Kirkcaldy College of Technology HND Communication Studies Course 1984 - 1986, Team video early 1985. One of the more exciting things we got to do at college was to practice a potential career in television, both behind and in front of the cameras. I can recall this practice was in two parts. The first was just reading a piece to camera to see how you came over. I think I read a piece about Star Trek - arrgh, I was only 17 I suppose! I remember the lecturer said I may have a problem getting a career as a TV presenter as I had the kind of face that was "naturally vague". This comment caused enduring hilarity among my fellow potential TV stars.
The second exercise was much more ambitions, we were supposed to make our own TV programme. This course requirement caused us much angst in advance as I remember. The class split up into about 4 different teams and the team of people I did this with were just the people I chose to sit around on day one of the course.
Our team was - Lorraine Rennie (main presenter), me and Mark Deas (first interview), Ewan Croal and Susan Neilson (second interview), Barbara Penman and Dave Radford (third interview).
I remember doing endless preparation for this exercise. We split our little team into sub groups who would interview each other for the programme. Mark would become a good mate in the coming months, but I don't remember him being at college much around this time and he dropped out in year 2. I think this video was made towards the latter half of year one and Mark's enthusiasm for the course was really fading.
Our group had a few sessions to get the programme ready, but I don't remember Mark being there much. So our section is pretty scripted, you can see the piece of paper pretty obviously on my lap. It was so scripted, that I think I wrote the questions and the answers for our piece. Mark's one great contribution was the title - "Retirement at 16", we all loved that.
Mark was a big socialist at the time, I first met him at a meeting of the Militant Tendency (of all places), so the parts of the piece where he is talking about the final end of capitalism is the only bit I didn't script. I think he is improvising here.
Owing to Mark and I being a little under prepared, our piece ran short by mistake, so we asked Ewan and Susie to pad their piece out a bit. This didn't seem an issue for them. Ewan was the guy I sat next to in the whole of my second year of college and he was a real nice guy, never short of a word or two.
The letteraset titles took bloody ages to do and it still looks crap. We got this final one the wrong shape too and Don the technician / cameraman had to pan around it to make it work. Our backdrops don't really work either, they are too small in relation to the rest of the "set". Mark and I's is particularly poor.
The beginning music was my idea, it's a Song called "Leisure" from XTC's "English Settlement" album. It seemed to fit Mark's "Retirement at 16" title perfectly. "My Generation" at the end was Dave's idea. I played the music from my sister's portable cassette player into the studio mic while Don filmed the leteraset.
I happened to know a guy who had just started at the college as a junior technician, working for Don. He was in the year below me at High School and was a really nice guy called John Wishart. I persuaded him to strike a copy of our programme. I think he took this straight from Umatic to Betamax, which was the format of the video recorder we had at home. Betamax was a much better format than VHS at the time, shame it didn't catch on, the picture quality was a lot better.
I rented a VHS machine when I moved just behind the college tho 2 Sang Place Kirkcaldy a few months later. I remember this cost 11 pounds a month and this seemed an incredible expense as my whole income was only 70 pounds a month. I quickly transfered some of my favorite Beta tapes to VHS in the Summer of 1985 and this was one of them.
This survived on the same VHS tape from 1985 to 2005, when it was transfered to DVD. The faint white lines that scroll up and down the screen are a result of decay on the original VHS tape, it seems I was able to digitise this at just the right time before the VHS became unplayable. The Beta tape still exists, but I'm not sure if I will ever get my hands on a beta machine to play it.
As far as I know, this is the only one of the programmes from our year of HND Communication Studies that got copied. Certainly, I'd be very surprised if any other programmes survived this long, copied or not. It's really funny think that, thanks to 21st century technology, this little student programme may now be seen by more people than anyone ever intended.
Due to the 10 minute per video restriction on Youtube, this is split into two parts.
Tags: Kirkcaldy College of Technology HND Communication Studies Course 1984 - 1986 Team video early 1985.
