Did Blue Peter always have such cool backing music? That sounds like Massive Attack Unfinished Sympathy...
It is! I didn't realize the song was that old. 1991!
Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video]
41–50 of 58 posts
Re: Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video]
#42Interesting to see broadcast video from 27 years ago preserved in such high quality. The BBC has spent a lot of money to preserve pretty much everything it has broadcast in the last 30 years.
it wasn't always part of the BBC's reflexes to keep all the content. They must have learned and adapted.
Blue Peter actually has a really good survival rate, most stuff from the mid-1960s onwards survives. Whilst this is perhaps partly forward thinking on the part of Editor[1] Biddy Baxter, AFAIK it was partly so older material could be reused in later editions to save money.
[1] The title of the "showrunner" of Blue Peter, so in the meaning of "editor of a newspaper", not "videotape editor".
Re: Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video]
#43I miss the quaintness of being on the old Internet. Maybe it's just the Endless September of it all, but the content seemed more cared for when it wasn't trivial to put out. I do think it's great that barriers for publishing are lower than what they were, but sometimes I sure do wonder if they're too easy, of people are too connected. Maybe that's just what getting old feels like?
I miss the quaintness of being on the old Internet.
I think that back then, you'd often host your own site. Or at least, write most of it in HTML.
It was mostly your content, and maybe if on geocities or something, a few ads around the edges.
Now, it's 280 chars surrounded by a whole page of, what is realistically, ads or 'not you' content.
Content is broken up, piecemeal, not one.
While you can setup a singular resource, it's more rare for people to do.
Many old pages were just a text menu on the left "birds", "my dog", "the month I spent travelling", and then deep content.
Now you get mostly reactionary fluff "Can you believe the horrible thing I read!!!"
Re: Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video]
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> very long running Since 1958 and over 5,000 episodes! (so much of classic UK TV is either "has been broadcasting since the dawn of television in a largely unchanged format" or the other extreme of "we only ever made six episodes back in the 1970s and they are etched across everyone's childhood")
It blew my mind when, as an adult, I learned that there were only 15 episodes of Mr Bean (with one of those being a "Best Bits of Mr Bean" episode!).
To be honest I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. I like a lot of Rowan Atkinson's work but I absolutely hated Mr Bean. Something about watching someone be inept in every possible way causes me a huge amount of stress and isn't something I'm able to derive any sense of enjoyment or fun from. If there were more episodes it might have become more of a cultural meme (like, say, The Simpsons), which I'd find really hard to deal with.
(This doesn't always follow, of course. The UK version of The Office is only 12 regular episodes plus a couple of specials, yet it's impact is still very much felt - at least in the UK - so I don't necessarily see there being a simple correlation between quantity of material and cultural significance. As much as the US series is also excellent I don't think it carries quite the same iconic status or cultural weight here even though there are a lot more episodes - obviously it might do in the US.)
Re: Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video]
#45For people who weren’t kids in the UK, Blue Peter is a very long running weekly BBC TV programme aimed at kids. Common tropes include the studio pet(s) and garden, charity events, and the Blue Peter badge that you got for sending in a letter with a tip or other challenges (and which qualified you for various discounts at venues around the UK). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peter
A Brit who when demonstrating some sort of art or craft says "Here's one I prepared earlier" is often referencing the Blue Peter art segments where they would start to assemble (say) a model of Tracy Island from 'sticky back plastic' and toilet rolls and then cut to a superbly finished creation.
It's the artistic equivalent of Step 1: take these household materials, Step 2: ???, Step 3: Profit!
Re: Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video]
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> very long running Since 1958 and over 5,000 episodes! (so much of classic UK TV is either "has been broadcasting since the dawn of television in a largely unchanged format" or the other extreme of "we only ever made six episodes back in the 1970s and they are etched across everyone's childhood")
It blew my mind when, as an adult, I learned that there were only 15 episodes of Mr Bean (with one of those being a "Best Bits of Mr Bean" episode!).
See also: there are only 12 episodes of Fawlty Towers.
Re: Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video]
#47For people who weren’t kids in the UK, Blue Peter is a very long running weekly BBC TV programme aimed at kids. Common tropes include the studio pet(s) and garden, charity events, and the Blue Peter badge that you got for sending in a letter with a tip or other challenges (and which qualified you for various discounts at venues around the UK). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peter
A Brit who when demonstrating some sort of art or craft says "Here's one I prepared earlier" is often referencing the Blue Peter art segments where they would start to assemble (say) a model of Tracy Island from 'sticky back plastic' and toilet rolls and then cut to a superbly finished creation. It's the artistic equivalent of Step 1: take these household materials, Step 2: ???, Step 3: Profit!
So you're saying the gnomes have already invaded Airstrip One?
Re: Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video]
#48For people who weren’t kids in the UK, Blue Peter is a very long running weekly BBC TV programme aimed at kids. Common tropes include the studio pet(s) and garden, charity events, and the Blue Peter badge that you got for sending in a letter with a tip or other challenges (and which qualified you for various discounts at venues around the UK). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peter
A Brit who when demonstrating some sort of art or craft says "Here's one I prepared earlier" is often referencing the Blue Peter art segments where they would start to assemble (say) a model of Tracy Island from 'sticky back plastic' and toilet rolls and then cut to a superbly finished creation. It's the artistic equivalent of Step 1: take these household materials, Step 2: ???, Step 3: Profit!
I feel its spiritual meme-cousin is this one: https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl
Re: Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video]
#49Little period details: - strobing CRT monitors that don't line up with the frequency of the TV camera - PCs in the internet cafe, Macs in media, Acorn Archimedes (with ARM processor!) in schools - first thing to do with the global communications network is send a dumb message to the US President - indexed-color images; you can see in one case when she changes windows and the colours go wrong in the background as the…
strobing CRT monitors that don't line up with the frequency of the TV camera I studied Broadcast Engineering for my degree back in 1997, and you could definitely shift the input signal to match the refresh rate of a CRT screen or a flourescent tube light on the Sony BetaCam TV studio cameras I worked with. I reckon the BBC would have been working with similar or better tech in 1995. I wonder if this might have been a…
While television refresh rates on both sides of the pond matched local grid frequency, did computer monitor refresh rates necessarily match? VGA for example supported 60 Hz but not 50 Hz according to Wikipedia [1]. So in the UK, I would think you could sync with fluorescent lights, or VGA monitors, but not both (unless you recorded at say 10 fps).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Graphics_Array#Technical...
Re: Blue Peter discovers the Internet (1995) [video]
#50I miss the quaintness of being on the old Internet. Maybe it's just the Endless September of it all, but the content seemed more cared for when it wasn't trivial to put out. I do think it's great that barriers for publishing are lower than what they were, but sometimes I sure do wonder if they're too easy, of people are too connected. Maybe that's just what getting old feels like?
I miss the quaintness of being on the old Internet. I think that back then, you'd often host your own site. Or at least, write most of it in HTML. It was mostly your content, and maybe if on geocities or something, a few ads around the edges. Now, it's 280 chars surrounded by a whole page of, what is realistically, ads or 'not you' content. Content is broken up, piecemeal, not one. While you can setup a singular reso…
> Now you get mostly reactionary fluff "Can you believe the horrible thing I read!!!"
Could be worth checking the mirror there.