"As Live" Drama isn't for ATV - November 1955 Article

[Mike of CAS]

Live, as-live or Pre-Recorded Drama? – November 1955 – ATV Archive

“The head of Associated Television drama, Mr Desmiond Davis, considers film the ideal solution, because it allows time for visual composition and can be edited afterwards. What, he asks, can "immediacy" [of 'as-live'] offer that will outweigh a clonking, swishing background of studio noise, clumsy camera work, the "fiuffed" speech, poor lighting, and inadequate sound quality?

At the A.T.V Highbury Studios, Associated Television is producing a most interesting hybrid, the "high definition" recording. After rehearsal as a stage play, the production is shot with television cameras from beginning to end, but fragment by fragment so that each can be properly polished. What emerges is not a poor cousin of the cinema film but something closer, relying less on movement, and giving fuller prominence to the words, which in television drama are of paramount importance.

Perhaps, then, there is something in the word "immediacy" if one, does not take it too literally. Whether live or filmed, television drama comes so near that artifices which are successful in the cinema or the theatre cannot be accepted; some special quality of spontaneity needs to be artfully suggested.”

I take it this was part of a bigger magazine/newspaper story at the time. But interesting back then ATV didn’t particularly like the ‘as-live’ format for dramas…

[DJB]

Amazing to think they were still doing Crossroads virtually "as live" nearly 30 years later!