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Old 29th Mar 2021, 10:32 pm   #170
Helder Crespo
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Join Date: Sep 2019
Location: Crystal Palace, Bromley, London, UK.
Posts: 417
Default Re: Television in the Home

These are not period photos either, but I think/hope it makes sense to post them here. The first one is from a really nice website devoted to film props, 'Our Life with Props', which features a section on the 1984 production of Nineteen Eighty-Four (directed by Michael Radford, with John Hurt, Susana Hamilton, Cyril Cusack, Richard Burton and many other great actors). Among other aspects, the art directors and prop makers wanted to create future technology as it would have been envisaged back in the 1940s (this is sometimes called retrofuturism, I think). The first photo depicts their interpretation of the infamous Speakwrite machine (a sort of bidirectional TV + (des)information system). They had to build many of these and so they used vacuum formed plastic painted and finished to look like bakelite (the descriptions and stories on the website are very interesting and I definitely recommend it to anyone who's into film and film props). This is in fact one of my favourite films, and one that has marked me deeply from the moment I first watched it back in the mid-1980s. When I recently came across the film prop website, I realised that perhaps this had something to do with my taste for Bush TV22s and DAC90As (I have two of each, which are actually my only vintage sets). Can you spot the similarities?
On another note, and inspired by this thread, I think it would be great to have a thread on "Television in the factory". I managed to find online a couple of reasonably good photos of the Bush factory, which have a lot of interesting details, including the way the chassis actually looked like when they were new.
Helder
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Last edited by Helder Crespo; 29th Mar 2021 at 10:38 pm.
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