Creative Technology Consultants

We’re pleased to be able to tell you about the new book from our friend Mar­i­an­na Lines. An author­i­ty on ancient sites, espe­cial­ly in Scot­land where she lives, Mar­i­an­na is also a tal­ent­ed artist. Her book is avail­able now from all the usu­al places, includ­ing your local book­store and those online peo­ple who don’t pay their tax­es. The Trav­eller’s Guide to Sacred Scot­land is pub­lished by Goth­ic Image in Glastonbury.

The Trav­eller’s Guide to Sacred Scotland
A Guide To Scot­land’s Ancient Sites and Sacred Places
Mar­i­an­na Lines

Buy from the pub­lish­ers, Goth­ic Image

The first guide­book to weave togeth­er the cul­tur­al, his­tor­i­cal and spir­i­tu­al aspects of this fas­ci­nat­ing coun­try, it will enhance the expe­ri­ence of the arm­chair trav­eller as well as any pil­grim to the ancient mag­i­cal land of Scotland.

Scot­land has a rich pre­his­to­ry stretch­ing from Neolith­ic times through the Bronze and Iron Ages. She has islands from the mag­nif­i­cent Orkneys and Shet­lands to the Out­er Hebrides and the Uists, the Isle of Skye and the Inner Hebrides. Each one is renowned for its ancient sanc­ti­ty. Scot­land was home to many dif­fer­ent cul­tures includ­ing the Norse, Picts and Celts. She has a par­tic­u­lar­ly unique and stun­ning land­scape with holy moun­tains, spec­tac­u­lar lochs and sacred trees. The High­lands with their Pic­tish set­tle­ments and carved stand­ing stones offer yet anoth­er kind of awe-inspir­ing beau­ty. Fairy folk­lore, poets and bards, Arthuri­an and Mer­lin relat­ed sites, Celtic Chris­t­ian foun­da­tions and their Saints are all to be found in this land.

This guide­book not only takes the read­er on an inspir­ing jour­ney of dis­cov­ery into Scot­land’s past, but, also, offers direc­tions to places regard­ed by Scots them­selves of spe­cial impor­tance, what they mean and their rel­e­vance today.

• Pub­lished : 03/11/2014
• ISBN : 9780906362761
• For­mat : Paperback
• Imprint : Goth­ic Image Publications
• Size (mm): 110 x 215
• Cat­e­go­ry: Travel
• Pages : 500
• Price £16.99

I love Shake­speare, but I’ve nev­er real­ly thought of per­form­ing any.

How­ev­er when we were prepar­ing for the Relay For Life of Sec­ond Life Telethon, sev­er­al mem­bers of the team were invit­ed to record a series of poems to be played dur­ing the Lumi­nar­ia cer­e­mo­ny (one of the most mov­ing parts of the event).

Lantern release dur­ing the Lumi­nar­ia cer­e­mo­ny — image by Beq Janus

The Lumi­nar­ia Cer­e­mo­ny occurs at every Relay For Life event, whether in the organ­ic world, or as in our case, in a vir­tu­al world. As the sun sets, lumi­nar­ia lin­ing the track light up the night. A hush falls over the crowd that had been over­flow­ing with cel­e­bra­tion. Par­tic­i­pants, sur­vivors, and care­givers then gath­er to remem­ber loved ones lost to can­cer and to hon­our those whose fight con­tin­ues. The cer­e­mo­ny in Sec­ond Life includ­ed a won­der­ful addi­tion­al fea­ture: the releas­ing of illu­mi­nat­ed Chi­nese lanterns into the night sky (see Beq’s pic­ture above, tak­en in front of her amaz­ing Esch­er build that you can just make out).

The offi­cial com­men­tary is car­ried by T1 Radio, and they read a list of names, between which they play pieces of music. Now, they have a licence to play com­mer­cial records, but we don’t, so this year they kind­ly gave us a run­ning order and tim­ings and we were able to deter­mine what was to go in the slots occu­pied by music in their cov­er­age, so we could “opt out” to our own audio pro­gram­ming. This was the pur­pose of the pre-record­ed poems. Mem­bers of our team put these record­ings togeth­er with pro­duc­tion music (main­ly by Kevin MacLeod, see cred­it below) to cre­ate a series of real­ly beau­ti­ful sequences, which I will hope­ful­ly be able to link to for you short­ly where they’ll have full cred­its — they’re being assem­bled into a series of short videos accom­pa­nied by images of this year’s campsites.

One of the two pieces I chose to record was this speech from Pros­pero in The Tempest:

Our rev­els now are end­ed. These our actors,
As I fore­told you, were all spir­its, and
Are melt­ed into air, into thin air;
And, like the base­less fab­ric of this vision,
The cloud-capped tow­ers, the gor­geous palaces,
The solemn tem­ples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inher­it, shall dissolve;
And, like this insub­stan­tial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our lit­tle life
Is round­ed with a sleep. (IV.i.148–158)

In addi­tion to send­ing the voice-only record­ing off to the guys for incor­po­rat­ing in the sequence, I found a piece of music [Vir­tutes Instru­men­ti, Com­posed and per­formed by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Cre­ative Com­mons: By Attri­bu­tion 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/] and ran it under the voice record­ing. As it will nev­er be used for any­thing, here it is, and I hope you like it:

Pros­per­o’s Speech with music — click to play

My atten­tion was drawn to a rather inter­est­ing arti­cle in the Wash­ing­ton Post late last year on the use of “his­tor­i­cal” FX in the movie “Lin­coln”. Spiel­berg actu­al­ly tried very hard to cap­ture “authen­tic” sound effects — Lin­col­n’s actu­al pock­et watch tick­ing, the ring of the bell of the church he attend­ed, and so on.

Quite a lot of the time, in my expe­ri­ence, record­ing actu­al sounds does­n’t give you as effec­tive a result as fak­ing it with some­thing else, but with sounds like those men­tioned in the arti­cle, you can see why it might be worth chas­ing the orig­i­nals. Apart from the fact that peo­ple notice when details are wrong — the BBC used to get let­ters if they used the sound of the wrong vin­tage plane in a radio play, for exam­ple, and they prob­a­bly still do — there’s an inter­est­ing philo­soph­i­cal dimen­sion here, about what we mean by “authen­tic”.

In the days of phono­graphs and cylin­ders, it was com­mon to make record­ings of famous peo­ple mak­ing famous speech­es and oth­er spo­ken mate­r­i­al. Very often these were not record­ed by the actu­al per­son claimed. But the degree of “real­ism” — or may we say “authen­tic­i­ty” — was judged by how well the per­former rep­re­sent­ed the orig­i­nal per­son, not by whether or not it was the orig­i­nal per­son mak­ing the recording.

Sim­i­lar­ly, we can read reviews of Clé­ment Ader’s his­toric stereo relays from the Paris Opera House to the World Expo in Paris in 1881 and be sur­prised that lis­ten­ers found the expe­ri­ence of lis­ten­ing to a pair of ear­ly mov­ing-coil tele­phone ear­pieces fed by car­bon micro­phones down hun­dreds of metres of wire so real­is­tic. Sure­ly it was noth­ing like hi-fi as we know it.

Exact­ly what we mean by “authen­tic­i­ty” has cer­tain­ly changed over the years. And there is a dis­tinct dif­fer­ence between accu­ra­cy and expe­ri­ence. When I’m in the stu­dio, I try to do my best to ensure that the lis­ten­er at home or on the move hears as close as pos­si­ble to what we heard in the con­trol room when we played back the mas­ter mix and said “That’s the one”. Is this a rea­son­able thing to seek to achieve? Or should we be striv­ing to give peo­ple the best expe­ri­ence, regard­less of authen­tic­i­ty? I touched on this the oth­er day refer­ring to mim­ing at the Pres­i­den­tial Inau­gu­ra­tion: def­i­nite­ly a case of going for the best experience.

To me, you can apply the old slo­gan “The clos­est approach to the orig­i­nal sound” to any record­ing as long as you know what you mean by the “orig­i­nal sound”. In my opin­ion this is gen­er­al­ly the mas­ter play­back, not what it sound­ed like out in the stu­dio. In the case of mul­ti­track lay­ered pop­u­lar music this is obvi­ous­ly the case. But how about a record­ing of a string quar­tet? Are you try­ing to give peo­ple the audio expe­ri­ence they would hear in a con­cert hall (I say “the audio expe­ri­ence” because you would be miss­ing all the non-audi­ble cues), or are you try­ing to give them the expe­ri­ence you had when you signed off the mas­ter play­back? Well, prob­a­bly, the latter.

It would be worth point­ing out that lis­ten­ing to con­cert-hall record­ings is fre­quent­ly not very much like being there, because you only hear the music. Even if you record­ed the con­cert Ambison­i­cal­ly, cap­tured the entire sound­field and played it back fault­less­ly, you would only have cap­tured the audio of the event, not the expe­ri­ence. This being the case, what is often done is to make the record­ing more live­ly and excit­ing to make up for the non-audio aspects of the per­for­mance. Close mics, changes of dynam­ics, and oth­er tech­niques do make the play­back more involv­ing. In my opin­ion there is noth­ing wrong with this as long as it’s not dis­hon­est­ly pre­sent­ed. Once again, the orig­i­nal sound is what’s heard in the con­trol-room, not in the con­cert-hall — and that’s what you should be want­i­ng peo­ple to hear at home.

It’s all very well claim­ing to ref­er­ence play­back sys­tems to the sound of actu­al musi­cal instru­ments, but that begs all kinds of — gen­er­al­ly unan­swer­able — ques­tions about how you estab­lished the sound of the instru­ments in the first place. What was your ref­er­ence? Where did you hear them? How far away were you? Who was play­ing what? What was heard in the stu­dio on mas­ter play­back, how­ev­er, is a per­fect ref­er­ence: it’s what the pro­duc­tion team thought was the best rep­re­sen­ta­tion of every aspect of the music, the com­pos­er, the artist and the per­for­mance — and more. They regard­ed it as the best com­mu­ni­ca­tion between all those fac­tors and the per­son lis­ten­ing to the record­ing. And, in my opin­ion, it’s the only thing you can rea­son­ably expect to try to recre­ate for the listener.

For a fur­ther con­sid­er­a­tion of the philo­soph­i­cal impli­ca­tions of “authen­tic­i­ty”, in the con­text of “Lin­coln”, check out this blog post.

More or less since we moved this site from being a con­ven­tion­al sta­t­ic web site to a Word­Press envi­ron­ment based around the The­sis meta-theme, the head­er image has been ran­dom­ly select­ed: each time you vis­it­ed the site, you would see a dif­fer­ent image.

This is actu­al­ly very easy to do — there is a tuto­r­i­al here — and it’s worked well. How­ev­er, the oth­er day I thought it would be rather neat for the head­er to con­sist of essen­tial­ly a slideshow of the avail­able images, gen­tly crossfading.

One of the neat things about Word­Press is that there are a great many plu­g­ins out there, many of them free, which you can locate to do things like this. For the Radio Riel site, I used a plu­g­in called the Smart Slideshow Wid­get, for exam­ple (it replaced a rather fid­dly flash slideshow that I used on the old RR site). The wid­get appears in the left side­bar to dis­play a con­tin­u­ous and ran­dom­ly-rotat­ing set of logos for the sta­tion’s spon­sors. How­ev­er, this sys­tem only pro­vides a wid­get: you can’t use it for a head­er image.

Go and search Word­Press plu­g­ins for slideshows and you will find a great many, but most of them are a lot clev­er­er than I want­ed. I just want­ed to be able to stuff a set of images in a fold­er and have them dis­play for a set peri­od and cross­fade over a set time. I def­i­nite­ly want­ed to avoid flash (if I did­n’t, I already have the tools to cre­ate flash slideshows, but flash is… a pain). This left me essen­tial­ly with Javascript as the way to do the cross­fad­ing, and JQuery (already run­ning on this site) or one of the oth­er libraries will do that and lots more.

Many of the slideshow sys­tems used the stan­dard Word­Press media upload sys­tem, which again was rather more than I need­ed. I start­ed to install one of them and noticed that it messed with the Fea­tured Image fea­ture of Word­Press. This rather warned me off, as I am already mess­ing with the Fea­tured Image capa­bil­i­ty to get it to work with The­sis — I’m using Word­Press Fea­tured Image for The­sis Theme from The­sis­tut, and I did­n’t want to mess that up. And any­way, it was more com­pli­cat­ed than I needed.

I final­ly found what I was look­ing for in the form of Cimy Head­er Image Rota­tor from Mar­co Cim­mi­no. The plu­g­in gives you some use­ful dis­play options, such as a “Ken Burns Effect” instead of a sim­ple cross­fade — that’s the ros­trum cam­era effect used exten­sive­ly by film-mak­er Ken Burns, notably in his land­mark series The Civ­il War (and now appar­ent­ly a require­ment for any PBS doc­u­men­tary), where rather than sim­ply dis­play a sta­t­ic image, you gen­tly zoom in on it. The plu­g­in also lets you include a cap­tion and a link — either for all the images or for each.

The plu­g­in has an upload fold­er (and you can actu­al­ly upload addi­tion­al files right in the plu­g­in, which was a bonus) and once you’ve defined the para­me­ters you get a bit of code to copy and paste into the appro­pri­ate The­sis hook (if you’re using The­sis), in my case the hook after the head­er. I replaced the exist­ing ran­dom sta­t­ic head­er code with the new piece and it worked straight away.

Of course I want­ed to tweak it a bit. I need­ed to change the size and posi­tion of the head­er image pan­el a lit­tle, which was easy, and want­ed to alter the way the cap­tions were dis­played. The default is a lit­tle black lozenge (aka a round-cor­nered box) at the cen­tre bot­tom of the image with the text in white. I tried drop­ping the lozenge and using a CSS drop shad­ow in black behind the text to pop the cap­tion out of the image, whether it was dark or light, but the drop shad­ow was­n’t strong enough to do the job on real­ly pale back­grounds. Even­tu­al­ly I low­ered the cap­tion to just under the image and made it black.

More tricky (and unsolved cur­rent­ly), I want­ed to move the cap­tion to be ranged left  rather than cen­tred. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the cap­tion is posi­tioned with respect to the entire brows­er win­dow, and I have the page cen­tred in the win­dow so if you enlarge the win­dow you get more air around the page equal­ly on either side. This is fine if the cap­tion is cen­tred, but if it isn’t, you can’t define the loca­tion of the cap­tion rel­a­tive to the image. I will sort this out anoth­er day. In the mean­time, enjoy the pics.

I won­der if any read­ers watched the fas­ci­nat­ing BBC series The Secret His­to­ry Of Our Streets a few months ago, which traced 150 years of social his­to­ry of sev­er­al Lon­don locations.

In the intro there was a view of a fas­ci­nat­ing “dark Satan­ic mills” kind of city (see above), pre­sent­ed in a con­text in which you would imag­ine it was rep­re­sent­ing Vic­to­ri­an Lon­don. But if you look for a moment at the image, you’ll see at once that there was nev­er a Lon­don quite like that.

In fact it was a brief clip from a movie called Franklyn — and believe it or not, I know about this movie sole­ly because, intrigued by that intro­duc­to­ry image, I cap­tured the frame, stuck it into Google Image Search, and looked at what came up. Hence I came to this film four years after it came out.

Franklyn (not the world’s most inspired title, but it is actu­al­ly quite impor­tant to the action) tells a very nice­ly detailed and inter­twined tale of four char­ac­ters and moves between mod­ern Lon­don and a kind of neo-Steam­punk-medi­ae­val ana­logue, “Mean­while City”, in which all the inhab­i­tants are oblig­ed to have a reli­gion of some sort. It’s a very noir, Steam­punk, SF, psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller. There’s a cer­tain amount of vio­lence, which I don’t go for in gen­er­al but here it’s fair­ly essen­tial to the sto­ry: that is prob­a­bly what earned it a 15 cer­tifi­cate in the UK (and “R” in the US).

The film fea­tures gor­geous cos­tumes and CGI, yet on a rel­a­tive­ly small bud­get. Not only that, it’s a British film, with British fund­ing too, writ­ten and direct­ed by Ger­ald McMor­row. It was his first fea­ture, and con­sid­er­ing the com­plex­i­ty of the plot and the visu­al require­ments of the sto­ry, he does extreme­ly well IMO. Mor­row wrote it him­self, inspired by a short film of his, Thes­pi­an X.

The Mean­while City seg­ments are beau­ti­ful­ly done, and that’s where the CGI is con­cen­trat­ed, of course. The bud­get was able to be rel­a­tive­ly small by virtue of the fact that only around 20% of the movie requires top-lev­el effects like city-build­ing and recre­ation of busy streets with all man­ner of char­ac­ters milling about. The detail in the par­al­lel world is excel­lent, and the cos­tumes are won­der­ful and wondrous.

Yes, there are faint echoes of oth­er films here (notably V for Vendet­ta, some have sug­gest­ed, but apart from a char­ac­ter in a mask and a Lon­don set­ting most of the time, that’s about the extent of the similarity).

Reviews at the time of release (2008) were mixed, but that just shows how review­ers have dif­fi­cul­ty with sophis­ti­cat­ed plot-lines: it worked fine for me, and although there were some details that weren’t quite under­stand­able until you’d seen the film through, real­is­ing what those details meant after­wards was part of the appeal (I felt the same about Sixth Sense for exam­ple). And I do like a film where I can’t tell what’s going to hap­pen or how it’s going to end.

Some crit­i­cised it for not devel­op­ing the char­ac­ters suf­fi­cient­ly, but in fact I was­n’t con­scious of that. We learn about them grad­u­al­ly as the sto­ry evolves. We need to learn about them grad­u­al­ly, because the entire plot revolves around the con­flu­ence of the char­ac­ters and giv­ing us their back-sto­ries up front would be ruinous. Like Sixth Sense, you do not want to know too much about this sto­ry before­hand (don’t watch the fas­ci­nat­ing “Mak­ing of” extra on the DVD until after you’ve seen the film, for example).

Yes, there are some issues with this film, but they’re minor IMO and it’s def­i­nite­ly worth a look. Actu­al­ly two looks, because once you know how it ends, you’ll find you can sud­den­ly grasp some lit­tle sub­tleties through­out the film that per­haps passed you by. There are even some ele­ments of humour that are sur­pris­ing­ly appropriate.

And look out for the impres­sive dif­fer­ent use of colour and shoot­ing approach for each char­ac­ter. Mean­while City is all earthy tones, for exam­ple, with lit­tle or no blue. Scenes involv­ing the char­ac­ter Sal­ly are always warm and well-lit. Mr Ess­er senior is often seen in sil­hou­ette, in the mid­dle dis­tance, with cool colours tend­ing towards the blue. And so on. You may also notice (well, you will now) that as the action shifts back and forth between the two worlds, each loca­tion in Lon­don has a cor­re­spond­ing loca­tion in Mean­while City that echoes it visu­al­ly or at least functionally.

Here’s the offi­cial trailer:

The movie also has a very effec­tive sound­track by tal­ent­ed com­pos­er Joby Tal­bot (Once Around the Sun, Hitch­hik­er’s Guide to the Galaxy, Divine Com­e­dy, etc) with an impres­sive major the­mat­ic element.

Rec­om­mend­ed.

I recent­ly had occa­sion to cre­ate a cou­ple of Face­book Apps for a client, to be accessed from tabs under the main time­line image on a busi­ness page.

There are plen­ty of tuto­ri­als around on how to do this, but I found a cou­ple of pit­falls that don’t seem to be men­tioned in the write­ups I’ve seen.

Face­book Page Tabs

One of the many things that has changed about Face­book recent­ly is the way that tabs on Busi­ness Pages are han­dled — this hap­pened from April this year.

To begin with, you can no longer set up a tab as a land­ing page so non-fans who arrive at the page see it auto­mat­i­cal­ly: tabs are sim­ply list­ed with thumb­nail images under the head­er image. And while the con­tent was pre­vi­ous­ly lim­it­ed to 520px width, you can now choose 810px wide as an alternative.

I was cre­at­ing the very sim­plest of Face­book Apps: ones that sim­ply call what is essen­tial­ly a web page that gets embed­ded in a Face­book page with the Face­book equiv­a­lent of an iframe. The basic tuto­r­i­al on this pro­vid­ed by Face­book can be found here.

To do this, you log into Face­book as a Devel­op­er (https://developers.facebook.com) using your usu­al cre­den­tials. Just to right of cen­tre in the blue Face­book strip at the top of the page you’ll see “Apps”. Click this link and it shows you any apps you have cre­at­ed pre­vi­ous­ly and there’s a but­ton top right called “Cre­ate New App”.

As described in the tuto­ri­als, you need to give your new app a Dis­play Name that appears beneath it on the Page; a unique Name­space; and a sup­port con­tact email address. Then from the pop-up menu “Cat­e­go­ry”, choose “Apps for Pages”. For this sim­ple app, that’s all you need in the top sec­tion. The tricky bit is next.

Select­ing how your app inte­grates with Facebook

You now select how your app inte­grates with Face­book. Select­ing “Page Tab” is obvi­ous. You give the Page Tab a name; and sup­ply secure and non-secure URLs. These point at the web loca­tion where the HTML con­tent you want to dis­play insert­ed on the Face­book page can be found. Pro­vid­ing a secure URL (ie one accessed via https:) is manda­to­ry. It does­n’t seem to mat­ter if the two URLs point to the same place, but I would sug­gest it’s a lot eas­i­er if they can, and your serv­er is set up to serve both secure and non-secure content.

It may not be oblig­a­tory, but it turns out to be sim­plest if the URLs point to a direc­to­ry in which the desired con­tent is the default page: in oth­er words, call your page “index.html” or what­ev­er your serv­er is set up to serve as default, and put it in a direc­to­ry, for exam­ple one named after the appli­ca­tion. So you might have a URL like “http://myserver.com/facebook/welcome/” — in oth­er words, the URL points at a direc­to­ry. This is what you want to enter into the Page Tab URL slot: with the for­ward-slash on the end.

You don’t need to pro­vide a page tab edit URL. What you prob­a­bly will want to include is a 111 x 74px image to appear in the box under the head­er on the main Face­book Page.

In addi­tion, select the width of the insert­ed HTML mate­r­i­al. You can use the orig­i­nal 520px width or the new 810px. Remem­ber that whichev­er you choose, the HTML will be dis­played on a blank white page with a Face­book blue strip at the top and lit­tle else: it should work visu­al­ly in this envi­ron­ment. It turns out that the width is not quite as straight­for­ward as it appears, as will be seen below.

On the face of it, you’re now done as far as the Face­book side of the set­up is con­cerned. Wrong. There is anoth­er step you need to take, and that is to click the check-mark next to “App on Face­book”. This asks you to enter Can­vas URL and Secure Can­vas URL. Enter exact­ly the same URLs as you used above. This step is not obvi­ous (don’t you just need to select Page Tab? No.) but if you don’t do it, you will get an error 191 when you try to add the App to a page. I have not seen this doc­u­ment­ed any­where: have you? And if you look up Error 191, you’ll find that absolute­ly every­one gets this error and that nobody has sug­gest­ed that fill­ing in the “App on Face­book” tab is the solu­tion, or what should go in there.

Once the above has been com­plet­ed, you can go off and cre­ate your mini-pages that will be stored at the URLs above and will be dis­played in an iframe on the Face­book page when vis­i­tors click on your app tab.

You can cre­ate the HTML in your favourite edi­tor: I use Dreamweaver, but you can even cre­ate it in the Post Edi­tor in Word­Press, then click the HTML tab in the Edi­tor and copy the code out, save it in a file with the right name, and upload it to the server.

In my case I had a 520px-wide x 775px high image and I sim­ply placed it cen­tred on the page and cre­at­ed a local image map to allow me to make it click­able, with dif­fer­ent parts of the image tak­ing vis­i­tors to dif­fer­ent URLs on the clien­t’s main web site. The clien­t’s for­mat involves black back­grounds, and the image had this, so I set the page back­ground colour to black too, just in case. This proved to be inadvisable.

Adding the App to a Page

Once the page con­tent is in posi­tion on your serv­er, you are essen­tial­ly done, and you can go back to Face­book and enter the spe­cial URL that allows you to select which of the Pages you admin­is­ter the App should be added to. Why this isn’t eas­i­er is beyond me. A but­ton would have been nice. The URL is:

https://www.facebook.com/dialog/pagetab?app_id=YOUR_APP_ID&next=YOUR_URL

You get the App ID from the Set­tings page of your App, in the top sec­tion. The “Your URL” is the tricky bit. It’s the Can­vas URL, and this is why it needs to be there. If it isn’t, then what­ev­er you put in there, you’ll get the 191 error, which seems to relate to where the app redi­rects you to when you click on it.

All being well, though, you will get a nice lit­tle page that allows you to choose one of the pages you admin­is­ter and add the App to the Page. You can then go to the Page and move the order of the tabs around to suit you (the “Pho­tos” tab has to be first, for some rea­son, but you can move the oth­ers by swap­ping them around).

When 520px is actu­al­ly 512

If you cre­at­ed the page the way I described above, with an image and imagemap, you will notice straight away that it has­n’t quite worked. The same is true if you sliced your image into bits, each with its own linked, and posi­tioned them with a table. You will (prob­a­bly, I assume it was­n’t just me) see hor­i­zon­tal and ver­ti­cal scroll bars. WTF?

By sim­ply reduc­ing the width one pix­el at a time I dis­cov­ered that both scroll bars go away if you set the width to 512px. Nowhere have I seen this doc­u­ment­ed, so I would be fas­ci­nat­ed to know under what cir­cum­stances this appears. So I trimmed the image a lit­tle so that it was 512px wide and lo! It worked!

And now you run into anoth­er lit­tle aes­thet­ic issue. You’ll recall that I had my image on a black back­ground. So I look at my image on the Face­book page and I notice a black strip down the left-hand side. It turns out that this strip is 8px wide. Hmmm. The image has to be 512 or it shows scroll bars, but it is placed in a 520px-wide space. Odd. Not only that, the image is ranged right in the space, even though the HTML cen­tres it on the page. This appears to be the case what­ev­er image posi­tion­ing you use.

As a result, I had to remove the black back­ground from the page, instead set­ting it to white, the back­ground colour of the Face­book page. Nobody will notice that the image is 8px to the right.

Sit­u­at­ed near the SW Sicil­ian coast is the town of Agri­gen­to, home of the so-called “Val­ley of the Tem­ples” (Valle dei Tem­pli), a ridge of land above the ancient city that is the site of a lin­ear clus­ter of (main­ly) Ancient Greek ruins, many of which are quite spec­tac­u­lar — the place is well worth a vis­it. It is a UNESCO World Her­itage site.

In addi­tion to the Greek and Byzan­tine remains, there is the Vil­la Aurea, which was home to 19th Cen­tu­ry British mil­i­tary offi­cer and archae­o­log­i­cal patron Alexan­der Hard­cas­tle, who financed, among oth­er things, the re-erec­tion of the pil­lars at the Tem­ple of Her­a­cles on the site.

Today, the Valle dei Tem­pli is not sim­ply a col­lec­tion of ancient sites: it’s also a loca­tion for mod­ern art which is dis­trib­uted among the ruins and else­where, such as in the Villa.

Thus it was that on a recent vis­it I encoun­tered this remark­able piece of stat­u­ary in the Vil­la Aurea gar­den, in bril­liant, shiny white mate­r­i­al show­ing a group of fash­ion­ably-dressed young peo­ple poised to kill one of their num­ber with var­i­ous weapons. What on Earth was this amaz­ing piece of work? There was no indi­ca­tion on or near the piece to indi­cate its ori­gin or significance.

After a sur­pris­ing­ly lengthy Inter­net search, I found the answer. It is a (small) part of a mul­ti­me­dia col­lec­tion of works by the Moscow-based art group “AES+F” titled Last Riot/Last Riot 2.

AES+F are named after their ini­tials: the group, found­ed in 1987, was orig­i­nal­ly AES — Tatiana Arza­maso­va, Lev Evzovich and Evge­ny Svy­atsky — but they were lat­er joined by pho­tog­ra­ph­er Vladimir Frid­kes — hence the “+F”.

Last Riot first appeared in 2007 at the Venice Bien­ni­al as a three-screen video pro­vid­ing win­dows into a high­ly detailed 3D vir­tu­al envi­ron­ment, inspired appar­ent­ly by the US Army video game “Amer­i­ca’s Army”, cre­at­ed to encour­age young peo­ple to enlist. You can see excerpts from it here:

AES+F say about the work:
“The vir­tu­al world gen­er­at­ed by the real world of the past twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry as the organ­ism com­ing from a test-tube, expands, leav­ing its bor­ders and grasp­ing new zones, absorbs its founders and mutates in some­thing absolute­ly new. In this new world the real wars look like a game on www.americasarmy.com, and prison tor­tures appear sadis­tic exer­cis­es of mod­ern valkyr­ias. Tech­nolo­gies and mate­ri­als trans­form the arti­fi­cial envi­ron­ment and tech­niques into a fan­ta­sy land­scape of the new epos. This par­adise also is a mutat­ed world with frozen time where all past epoch the neigh­bor with the future, where inhab­i­tants lose their sex, and become clos­er to angels. The world, where any most severe, vague or erot­ic imag­i­na­tion is nat­ur­al in the fake unsteady 3D per­spec­tive. The heroes of new epos have only one iden­ti­ty, the iden­ti­ty of the rebel of last riot. The last riot, where all are fight­ing against all and against them­selves, where no dif­fer­ence exists any more between vic­tim and aggres­sor, male and female. This world cel­e­brates the end of ide­ol­o­gy, his­to­ry and ethic.”

In addi­tion to the video, there are series of glossy white sculp­tures of which the exam­ple at the Vil­la is one, and remark­able still images fea­tur­ing the same weaponised, brand-name-dressed young peo­ple, in a kind of super­re­al­is­tic style that some­how echoes works of the Renais­sance as much as they do CGI-cre­at­ed videogame characters.

Here’s the stat­ue from the Vil­la in an art gallery set­ting (from the AES+F web site):

…and one of the images from the same source:

I would love to expe­ri­ence the orig­i­nal video as well as the oth­er pieces, espe­cial­ly giv­en my inter­est in vir­tu­al worlds. Kudos to the peo­ple who arrange the art exhi­bi­tions along the Valle dei Tem­pli for intro­duc­ing me — and many oth­er peo­ple I hope — to the stun­ning work of a fas­ci­nat­ing group of artists.

Vis­it the AES/AES+F web site
Last Riot on the AES+F web site

YouTube search for “Last Riot”

Last week­end I was lucky enough to get up to Durham, in the NE of Eng­land, to spend a cou­ple of nights expe­ri­enc­ing the lat­est event from Arti­choke, titled Lumiere. And a mag­nif­i­cent event it was too.

Lumiere was in fact how I first heard about Arti­choke, via a TV doc­u­men­tary on Sky Arts (in the old days when I used to sub­scribe to Mur­doch TV — we’re now on Freesat). That first Lumiere hap­pened in 2009, and of course I’d missed it. But they planned to do it again, and when I heard about the 2011 event I was quick to block out the time and book a hotel.

The event, which brought dozens of inter­na­tion­al artists work­ing with light into the heart of the medi­ae­val city, turn­ing it into a vast illu­mi­nat­ed art gallery, last­ed over four nights, nom­i­nal­ly from 6–11pm, and fea­tured around three dozen sep­a­rate exhibits. Some of the high­er pro­file instal­la­tions were in the city cen­tre, but many were rather fur­ther out, and in fact you would have need­ed all four nights to catch every­thing. I only had two nights, and that sim­ply was­n’t enough — I prob­a­bly saw about 2/3 of the instal­la­tions and missed some that I real­ly want­ed to see. Thank­ful­ly the weath­er was kind to us — no rain and in fact quite warm — a good deal warmer, in fact, than the last Arti­choke event I attend­ed, Din­ing with Alice, back in May!

What I had rather under­es­ti­mat­ed was the num­ber of peo­ple who would throng the cen­tre of the ancient city as night fell and we approached 6pm. We gath­ered next to the stat­ue of the Mar­quess of Lon­don­der­ry — not one of the nicest peo­ple in life, alleged­ly — who had been trans­formed, thanks to Jacques Rival, into an immense snow-globe with the words “I Love Durham” on the plinth. Hehe.

The crowd con­trol was excel­lent, despite the enor­mous num­bers of peo­ple, but what the organ­is­ers could have done that would have helped was to have had a fair­ly seri­ous PA set up in the Mar­ket Place so that the crowds could be informed about what was hap­pen­ing. The bull horns in use had an effec­tive range of about 10 feet, so most of the time none of us had any idea what was hap­pen­ing or going to hap­pen. It turned out that we were wait­ing to be allowed up the cob­ble streets to the Cathe­dral, but we did­n’t all know that. How­ev­er, that is the only mild­ly neg­a­tive com­ment I have about the whole fes­ti­val, and hope­ful­ly the planned 2013 event will take this sug­ges­tion into account.

Via Twit­ter, @ArtichokeTrust asked what my favourite exhib­it was, and it’s real­ly dif­fi­cult to say. Of course the amaz­ing son et lumiere at the Cathe­dral, high­light of the orig­i­nal 2009 show, must rate up there, and that’s the first thing we were effec­tive­ly queu­ing to see. Titled Crown of Light, it con­sist­ed of mar­vel­lous images of the Lind­is­farne Gospels and much more, illu­mi­nat­ing the front of the Cathe­dral with mul­ti­ple sec­tions slid­ing up and down inde­pen­dent­ly, accom­pa­nied by a pow­er­ful sur­round audio and music sound­track includ­ing actu­al envi­ron­men­tal record­ings from Lind­is­farne itself (though I think it would have sound­ed bet­ter in Ambison­ics, of course). Crown of Light was cre­at­ed by Ross Ash­ton, Robert Ziegler, and John Del’ Nero.

It’s actu­al­ly quite hard to con­vey much of a sense of Crown of Light as it was so immense. But here’s a taste:

The above video includes two extracts, one from near the begin­ning and the oth­er from the end. It’s a hand-held mini-cam­era run­ning at its high­est sen­si­tiv­i­ty, so it’s not won­der­ful qual­i­ty, but hope­ful­ly you’ll get the idea. The first extract is 16:9 and the sec­ond pil­lar­boxed 4:3, the lat­ter show­ing rather more of the building.

Fol­low­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion (there were three per hour), we could either go off to the left, and down towards the riv­er, or we could file into the Cathe­dral itself, where there were some amaz­ing things going on in the Nave, the clois­ters and the Col­lege gar­dens behind.

Com­pag­nie Cara­bosse had hung the Nave with lamps made of white vests on frames, while at the far end of the Nave, next to the pul­pit, was a gen­tle­man per­form­ing on elec­tric gui­tar, synth and vocals, in a rather cool neo-Steam­punk envi­ron­ment. This pho­to of him is a bit ropey, but hope­ful­ly you get the idea from that and the (even more ropey) raw iPhone video below (the audio improves dra­mat­i­cal­ly at 2:22).

In the clois­ters and gar­dens it was fire — with amaz­ing met­al frame­works and sculp­tures with flames issu­ing from var­i­ous parts — from the enor­mous (a rotat­ing globe cov­ered in fire­pots in the clois­ters) to fiery foun­tains and strange lit­tle figures.

Emerg­ing from the gar­dens through an ancient arch­way, we turned down the hill to be con­front­ed by a sequence of mar­vel­lous illu­mi­nat­ed wire-mesh sculp­tured human fig­ures, some­times fly­ing, some­times sit­ting non­cha­lant­ly on a roof, or reclin­ing in a gar­den. These were Les Voyageurs (The Trav­ellers), by Cedric Le Borgne — a num­ber of French artists were rep­re­sent­ed here.

We pro­ceed­ed down the hill, mar­vel­ling at these over­head, near­by and dis­tant fig­ures, until we came to Prebends Bridge, which gave us a pas­sage through a pro­gres­sive rain­bow of colours.

And then it was back towards the cen­tre of the city along the river­front, with the trees and bridges illu­mi­nat­ed by gen­tly shift­ing coloured lights — and vir­tu­al­ly all the lights in the Fes­ti­val, inci­den­tal­ly, were low-ener­gy vari­eties, with some City light­ing turned off so the over­all ener­gy impact of the event was minimal.

Some of the exhibits were low­er-key, but nonethe­less effec­tive. Real and imag­i­nary sto­ries were told in illu­mi­nat­ed text; a clock on a far build­ing spelled out the time in low­er-case Hel­veti­ca; and a series of illu­mi­nat­ed pan­els hung high above the nar­row streets. Pos­si­bly the best-known artist’s work at Lumiere was Tracey Emin’s: an illu­mi­nat­ed phrase, “Be Faith­ful to your dreams” in blue, hand­writ­ing-style text on the side of the chapel in a dis­used grave­yard, approached along a path lined with trees soft­ly shin­ing with slow­ly shift­ing colours.

Else­where, an enor­mous light bulb made of lights hung over the riv­er Wear:

…while com­mon­ly-thrown-away objects were mon­taged and lit with LEDs:

We had an invi­ta­tion to join friends and spon­sors in the Town Hall on the Sat­ur­day night, which was good fun, and I had some inter­est­ing chats — with Arti­choke co-Direc­tor Nicky Webb and with the peo­ple who organ­ised the food for Din­ing With Alice, who had quite a tale to tell, to name but two.

All in all, Lumiere 2011 was an amaz­ing, mag­i­cal, mar­vel­lous fes­ti­val of lights and art – exact­ly what I have learned to expect from Arti­choke. I do hope they are able to do it again in 2013.

For more videos of Lumiere (includ­ing some from the first event in 2009) on Vimeo, click here.

When­ev­er I’m in the NE of Eng­land, I try to get over to Beamish - “The Liv­ing Muse­um of the North”. It’s a won­der­ful place built around a road/tramway loop on which run vin­tage bus­es and trams.

On this occa­sion (20 Novem­ber) I was up for the week­end to go to Lumiere in Durham, so nip­ping over was a chance I could­n’t miss. It was fog­gy on leav­ing Durham but approach­ing Beamish the sun came out and it was gor­geous­ly sun­ny until the dri­ve home, when the fog closed in again.

Dif­fer­ent sites around the tramway loop recre­ate dif­fer­ent eras, each cre­at­ed from build­ings that have been lov­ing­ly trans­plant­ed from their orig­i­nal sites: the Town, for exam­ple, is Edwar­dian, with a Bank, a gor­geous Mason­ic Hall (rebuilt with the help of the Masons, appar­ent­ly), a Co-Op depart­ment store, sweet shop/factory and lots more. It also has an adja­cent Steam Rail­way and sta­tion and a steam-pow­ered fairground.

The Pit Vil­lage is per­haps some­what ear­li­er, and fea­tures a col­liery and a rel­a­tive­ly new addi­tion: a coal-fired fish & chip shop that uses beef drip­ping to cook with, result­ing in utter­ly tasty meals that you have to queue for twen­ty min­utes or so to get, it’s so pop­u­lar. Yet anoth­er area, Pock­er­ley, is more Geor­gian, with a Wag­gonway that fea­tures steam locos from the ear­li­est times and Pock­er­ley Old Hall. I’ve talked about Beamish before, here.

From this time of year until Christ­mas itself, Beamish is hav­ing a series of Christ­mas week­ends, includ­ing San­ta’s Grot­to some­where over by Pock­er­ley I think, com­plete with snow, an ice-rink in the Col­liery Vil­lage (above), and dec­o­ra­tions up in the Town.

I had to pop into some of the ter­raced hous­es, sev­er­al of which con­tain busi­ness­es, such as a solic­i­tor’s and a den­tist — the tor­ture cham­ber itself is shown below. In those days you would have had the option of (unreg­u­lat­ed) nitrous oxide (with a fair risk of death) or cocaine as anaes­thet­ics, the lat­ter effec­tive­ly remov­ing your short-term mem­o­ry, so things hurt but you did­n’t remem­ber it (rather like intra­venous Val­i­um it would appear, which I always loved as an adjunct to den­tal operations).

Anoth­er house includ­ed peri­od Christ­mas dec­o­ra­tions in the front room.

Across the street is a lit­tle park, with a band­stand, and there was the Mur­ton Col­liery Band prepar­ing to play some suit­ably sea­son­al music, which they pro­ceed­ed to do beautifully.

Here’s some video of extracts from their programme:

The band was formed as the Mur­ton Gospel Tem­per­ance Blue Rib­bon Army Band in 1884, and play­ers were request­ed to wear a blue rib­bon on the sec­ond but­ton of their waist­coats. They became Mur­ton Col­liery band in 1895. When the col­liery closed, the band became self-sup­port­ing — and it still is today. They’re also one of the few remain­ing bands to con­tin­ue to call itself a ‘Col­liery Band’, and they still proud­ly march through the vil­lage dur­ing the Durham Min­ers Gala and Armistice Day. I don’t know about you, but brass band music and Christ­mas do seem to go togeth­er rather well.

There was time for a good wan­der around and trips on some of the trams — includ­ing a 1930s enclosed dou­ble-deck­er Black­pool tram, which is tech­ni­cal­ly a lit­tle late for their re-cre­ations but very impres­sive — and I had some good chats with the tramway staff, notic­ing that they wore the arche­typ­al “wheel and mag­net” emblem of British Elec­tric Trac­tion (lat­er to become the par­ent, sur­pris­ing­ly, of Red­if­fu­sion Tele­vi­sion) on their caps. The shop at Beamish should sell those cap badges — I would have bought at least one.

Final­ly it was time to head off on the 3+ hour home, and soon after get­ting back on the A1 the fog closed in, and it end­ed up tak­ing a good deal longer than that. But it was a great day out.

Wednes­day 2nd Novem­ber saw the 75th anniver­sary of the open­ing of the BBC Tele­vi­sion Service.

To com­mem­o­rate the event, the BBC held a spe­cial cel­e­bra­tion at Alexan­dra Palace, where the Ser­vice opened.

Orig­i­nal­ly, the inten­tion was to hold a spe­cial Open Day on the 2nd, at which mem­bers of the pub­lic would be able to vis­it the stu­dios and see audio-visu­al pre­sen­ta­tions. How­ev­er this was even­tu­al­ly moved to Novem­ber 5–6, leav­ing only an inter­nal BBC event hap­pen­ing on the actu­al day.

I man­aged to obtain an invi­ta­tion, for which my thanks to the ebul­lient Robert Seat­ter, head of BBC His­to­ry, and tech­nol­o­gy jour­nal­ist Bill Thompson.

The invi­ta­tion said “3:45 for 4pm” and as a result I found myself in the Alexan­dra Palace Tow­er end car park well in time for the off, giv­ing some time to take in the views over the city, expe­ri­ence the con­tin­u­al wind and enjoy some dra­mat­ic skies over this “Palace of the Peo­ple” locat­ed at the high­est point in North London.

When the BBC decid­ed on Ally Pal­ly as the site for the new BBC Tele­vi­sion Ser­vice in the wake of the Sels­don Report in 1936, the place was already decay­ing some­what. It’s a process that has con­tin­ued since BBC Tele­vi­sion left here sev­er­al decades ago, and although the team now fronting the Trust that runs the site today is incred­i­bly, and impres­sive­ly, enthu­si­as­tic and upbeat, there is no way it can be oth­er than an uphill strug­gle in these aus­tere times. But you can’t say they aren’t try­ing hard and I wish them every success.

The BBC still main­tains active offices in the block under the mast. But instead of enter­ing through the doors there, adja­cent to the GLC blue com­mem­o­ra­tive plaque on the wall, we were motioned into an entrance along to the left, up a met­al ramp and into what had orig­i­nal­ly been the Trans­mit­ter Hall. It may be not­ed that this was prob­a­bly not the first, but pos­si­bly the last, time that any­one had the bright idea of plac­ing a pair of pow­er­ful VHF trans­mit­ters and a pig­ging great set of trans­mit­ting anten­nae right next to a set of tele­vi­sion stu­dios full of sen­si­tive equipment.

Inside, the room had been dec­o­rat­ed with pan­els against the walls, each car­ry­ing infor­ma­tion and images of some aspect of Ally Pal­ly TV his­to­ry, and a free-stand­ing pho­to dis­play of his­tor­i­cal images, main­ly pro­vid­ed by the Alexan­dra Palace Tele­vi­sion Soci­ety. A jazz quar­tet played suit­able 1930s style music; servers glid­ed among the assem­bled invi­tees dis­pens­ing water, orange juice or Prosecco.

We had the chance to min­gle and chat, and I was very pleased to meet TV cook Zena Skin­ner, who prob­a­bly coined the phrase “Here’s one I made ear­li­er” — though in her case she real­ly had made it ear­li­er, her­self; I also met Pro­fes­sor Jean Seaton, the BBC’s Offi­cial His­to­ri­an and Pro­fes­sor of Media His­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of West­min­ster; and talked briefly to John Tre­nouth, Tech­nol­o­gy Advis­er to the BBC Col­lec­tion, whom I met dur­ing his time at what is now the Nation­al Media Muse­um in Bradford.

In the cen­tre of the room, a make-up table and lights were set up, where var­i­ous young women were being made up using the colours required by the Baird System.

When the BBC Tele­vi­sion Ser­vice was estab­lished, the Gov­ern­ment required two tele­vi­sion sys­tems to be used. On the one hand was the all-elec­tron­ic Mar­coni-EMI sys­tem, which offered 405 lines, and on the oth­er was the Baird electro­mechan­i­cal sys­tem which deliv­ered 240-line tele­vi­sion. Ear­ly on, it became evi­dent that the Mar­coni-EMI sys­tem was sig­nif­i­cant­ly supe­ri­or, but it had been Baird who had tire­less­ly pro­mot­ed tele­vi­sion as a con­cept, and lob­bied the GPO over licens­ing and the Gov­ern­ment to leg­is­late for a Tele­vi­sion Ser­vice. Baird high­light­ed the fact that his was a British inven­tion – though it could equal­ly legit­i­mate­ly be claimed that the Mar­coni-EMI sys­tem was British. Almost cer­tain­ly the Gov­ern­ment deci­sion, a typ­i­cal British com­pro­mise, was made at least in part to avoid sug­ges­tions that they were turn­ing down a British inno­va­tion, the deci­sion man­dat­ing the use of both sys­tems on an alter­nat­ing basis for six months before a choice was to be made before the two. The prob­lems expe­ri­enced with the tech­no­log­i­cal dead-end of the Baird mechan­i­cal scan­ning sys­tem result­ed in the deci­sion — in favour of Mar­coni-EMI — to be made after just three months.

Baird Tele­vi­sion actu­al­ly used two sys­tems. The fun­da­men­tal fea­ture of both was a “fly­ing spot scan­ner” in which, almost com­plete­ly counter-intu­itive­ly, the scene was scanned with a spot of light and pho­to­cells col­lect­ed the light reflect­ed from the sub­ject. The “Spot­light Stu­dio” used noth­ing more than this; the Inter­me­di­ate Film Tech­nique used a con­ven­tion­al film cam­era, exposed film from which was then passed imme­di­ate­ly through devel­op­er and high­ly poi­so­nous cyanide-based fix­er (par­tic­u­lar­ly nasty when it got loose), then scanned with a a fly­ing spot actu­al­ly under water. The fly­ing spot scan­ner was very sen­si­tive to red light, so if you were appear­ing in the Spot­light Stu­dio, you need­ed the spe­cial make up: black lip­stick, blue eye-shad­ow and a pale white face. Very neo-Goth. You checked it by look­ing through a red gel.

This was the make-up that was being applied to the young ladies at Ally Pal­ly on the 2nd. Appar­ent­ly the idea had orig­i­nal­ly been that BBC Lon­don would be send­ing a crew up to cov­er the par­ty, but they had pulled out and the job was left to an enthu­si­as­tic team from BBC News School Report.

Mean­while, we were treat­ed to wel­com­ing pre­sen­ta­tions: by the PR gen­tle­man from the AP team, and from Robert Seat­ter, who encour­aged us to relin­quish our glass­es and pro­ceed upstairs to Stu­dio A.

There were two main stu­dios at Ally Pal­ly orig­i­nal­ly, one above the oth­er. Stu­dio A was the Mar­coni-EMI stu­dio, while direct­ly above it was the Baird stu­dio, Stu­dio B. You can’t go into B today, because it’s rid­dled with asbestos and things are like­ly to fall on your head. But Stu­dio A is acces­si­ble. At one end of the room is a tableau rep­re­sent­ing the pro­duc­tion of the mag­a­zine pro­gramme Pic­ture Page, which ran from 1936–39 and 1946–52 and was ini­tial­ly pre­sent­ed by Joan Miller.

Around the room are assem­bled old TV sets, and var­i­ous exhibits in the room itself includ­ed an EMItron cam­era, which John Tre­nouth of the Nation­al Media Muse­um in Brad­ford kind­ly removed the lid of so we could have a look at the innards (sans tube).

In Stu­dio A we were treat­ed to a cou­ple of brief audio-visu­al pre­sen­ta­tions, the first assem­bled main­ly from clips from the film doc­u­men­tary Tele­vi­sion Comes To Lon­don, which was made to tell the BBC Tele­vi­sion Ser­vice sto­ry in 1936. Rebec­ca Kane, the MD of Alexan­dra Palace Trad­ing Ltd, intro­duced Michael Aspel, a news­read­er at AP dur­ing the peri­od when BBC Tele­vi­sion News was based here, to cut the cake.

And what a cake it was: made in the form of an old bake­lite tele­vi­sion with a pic­ture of Alexan­dra Palace on the screen, deli­cious­ly thick icing and suc­cu­lent innards. Very nice.

After that, we all wan­dered around Stu­dio A and chat­ted to each oth­er. I got into an amus­ing dis­cus­sion about the way in which the Tele­vi­sion Ser­vice closed down at the start of the Sec­ond World War, on Sep­tem­ber 1st, 1939 – about which a num­ber of myths have arisen, most of which are incor­rect (includ­ing the per­pet­u­a­tion of the main myth in Alan Yen­to­b’s Imag­ine doc­u­men­tary, re-shown on Wednes­day) – see The Edit that Rewrote His­to­ry on the Trans­d­if­fu­sion Baird site, which includes a num­ber of arti­cles on tele­vi­sion pri­or to 1955.

And then we grad­u­al­ly sloped off home.

See also:

The birth of tele­vi­sion: the “Baird” microsite at Transdiffusion

75 years on from BBC tele­vi­sion’s tech­nol­o­gy bat­tle — a nice piece by John Trenouth

BBC Cel­e­brates 75 Years of TV — Nick High­am vis­its Alexan­dra Palace