaum talks about expert systems, specifically in juggling discount air fares on US flights.
In the next episode, there was a report from the Atari Computer Show. One of the displays compared the Atari ST with the Apple Mac and the Amiga – but they even managed to misspell ‘Macintosh’. Lesley even suggests that in their bouncing ball demo running on all the machines, they might have artificially slowed down the Amiga…
Fred takes a look at the new Atari ST models, and is particularly taken with the adventure game The Pawn.
Lesley visits the training centre for RAF air traffic controllers, to see how micros are being used to supplement the training given to new controllers.
Fred and Lesley look at different programming languages. Fred even looks at Forth again – I didn’t know that Forth was used to program the motion control cameras at Industrial Light and Magic, for Star Wars.
Then there’s a report on whether a home computer is a useful addition to teaching music in schools.
The teacher running the project is the perfectly named Claire Tester.
I love the fact that the program isn’t afraid to be snarky about the technology. “When it comes to printing the notes it scores badly. Here it’s making heavy weather of just producing one line of a stave.” I swear they only included that line for the pun on ‘scores’.
Next, in the final programme of the current series, the programme looks at the RAF Nimrod Mark 2, the early warning aircraft that, at the time, was undergoing a new Mark 3 design that was plagued with problems. The programme looks at the Mark 2 version – I wonder if the RAF offered access for the programme as a bit of positive publicity?
Lesley looks at a new flight simulator game which allows two computers to link up and play together.
John Coll joins Fred to talk about BASIC benchmarks, and they run the same benchmark on four different home micros.
Then Freff looks at a parallel computing system, the non-von 1, as it’s a non Von Neumann machine.
Then Mac talks to Phil Atkin about the Inmos Transputer.
After this, recording switches to ITV for the end of a kids TV show, with Roger Daltrey singing a song.
Then, an episode of Captain Scarlet. In Avalanche, an avalanche protection base is attacked by the Mysterons. Everyone is dead, but there’s nothing toxic in the atmosphere of the air-tight base, and radiation is negative. However, when Lieutenant Green tries to take off his respirator he can’t breath. The Mysterons have removed all the oxygen from the atmosphere.
Interesting credit spot – this episode was written by actor and veteran Anderson voice artist Shane Rimmer.
Next, there’s a show called Secret Valley, from Australia. I don’t remember it, there’s a certain charm in a programme that groups its actors into ‘The Goodies’ and ‘The Baddies’.
After this, the start of an ITN news bulletin. Then the tape ends.
Adverts:
trail: Robin of Sherwood
Splasharound
trail: The A-Team – featuring Andrew Robinson, who we saw yesterday in Dirty Harry.
First on this tape, American Carrott, Jasper Carrott does some stand-up in the US, and there’s some vaguely sitcom interludes of Jasper trying to watch his own show in TV. They’re not entirely successful.
His jokes about gays in San Francisco, and Chinese drivers in Hong Kong feel a little bit behind the times, but I guess it’s the 80s. He does tell a joke about Joe Dolce, though.
But gosh, the interstitial bits are tiresome in the extreme.
Then, recording switches to the end of Panorama, looking at the Nimrod early warning plane.
There’s a trailer for Miss Marple – The Moving Finger.
Then, The Monday Film is Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood’s original maverick cop who doesn’t play by the rules, in Don Siegel’s classic.
It starts off trying to get you onside.
It has a wonderfully funky score by Lalo Schifrin. A score which does something during the titles that I’ve noticed a lot – when the composer’s name appears, often a score will do something different to what it’s been doing. Here’s there’s a new motif that appears in the basses, and it starts just after Schifrin’s credit. I’ve often wondered if this is something a composer is in a position to do. Are the titles locked before the composer does his stuff? Enquiring minds would like to know.
Someone calling himself Scorpio is killing people with a sniper rifle in San Francisco, and demanding money from the city. John Vernon plays the mayor, in basically the same roles as the Principal he played in Animal House. But Harry doesn’t take shit from the Mayor. “When an armed man is chasing a woman with intent to commit rape, I shoot the bastard. That’s my policy.”
When he foils a bank robbery during his lunch break, we get to hear his ‘catchphrase’. Well, that’s stretching the point for what’s virtually a soliloquy.
I know what you’re thinking. Did he fire six shots or only five. To tell you the truth in all this excitement I’ve kinda lost track myself. But being this is a .44 magnum the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question. Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?
It’s fun to count all the hard-boiled cop cliches that were fresh when this movie was made. All his partners were in the hospital or dead, so he’s partnered with a rookie – a Latino rookie called Chico Gonzalez.
Harry gets to talk down a potential suicide from a tall building (the Lethal Weapon films nicked this one). Scorpio wants a bag full of money, and Harry has to run around town to catch ringing phones. This was used in Die Hard with a Vengeance.
The Scorpio killer, played brilliantly by Andrew (or Andy as he’s credited here) Robinson, was inspired by the Zodiac killer, subject of a terrific film with Mark Ruffalo and Jake Gyllenhall and directed by David Fincher. When Harry tracks him down, trying to find him before a kidnapped girl he’s buried alive dies, he’s just the right level of pathetic, crying for a lawyer as Harry treads on his injured leg to try and get the location of the missing girl.
But as a result of Harry’s methods, the DA has no case, as all the evidence found by Harry was inadmissable. And when Scorpio gets someone to beat him up, then claims Harry did it, it looks like he’s got away with it.
But he’s too crazy to leave it there, and he kidnaps a school bus. He’s really scary as he starts to unravel while singing ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’ and the kids are getting more and more scared.
It’s still a great film, and Eastwood has rarely been cooler.
Then, there’s the start of A Change in the Weather, as Bill Giles looks at the way weather forecasting has changed on the BBC. Unfortunately, there’s only 5 minutes of it before the recording ends, as it looks interesting.
Back to classic Cheers. The first episode is The Executive’s Executioner. Norm is given the job of firing people in his firm. At first he can barely do it, spending the whole day putting it off, and then bursting into tears. He thinks this makes him useless at the job, but his company are delighted.
A great episode, particularly for Norm.
The next episode opens with the Channel 4 announcer saying it’s the last episode of Cheers to feature Nicholas Colasanto as Coach. Way to put us in the comedy mood, Channel 4 lady.
Frasier has got a job teaching at the University of Bologna. (Coach: “Do they need a whole university for that? I know it’s a complicated meat…”)
Diane is reluctant to go with him, worried about leaving Sam. And they almost hook up again, but in the end Diane leaves with Frasier, setting up the situation for the rest of the series.
In the next episode, The Bartender’s Tale, Sam is having trouble hiring a new waitress. Carla won’t let him hire a waitress who he’ll just sleep with and dump shortly afterwards, but then Lila Kaye appears as Lillian Huxley. “My turn ons include Hunting Dogs, Thackeray and Welsh Rarebit.”
She’s perfect, and best of all, Sam won’t spoil it by sleeping with her. But then he meets her daughter, and things get complicated.
When she shows Sam her portfolio of lingerie modelling, Sam’s trying to feign disinterest. “I bet they used a F-Stop on that one, huh?”
Another brilliant episode that never goes where you expect. I always thought it was a shame Lillian wasn’t a recurring character.
The next episode is The Belles of St Cletes. Carla spots her old headmistress, who she remembers as a tyrant, and plots her revenge.
And the last episode here is Rescue Me. Frasier proposes to Diane, who has second thoughts and phones Sam. Will he do the romantic thing and get on a plane to go to her?
Another brilliant episode. Diane and Frasier go to the finest restaurant, but discover their renowned chef has just died, and the waiter is finding it hard to cope. Martin Ferrero plays the waiter. In one scene, Diane returns from phoning Sam to find him weeping in Frasier’s arms. “Oh hello, Diane, I was just ordering the chef’s specials.”
This was the end of the series. Interestingly, it didn’t open with a ‘cold opening’ before the credits, but according to Wikipedia where was one featuring Coach. I presume the programme makers removed it after Nicholas Colasanto died.
So I looked it up on YouTube. Here’s the scene in question. It made me cry.
After the last episode, recording stops, and underneath there’s part of an episode of Budgie (which I almost called Birdy) starring Adam Faith and the great Iain Cuthbertson as Charles Endell Esq.
there’s fifteen minutes of this before the recording finally stops.
Adverts:
Our Price – Nils Lofgren – Flip
Austin Rover
Fosters
trail: Hill Street Blues
Paul Masson – Ian Carmichael
Mazda 626
Barclays
Foster’s
Bird’s Eye Steakhouse Burgers – a variant of the ‘Hope it’s chips’ song.
First on this tape, Vertigo, regarded by many as Hitchcock’s greatest film. I’m not sure I agree. It’s a bit of a shaggy dog story, one that lacks the visceral nature of Psycho or the rip-roaring adventure of North by Northwest, but I can see why it appeals. I’m not saying it’s bad, far from it, just that it’s not my favourite of his films.
James Stewart plays John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson, a police detective who we first meet giving chase to a criminal across the San Francisco rooftops, against some unconvincing back projection. He loses his footing, and is overcome by Acrophobia and Vertigo as he hangs on, leading to a policeman slipping and falling to his death below him. He hasn’t been back to work since. and he’s looking forward to retiring.
He’s friends with Barbara Bel Geddes’ Midge, a designer. In an early scene they discuss a brand new design of brassiere. “Works on the principle of the cantilever bridge. An aircraft engineer down the peninsula designed it. He worked it out in his spare time.” I wonder if that’s a reference to the story that Howard Hughes supposedly designed a bra for Jane Russell in The Outlaw.
Stewart is hired by an old friend, Gavin Elster, who’s worried about his wife. He seems to think that she’s somehow become posessed by the spirit of a dead woman, and she’ll go out all day and not know where she’s been. He wants Stewart to follow her to see where she goes, and he agrees.
Elster’s wife, Madeleine, is played by Kim Novak, and Stewart follows her around for a day. She appears to be fascinated by Carlotta, a woman who lived in the city a long time ago.
It’s all very mysterious, and Stewart doesn’t really know what to make of it all. Then, when she falls into the San Francisco Bay and he has to pull her out, he finally gets to meet her.
Her husband is worried. Madeleine is the same age as Carlotta was when she committed suicide.
So Stewart keeps tailing Novak, and she starts confiding with him, until, at the edge of the ocean, with waves crashing behind them, they start kissing. Hitchcock is nothing if not heavy with the metaphors.
Stewart is convinced he can cure Madeleine of her ‘delusions’. But when he takes her to an old mission church, preserved from 100 years ago, she still remembers having been there as Carlotta.
Then, wouldn’t you know it, she runs into the church and starts climbing the tower. Stewart tries to follow, but his vertigo holds him back. This is one of Htichcock’s most famous sequences, and features his ‘zoom-dolly’ shot where the camera zooms out at the same time as it moves forward, which keeps the foreground at the same size, but stretches the background in a strange way. Famously, Steven Spielberg used the same shot (in reverse though) for the shot of Roy Scheider seeing the shark attack on the beach in Jaws.
He’s still climbing the tower when she reaches the top, runs outside, then he hears her scream and sees her plunge to her death through the window.
Although he’s not officially blamed for her death by the inquest, the coroner makes some very pointed remarks about him, and he’s still plagued by guilt, as shown by the dream he has, which also sees him auditioning for Doctor Who five years too early.
And when he meets Judy Barton, a woman who looks uncannily like Madeleine, he sets about transforming her into Madeleine.
There’s a lot to like in Vertigo – Bernard Herrman’s score is lovely, and is a big part of the movie’s atmosphere. But the story is incredibly slight, and mostly consists of James Stewart stalking Kim Novak in her various personas. And the ending is a touch ridiculous, if we’re honest (although who hasn’t been frightened to death by a nun in the past).
After Vertigo, back to safe ground for me, with yet another episode of Micro Live. (I apologise for any regular readers with no interest in the 8-bit computer scene of the 80s, but it’s my adolescence and early adulthood, as well as my career, so I do have a lot of stuff in that area.)
Fred looks at portable computers, including the new Sinclair Z88. I wrote a version of Spellmaster from the Z88 which required me to
Learn Z80 machine code
Disassemble the internal Z88 code to see how it stored text
Write my own Z80 assembler, because the cross-assemblers that were available were rubbish
We also had to use a specially made circuit board that emulated a ROM chip, but actually contained battery-backed RAM, and could be written to by an Archimedes. I’d write the software on the Archie, assemble and build the ROM, then transmit that to the RAM board, which I’d then test on the Z88 itself. It’s a wonder anything worked at all. Coupled with an operating system that couldn’t allocate much more than 256 bytes of RAM in one go, it was a tricky job.
Then there’s a look at Walt Disney’s EPCOT centre and the technology that goes into creating a theme park. I presume that a lot of this footage is not originally filmed by the BBC, because here’s animator Ward Kimball looking over some audio-animatronic characters. I doubt the BBC would happen to have been there for that.
The trip there was part of a competition for young computer enthusiasts, won by 11 year old Joanna Dudney.
The second part of the EPCOT report looks at the dolphins in EPCOT.
Then, the show looks at Desktop Publishing. Here’s Fred and an Apple LaserWriter.
When I was working at Computer Concepts, we’d produce our own manuals. In my very early days, Rob Pickering was the general manager, and he’d write the manuals in Wordwise Plus, but he’d add special markup to the text. Wordwise Plus had a way of embedding printer codes in the text. It was usually used with the old dot matrix printers to set things like bold, underline, italic (if your printer had it) etc. each printer manufacturer had a different set of codes, so Wordwise let you define what your printer codes were, and let you create custom codes if your printer did special things.
Rob had devised a set of codes for writing manuals which, when combined with a colour dot matrix printer (swanky!) would allow him to print out proofs of the manuals, with different colours for things like headings, sub headings, code listings, etc.
But when he came to actually produce the finished manual, this needed a file which our printer and typesetter could read, and Rob would change the printer codes output by Wordwise to markup that the typesetter could understand. I can’t remember the details, or the kind of typesetter used, as Rob was the only person who understood that system, but it was enough to get the marked up text into the typesetter, and produce beautiful typeset documentation.
Needless to say, when we got a Macintosh, and especially when we got one of the original LaserWriters, it was something akin to a miracle. Here was a device, sitting on a desk in our office, that could produce beautiful pages, using real fonts (Palatino was a favourite in our manuals) that looked like they had been typeset. Even though the LaserWriter was only 300dpi, crude by today’s standards, it looked gorgeous. You could do anything.
Well, that’s as long as your Mac word processor didn’t keep crashing, and losing 15 pages of work. In those floppy-only days, that happened to me more than once. But it was clear the future was here.
In the years that followed, at Computer Concepts we wrote our own DTP software, Impression, which even won an award which I was proud to pick up on behalf of the team. So I got to know the ins and outs of DTP quite well. But at the stage this programme went out, it was all new horizons.
Anyway, back to the programme. Ventura Publisher gets a demo, and he drops in a graphic. “That’s the lens of a camera” says Mac.
I can see why he thought that, but no, that’s a familiar demo drawing, originally from AutoCAD, of the nozzle of a firehose. It was often used as a demo line-art sample, and was often used as a timing test for graphics packages.
VHiStory 