- ATVLAND.Productions recently caught up with... Chris Tarrant at the studios of Who Wants To Be A Millionnaire for an in depth chat about Tiswas, ATV Today, Stop Look Listen and his very happy memories about the ATV Centre (thanks to Tony Clegg for organising this). See previous blog entry for more on this.
- Gary Terzza gave us plenty of behind the scenes gossip about life as a Continuity Announcer for Central in the 80s... (thanks to Matthew Gulliver for organising this).
- Wendy Nelson told us about life on ATV Today and Central News and what it was like to switch between the two companies with such differing outlooks... (thanks to Roddy Buxton for organising this).
We've reached a stage where we've got many core shots for the documentary. Roddy Buxton (Writer) and Pete Raven (Script Editor & Director) have come up with the second part of the script. Peter Thomas (Co-Exec Prod & Co-VT Editor, alongside Stephen Thwaites) has been placed in charge of the Tiswas bits, as you might expect, and he's rather happy about this! He'll also be working on various other parts of the documentary including the opening titles and music.
We've produced a couple of 'internal' edits of various segments, both to see how well the footage we've gathered so far works in context, such as Pete T's Tiswas segments, and as a showreel to send to professional interested parties, produced by Pete R. All of this material has so far been well received, indeed it's already been mooted that some of this material could make up additional stand-alone programmes, such as a stand-alone Tiswas programme to begin with. However, that's something to look at for the future, just to whet your appetite.
Looking back how far we've come, this time last year we were celebrating having conducted our first interview specifically for this programme, with former Miss ATV and CITV presenter Debbie Shore. This was the start of what has become a fascinating journey into the stories of the people who worked at the ATV Centre. Travelling around the country speaking to the people who spent part of their life in that concrete box on Bridge Street has become a big part of the teams spare time activity.
We have also had valuable contributions from other people aside from interviews and have a whole host of new and originally generated material to work with. What has been frustrating is finding the time to get everything together and that is why we keep the 'deadline' for the end of production fairly open ended. Much work is still to be done, and of course this depends on the individual team members being able to work in their spare time. Not that this will compromise quality, with professional advisors guiding aspects of the production, we are confident the result will be worth waiting for.
As mentioned, the writing is fairly well advanced, but because the writer is spending more time at work in his day job (in professional TV Production) this has slowed for a while. Other aspects have however been going on behind the scenes, many technical improvements have come about which will make the team's work easier, enabling instant access to the footage we have amassed by each member of the team.
Some of the team have recently had the pleasure of viewing the Timeslip documentary DVD which was released recently having been 4 years in the making. As you may know, we've been in contact with the Timeslip team for quite a while and we're happy to report that the results are very impressive. We hope to be able to produce something equalling that quality, with the same passion.
So, we'll be carrying out further interviews in August and beyond. We're discovering plenty of interesting information about the Broad Street building all the time. We'd love this documentary to be cherished by British TV historians. We've put a lot of love into chasing this dream, and the outstanding generosity of former ATV/Central staff continues to fuel that passion.
