Which mark?

Reductionist society, John? Are you sure that’s what you meant?

Do you mean ontologically, theoretically or methodologically reductionist? Or is that a)not talking proper, b)technobabble or c)psychobabble?

I’m sure that armed with your expensive education you will be able to enlighten this sweaty state-school peasant.

Me. I can.

We could always take a camera and get sponsored to make a ‘fly on the wall’. Man from 50’s timewarp goes to contemporary arts and music festival. I’d pay to see it.

Snafu, let’s take John to Glasto.
🙂

Agree about ‘wobblecam’ and visually illiterate camera direction masquerading as creativity, though. Visual mumbling, perhaps?

Not wrong, but missing the point already made. Sixty years ago actors would squawk unrealistically at the microphone in loud RP, learned on the stage, because by the time it had been recorded, copied and played back on the equipment of the time anything at normal realistic levels, delivered with real speech patterns and accents, would be lost to much of the audience.

As things improved, actors became free to act – and speak – like real people, and I suppose its a matter of taste which you regard as ‘proper’ acting, John.

Sound editors are guilty of adding layers of music and effects over dialogue, often because in their suites they have perfect reproduction through multi-channel playback systems so the sounds can be differentiated whilst simultaneous.

Now that tellies are getting thinner, this causes problems as speakers are becoming tinier and tinnier, and just can’t cope. This is not helped, as Meddle says, by audio compression being used sometimes (iPlayer seems particularly prone to sound degradation). But hammily enunciating luvvies will still come though ok. For anything else, put the sound through your stereo.

Hopefully that explains your problem better – the sound problem, that is, not your compulsive snobbery. I will let the insult in your last post go.

The new spate of reported sound problems has nothing to do with the BBC and everything to do with the drive for thinner televisions. There is no room for a decent speaker cone. You can get the volume, but no depth (which the human voice needs to be properly intelligible above background noise).

‘Their so called actors and actresses’? They are not the BBC’s – they don’t keep them in a big pen, with ‘property of the BBC’ stamped on the backs of their necks. What you are seeing are a cross section of the available contemporary screen acting pool, recruited for each production by the independent production company responsible.

What is more, recording and sound post-production have been ‘cracked’ for a long time, such that actors on film and TV have not had to ‘speak up’ since the days of Mr Chalmondley-Warner. Professional mics and recorders have for a long time made listening to an acted conversation as easy or difficult as listening to that conversation in real life (though old age and/or rubbish speakers might make that less easy). And few say ‘actresses’ any more, so they are rarely ‘so called’.