SMALL SCREEN

An old friend was recently describing to me how, in his view, one of the delights of having a tiny iPod video is that he can sit on the tube and watch programmes he’s “nicked” (as he put it) from the BBC iPlayer. Apart from the deplorable illegality of his actions, I can think of few prospects more uninviting than the notion of watching anything on a screen the size of a postage stamp and presumably listening through those tiny earphones that no one under 30 can move without wearing, while surrounded by fellow travellers some of whom will certainly be attempting to peer over your shoulder to see what it might be that you are squinting at. Why doesn’t he read a book?

It is very curious that while the size of the cinema screen has grown until it has reached IMAX proportions, a high proportion of viewers has settled for a more and more restricted view. I don’t suppose it would rob Newsnight of much of its visual appeal if one were to watch it on a screen rather smaller than most of Elizabeth Taylor’s diamonds (and indeed the smaller the image of Mark Lawson on Newsnight Review the better). But I certainly wouldn’t want to watch, say, Abel Gance’s Napoléon in any conditions other than its three-projector Polyvision version which is the width of three academy-frame screens.

As a boy I was taken to see the first commercial movie made in a new process: This Is Cinerama. We all duly ducked as the train hurtled towards us and generally were bowled over by … well, by the sheer size of the images. Sadly, very little worthwhile work is ever executed in these mammoth aspect ratios. Several features were released in Cinerama; only How the West Was Won and of course 2001: A Space Odyssey have much merit. But modern movies are routinely released in widescreen dimensions and compromises must be made if these are to be televised or shown anywhere where the screen’s aspect ratio differs from that of the movie.

When I lived in London, I endeavoured to see the great majority of films that I wanted to see on the big screen first. This was especially true of large-scale roadshows like Pirates of the Caribbean where the scale of the cinema screen dictates the look of the entertainment. Subsequent viewings on television would be referable in my memory to the earlier ‘proper’ cinema-going experience. Since we moved to the country and my visits to the city have dwindled in regularity, I have drifted more and more out of touch with contemporary film-making. This year was the first since I originally came to London to attend university that I had not seen a single one of the Oscar-nominated movies or performances by the time of the ceremony. There is no cinema within easy striking distance of where we live.

I record a great many movies from television but I get around to watching dishearteningly few of them (I claim to possess the largest collection of unseen movies in the world; I know – it’s a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). As I write I am downloading a commercially released documentary saved on Sky + last night, removing the adverts as I store it. Despite the fact that I may never watch this or most of the rest of my collection, I am acutely aware of the treatment that television metes out to film.

When we moved to our present home, there was a Sky aerial already in place. As it was remarkably discreet – on so many dwellings the satellite dish is the first feature you notice – and as we quite fancied the movie package that was then one of the main options for Sky customers, we decided to ignore our dislike of all things Murdochian and go with it.

To my great surprise, Sky Movies has proved to be the best source for films on the box, not least because so very many movies from all levels of commerciality come onto Sky eighteen months or so after their theatrical release. Already movies dated 2008 are beginning to air. On Sky’s ‘free’ channels – which is to say those that make up the package which we pay for monthly rather than those so-called Box Office movies for which a premium must be paid at each viewing – most of the boxes that I require get ticked. There are no ad breaks during the film. There is no channel ID in the corner of the screen. With very few exceptions, movies made in widescreen ratio are broadcast in letterbox format. (Most channels both satellite and terrestrial now respect the aspect ratio, though not Five which transmits all its movies panned and scanned).

Subsequent Sky transmissions are never given on-screen trails while the movie is still playing. End credits are always shown complete and at the correct speed and, while it sometimes happens that a linkperson speaks briefly over them and very occasionally that the dimensions of the movie image are squeezed to allow a visual trail, these intrusions are very much the exception rather than the rule. In the great majority of cases, the print of the movie is the longest available (an exception is Sky’s version of the Tarantino-scripted True Romance of which Channel 4 has a fuller print). It sometimes happens that venerable British movies are shown by Sky in US television prints that have either been savaged to fill programme slots or copied from release prints that were shortened to serve as supporting features in movie houses. Sky Movies is not apt to screen signed versions of films or dubbed versions of foreign works.

The one drawback to Sky’s policy is that it assumes that all viewing households are largely peopled by small children who do nothing but stare at the domestic screen all day. Consequently, most of the movies I want to see (or record) first have to be accessed using my PIN number, a dull undertaking. One day when I was tired I confused the PIN number with a similar code for a channel I often use and entered the code wrongly three times. As a consequence, I was “locked out” of the movie for ten minutes so that by the time I could access it again it was already under way. Grown-up households ought not to have to put up with this. (It is a measure of the extraordinary over-sensitivity of Sky to parental controls that the movie title The Bitch appears in all Sky promotional material as The B***h). Generally, though, this is about as good as movies on television get.

By contrast, the BBC long ago gave up being scrupulous about screening movies. Unless a picture is so old that its ending amounts to little more than the words ‘The End’, end credits are routinely interfered with, even on BBC4, and always rendered illegible for the duration of an on-screen programme promotion. Either all the craft credits are simply excised or the roller is dizzyingly speeded up or, often enough, both forms of butchery are employed simultaneously. The result is that it becomes impossible to know whether any other violence has been done to the print.

Let me explain. Film traditionally projects at the rate of 24 frames per second. For some reason too arcane for me to go into (even were I to understand it), film transferred to tape for showing on television (or selling on DVD) runs at 25 frames per second. This means that a movie timed at 100 minutes in the cinema will play for 96 minutes (4 percent faster) on the box. When planning to copy movies from transmission, I check the official length and then subtract 4 percent so that I know what to expect. But once the broadcasters have edited the end credits, the calculation is thrown out and then the integrity of the movie cannot be relied upon.

A certain discrepancy may be anticipated for a film shown on the BBC or ITV (Channel 4 and its satellite channels are usually more reliable for film timings though they perpetrate other impositions) but there are times when the difference between what length a movie should broadcast at and what it does broadcast at cannot be explained simply by credit cutting. Not long ago, the BBC showed a feature that it had made itself – Starter for 10 – and, even though this appeared to have a complete credit roller (perhaps because of the very fact that it was a BBC-financed production), the broadcast version was still light by three minutes. Another of its own features, A Cock and Bull Story, ran four minutes short, too much to be spoken for by trimming the end credits. This cutting does happen on C4 channels from time to time. Zoo, the documentary I recorded on More4 last night played six minutes shorter than it should (and anyway its release print was only 80 minutes long).

The same documentary revealed a problem that continues to bug More4 three-and-a-half years after its launch. Whenever the presentation microphone is switched on, the broadcast sound breaks up so, if the duty announcer’s mike is not switched off immediately a programme starts, the introductory music becomes unstable – this happened to last night’s documentary. Why nobody at the channel appears to be aware of this is peculiar: doesn’t anyone monitor the output off air?

Meanwhile, there was a curious incident on More4’s sister channel Film4 this afternoon. A vintage British movie, A Cottage to Let, was going out for the umpteenth time in recent years but in an “audio described” version, so that, fitfully, a woman’s disembodied voice chimed in to describe physical action on screen. I have no idea how often such versions are transmitted, never knowingly having encountered one before. The Sky on-screen guide indeed has the code AD against the broadcast but one rarely notices such detail and there is nothing about it in Radio Times. It surely ought to be possible to confine such intrusions to the coloured buttons on the remote and spare those who are able to see all the action for themselves.

Signed screenings are another bugbear. Given the development of interactive television services, the signer ought also to be consigned to a place from which he or she may be summoned by those that require them. I would have no complaint if C4 in particular did not pursue a curious policy of broadcasting its signed movies late at night and frequently using for the purpose films that are rarely screened. I have several times been caught out setting Sky + for a long hoped-for movie transmitted while I sleep, only to discover next day that it is unwatchable because some over-actor in the corner of the screen is gesticulating for the hearing-impaired. One such screening neglected to slot in the signer until the movie was more than an hour into its duration.

A satellite movie channel I discovered a few months ago is Simply Movies. The channel belongs to a DVD marketing outfit, called Simply, which promotes itself on the channel and transmits there a package of movies acquired from the Sony Corporation, which means that all the movies were first made and/or released by Columbia Pictures. Many of the films are long unseen -– there is a preponderance of titles from the 1960s – and some are pretty obscure. But all without exception are shown distorted out of their true ratio so that faces are elongated. It is bewildering that no one at the channel attends to this yet they must be aware of it. One of the channel’s true plums – Von Sternberg’s dazzling and perverse 1935 traversal of Crime and Punishment with Peter Lorre sliming along as Rashkolnikov – even went out with every ad break caption card bearing the movie’s title superimposed on the phrase “wrong format”. How weird is that?

Of course there is no real substitute for settling down in a proper cinema to see a film on the big screen. Not that this experience is always unalloyed pleasure. Ignorant people will talk through the screening, as if watching at home. The last feature that I saw in a movie house was Gus Van Sant’s wholly admirable Milk. But the print was severely scratched for a considerable portion of the opening reel and that ought not to be the case when one is being charged a West End price. Nowadays, when cinema staff have been rationalised to a minimum squad, you go off to look for someone to complain to and miss twenty minutes of the movie because, especially in a multiplex, there is no one to be found. The projectionists tend to be unaware if the sound has dropped out or the focus has slipped because they’re simultaneously dealing with projectors feeding several different screens. The cinema’s greatest effort now goes into the most lucrative part of its business: the sale of popcorn, snacks and hot and soft drinks.

The only answer is clearly to make a lot of money, build you own private screening facility, employ a seasoned projectionist, have pristine prints of new movies flown in and watch at your leisure with whatever guests and libations suit your taste. Better by far than an iPod on the tube.