Chapter 8

Different Programme Styles

Before going on, it’s worth spending a moment considering how the scene assembly techniques that we have examined so far are modified when they are used in different programme genres.

In this chapter, I consider the stylistic differences between:

• 8.1 Comedy Shows
• 8.2 Panel and Game Shows
• 8.3 Interviews and Chat Shows
• 8.4 Documentaries
• 8.5 Trailers and Promotions
• 8.6 Key Points—Different Programme Styles

8.1 Comedy Shows

Comedy, even more than straight drama, relies on a series of actions and reactions. I have already talked about custard pies, but you can also think of these actions and reactions like a game of tennis, of repeating serves and returns, all of which have to be seen. Imagine how much less interesting it would be to watch a game of tennis where the director over-concentrated on just one of the two players.

 School for Scoundrels (1960)—My Favourite Tennis Match

School for Scoundrels (1960), directed by Robert Hamer and edited by Richard Best, contains a brilliantly funny tennis match. It’s between Henry Palfrey (Ian Carmichael) and Raymond ‘Hard Cheese’ Delauney (Terry-Thomas).

Palfrey stands no chance against Delauney, who uses every trick from his recently acquired ‘Lifemanship’ skills to win the match. The sequence is cut and timed to perfection, some of it with a musical underscore, and is a fine example of how to cut a comedy action sequence.

Notice that the film’s editor, Richard Best, wasn’t frightened to stay on a wide shot for a while to emphasise the fact that Palfrey is running about like a mad thing, trying to keep up with the game, while Delauney is strolling around the court almost with one hand in his pocket. The scene will certainly infect you, with the great put-down phrase of ‘Hard Cheese’.

Happily, in the film, there is a return match where Palfrey does considerably better after he himself enrols in a course to acquire the same ‘Lifemanship’ skills.

 Comedy Connections—Keeping Contact Going

In comedy, as a result of the requirement to keep the viewer in constant touch with all the participants in a scene, the number of cuts per minute is high because of all those launched and landing custard pies.

Where would we be without seeing Rodney’s face fall in Only Fools and Horses, when Trigger calls him ‘Dave’ again; or the face of another poor unfortunate victim during an ‘Am I bovvered?’ tirade of abuse from Catherine Tate’s schoolgirl character, Lauren; or Richard Wilson’s face of horror in One Foot in the Grave before his catchphrase ‘I don’t believe it’?

 I Love Lucy—American Comedy Shows

To compensate for all these references to shows from the UK, I must give due credit to the great comedy shows from the US, and especially to those I grew up with. Shows like: I Love Lucy, Bewitched, The Phil Silvers Show (Bilko), The Munsters, and so on. They were usually shot on multiple 35 mm film cameras, and their slickness, as we look at them today, is a credit to the editors back then. They still stand up very well to any microanalysis we can throw at them, sometimes over 60 years later.

 As Time Goes By (1992–2005)—Home Territory for Me

Why do performances by some of our country’s greatest comedy actors, such as Sir David Jason, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, or Rowan Atkinson need any editing in the first place? These people must be better than you at comedy timing. Surely Dame Judy Dench and Geoffrey Palmer, who star in As Time Goes By, written by the late Bob Larbey and directed by Sydney Lotterby, are at the top of their profession and could easily give you a lesson in delivering lines to a camera or audience.

As Time Goes By, like countless other comedies, is recorded in front of a live studio audience, and if you were in that audience watching the show being recorded, you would, more than likely, have been entirely happy with the pace of the performances. The trouble is an audience member just sees a permanent wide shot of the action and, in addition, has the personal freedom to look around the set, wherever they want, to get maximum enjoyment out of the scene.

When a scene is filmed, edited, and subsequently transmitted, we force the viewer to watch only what we choose. After a good laugh, if I cut to the actor who is next to speak and they are still waiting for the laugh to die down, it looks wrong, whereas to a member of the laughing audience, this is a perfectly natural piece of timing. Thus, the process of filming any action imposes its own artificial pace on the live performance, and this artificiality is purely the result of the fact that we are looking at the action through the lens of a camera and turning an audience member’s permanent wide shot into a series of closer, more analytical shots.

 A Choice of Viewing—The Use of Isolated Camera Feeds (ISOs)

I can’t imagine today how we managed to edit a five-camera studio audience comedy with only the main output recording to work with. Right up to the mid-1980s, no extra shots were available to the edit other than the ones the director and vision mixer chose and timed for us on the night. Vision mixers are known as technical directors in the states, but in the UK they seem to have much more of an artistic input. This can be a problem for American directors coming over to the UK, who have to deal with this additional layer of enthusiasm.

Thankfully, as recording machines are much cheaper today, several simultaneous recordings are made from the outputs of the various cameras alongside the main vision mixer coverage. Recently, even these recording machines have now disappeared, to be replaced by file servers. With the increased availability of these so-called isolated camera recordings (ISOs), a moment that proves to be much funnier than anybody had anticipated before the recording can be correctly covered from these alternative camera viewpoints.

Another advantage of having access to these simultaneous recordings is that it gives an editor many more opportunities to make those small tightens necessary to achieve the artificially high pace that television comedy demands.

Given the fact that these programmes are usually over-recorded by about 5 to 10 minutes, these ISOs can be used to good effect to manufacture extra shots in order to remove lines and successfully cut time out.

 Two Way Stretch—Stretching Time

For the most part, you try to tighten up action and line delivery. Sometimes the reverse is true, when you find yourself stretching time by doubling-up action from two or more angles in the hope of building up a comedy moment. Editing funny material that eventually will be shown to an audience and guessing the right amount of time to leave between a funny line (or action) and the next funny line (or action) is an art.

Stretching action is usually only possible with alternative coverage of that action, and thus you can dance around various alternative shots, mopping up every last drop of dripping custard in the hope a forthcoming audience playback will reward you by filling in your ‘negatively edited’ hole with laughter or applause.

The falling chandelier in Only Fools and Horses is a prime example of what I mean. It was shot on film and designed to be played to a live audience when the rest of the episode was recorded. It was edited by Mike Jackson with director Ray Butt. Ray and Mike put in every reaction shot they could think of after the crash, hoping the audience would go wild. They did! When it came to me, after the audience had seen it, only a couple of tightens were required for a perfect result. They had fortunately made all the right choices. As I say, the correct timing of such a sequence is very difficult to guess. To this day, if I achieve a 90% success rate, I would regard that as very good, because that 600-legged animal is very unpredictable as to when and for how long it might laugh.

I know this exercise is not exactly comedy, but it will stretch you, or more accurately the action. Have a go at ‘negative editing’ with Exercise 45: Stretching Time.

8.2 Panel and Game Shows

Even 20 years ago, panel and game shows were quick-fire affairs where much of the pace was achieved in the edit suite. Time had to be truncated (fast forwarded, if you like) without altering the speed of any shot. Shows like QI, Mock the Week, and Have I Got News for You are as hugely popular today as The Generation Game, Blankety Blank,and They Think It’s All Over were a few years ago, and for good reason, as they feature the best of comedy talent in this country today. The question is, are editing techniques any different for this type of show?

 I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue—One Very Long Take!

I suppose the biggest difference between this genre and other aspects of the entertainment output is that the recorded show largely consists of one very long take. Yes, just one, and sometimes no script either…well, not much of one. Few retakes are attempted here. If a gag fails, it fails. If a sequence doesn’t go well, its chances of inclusion in the transmitted programme are grim.

Survival of the fittest is the name of the game show.

 Game for a Laugh—I Want Pace and Yet More Pace

What I said about every frame justifying its existence in comedy is just as true here. It is common practice for these shows to record for the greater part of two hours, hoping that within that time, there’s a sparkling 30-minute show just begging to get out.

Even moments of winning and success are dealt with quickly, with rounds of applause and laughter all shortened. Music stings and graphics propel us from section to section. Cut rates are high, with many shots lasting not much over one second. Luckily, with ISOs (as such a show these days would never be attempted without at least three of these), an editor can achieve a pace that a few years ago would have been impossible.

Any quiz or game show obviously has to contain the mechanics of the game in the allotted timeslot, but the trick is to contain this in as short a time as possible without losing any of the fun. Along with the director, an editor here adopts more of a judgemental and editorial role, constantly asking the question, is this funnier than that, and above all, can we transmit it?

 What’s My Line?—Individual Tempos and Rhythms

Panel shows, by their very nature, host several varied and individualistic comedy talents, each with their own unique style of delivering funny lines. In this situation, an editor has to adapt to the tempo and rhythm of these individual performances by timing edited lines in exactly the same way as the performers concerned would have done in their acts. For example, the way Paul Merton thinks of and works with a new gag is totally different from the style of Dara O’Briain or Jo Brand. The golden rule is, if you alter their content, make sure you don’t alter their performance.

 The Golden Shot—The Value of Clean Shots

In game shows, the host is sometimes on the loose, which makes for a shooting nightmare for cameras, as well as for the director and vision mixer. An editor always wants clean singles in order to cheat the sound and do all that is necessary to cut time out. The lack of clean singles is made worse in these wide-screen days where bits of unwanted people keep poking in the left and right of frame and ruining the shot’s usefulness as a cutaway. Sometimes, you have to resort to zoom-ins and other vision patches in order to manufacture a clean shot. The problem is that this all takes time, but it’s a perfect job for a budding assistant.

 Just for Laughs—Full Mix, Clean Stage, and Clean Audience Soundtracks

In the editing process, it is sometimes useful to have the full mix of stage and audience sound broken down into its constituent parts, namely clean stage and clean audience.

I have always regarded this as a very odd and highly inaccurate use of the word clean. After all, the performers and the audience are in the same room and, as a result, no microphone placed on a performer or above an audience only picks up its intended source of sound to the exclusion of everything else.

Having to edit after a gag usually renders the laugh the gag got unusable, because it (the laugh) rarely would have finished before the commencement of the now-unwanted next line. In other words, you are not only editing the performers on stage, but you are also editing 300 of their friends at the same time.

The solution is clean laughs from your store cupboard, or elsewhere in the show, or even the audience warm-up. It’s usually very wise to build up a collection of good and varied laughs, clean of overlapping dialogue, for use on these sorts of occasions.

8.3 Interviews and Chat Shows

An interview that has taken 20 minutes to record might have to be cut down to 5 minutes to fit a programme schedule. Producers of such an interview often do a paper cut, but as an editor, you are in charge of making such a paper cut work. Once a good working relationship has been established between you and the producer or director, an edit that causes trouble should be obvious to both of you straightaway so that no time is wasted pursuing the impossible dream. When I used to edit Parkinson with Sir Michael Parkinson’s son, Mike Parkinson (how confusing is that), I only had to look across to Mike (the son that is) in a certain way to cause a flurry of paper work and for both of us to look for an alternative.

 Free Speech—Dealing with Unscripted Dialogue

Many of the same rules that applied to editing scripted dialogue are also just as relevant here, in the construction of an interview, except for the fact that the free-flowing dialogue from both interviewer and interviewee must be allowed to contain more of the individual spoken idiosyncrasies of the participants. It’s akin to dealing with different comedy performances that I mentioned earlier.

 Face to Face—Dealing with Eye Contact

Eye contact is equally as important when you are cutting an interview as it is in a scene involving scripted dialogue. It is good practice to keep as much eye contact, or lack of it, in your cut as you can.

 Just a Minute—Hold On to the Outgoing

The best way of visually hiding edits in an interview is to hold on to the shot of the outgoing speaker as long as possible beyond the end of their answer, and then, underneath this vision extension, change the sound to a new and different question from the host. Only when this question is underway do you make the vision cut back to that of the host. Advanced students will recognise this technique straight away as the dear old split edit.

Within interviews, it’s important that your edits not be predictive in any way. By that I mean, don’t make early cuts to a yet-to-be-asked question. This is because an element of clairvoyance would have to be involved to know the next question was about to be delivered. In real life, you would never look at a telephone before it started to ring or a door until someone knocked on it. Vision lagging is the rule here, especially over weak words like ‘um’, ‘well’, or ‘so’. After all, that’s how a vision mixer has cut the rest of the show, so you might as well do the same—be reactive, not predictive.

 The Alternative View—The Use of Cutaways

We have already considered good techniques when you are dealing with cutaways, and it is just as vital to employ these in an interview situation, or you might as well superimpose a flashing caption on the picture saying ‘EDIT’.

As we have seen, try not to return to the same size of shot after the reaction cutaway. Thus, if you left on a single before your cutaway, it is better to come back to a two-shot or wide shot; this will make the edit look much more natural.

 I’ve Started, So I’ll Finish!—Let the Answer Get Going

One type of edit that’s such a giveaway in an interview situation is to cut back to the host too quickly after the start of a new answer from the interviewee. There has to be a period of settlement while the audience listens to the start of the new answer uninterrupted. Cutting back to the host within the first few seconds of an answer in order to hide yet another audio join is a dead giveaway, and this has to be avoided if at all possible.

 Circus Boy—Circuses to Funerals

Any edits you make in an interview shorten time, and this necessary shortening can sometimes lead to some conversational flow problems. A good interviewer will take time to introduce a more serious subject, especially after a period of uncontrolled jollity.

When a chunk of the interview is removed, you must be careful not to cause any change in the emotional content to happen too quickly by badly thought-out edits. I rather strangely call this the circuses to funerals problem. By that I mean that you can’t cut directly between these two subjects of such contrasting content without producing an abrupt and uncomfortable emotional jump cut.

The circus has to leave town before the funeral procession can start to take its place. Faces must be allowed to change from laughter to tears at a natural pace, and in a chat show like Parkinson, where we never saw the audience, this change has to be included in the cut, whatever the duration problems this causes.

8.4 Documentaries

The term documentaries can cover a huge range of the television output, from the daytime house buying and selling programmes, to a documentary about the life and works of Alfred Schinttke.

 If…—Documentary Freedom—Is It Too Much Freedom?

I suppose the new variable in documentary editing that we have not considered so far is the programme order. For example, our invented documentary, The Life and Works of Alfred Schinttke, could start with his death and look back through his life, or alternatively start with his birth and work forward to his death. More usually of course, it’s a mixture of both. This lifetime direction of travel can change mid-production when one of the team (writer, producer, director, or your good self as the editor) comes in one day and says ‘I’ve got a great idea’. Be prepared for such drastic changes of mind by being scrupulously tidy with all your project elements. Here, nonlinear editing software comes into its own as old edits, thought to be dead and buried, can suddenly be brought back to life by such ‘great ideas’ as easily as the removal of a Transylvanian wooden stake from Count Dracula’s heart.

Regardless of what happens in the middle, the most crucial aspects of any documentary are how to start and how to finish. You have to start with strong material to hook your viewers and end with something equally profound to keep them thinking and talking about it after the programme has ended.

 New Faces—The Perils of New Material

Another headache for documentary editors is that the source material can sometimes continue to arrive in the edit suite as researchers uncover some new and highly significant facts about your subject long after the programme has started to take shape. My advice is to ‘Keep Calm and Carry on Editing’, with the hope the ‘great ideas’ will eventually reduce in frequency.

Because the flow of a documentary cannot be judged until all the material is shot and placed in context, the arrival of this new material can itself cause the high rate of those ‘great ideas’. These ‘great ideas’ can have a considerable effect on the order of individual sections, and maybe even the whole of the edited piece so far. A late but crucial interview can easily negate the need for the inclusion of your best and most creative work which took so long to manufacture. When this happens, a preparation from a chemist might help you maintain your beautifully calm exterior and stop you from bursting into tears, or alternately you could just go down to the pub!

Eventually, with all the material in and the ‘good ideas’ only now serving to make the programme different and not necessarily better, it is time to stop and leave it alone. Your production might arrive at this steady state of conclusion considerably later than you do.

 Unfinished Business—Knowing When to STOP!

Knowing when to stop might be the hardest decision you and your production team will have to make. Sadly, all too often, the only whistle that is blown on this outpouring of ‘creativity’ is the fact that the programme is about to be transmitted. And this often comes after considerable time has been wasted moving the furniture around, without any obvious reason why, and without producing any significant improvement to the programme’s content. All you can hope for is when that delivery date does arrive, you and your team are on one of those better ideas.

I’m so glad I have had a script beside me for most of my working life.

8.5 Trailers and Promotions

Some of the most inventive editing that is produced today on a day-to-day basis is in the making of trailers for cinema and TV. Very often, these trailers are created by a different editor and with the source material being used in a completely different way from the style that produced the programme or film in the first place.

There is a balancing act to do when you make a trailer, in that you must do your best to include the key points of the drama or narrative without giving away too much of the plot. Your trailer should therefore pose questions without necessarily answering them. The production team might have some good ideas about what is okay to give away plot-wise and what to hold back.

Shots in trailers or promotions have their durations counted in frames. Loads of quick cuts followed by snatches of dialogue are the order of the day, all designed to tempt the viewer to watch further. Even when you’re promoting a slower, more romantic story, a pace has to be adopted that can contrast greatly with the original film. These promotions are great fun to do, as you can generate conversations that never occurred in the original film, where characters from one scene are answered by characters from another.

For the most part, cuts are still the best technique of assembly, allowing you to quickly intercut dialogue with dramatic snatches of action, such as flashes, explosions, or crashes. Cross-cutting like this will allow you to shave any dialogue down to the bare minimum and, at the same time, help create the sense that a lot is going on at one time.

Music will play an important role in any promotion. Hopefully, the film you are given to promote will have some music associated with it already, and this will undoubtedly help join the programme fragments together.

On a practical note, their music should have already been cleared for distribution or broadcast, and almost certainly this clearance will include the production of promotional material as well, so you’re covered. Worth checking though!

Just as with documentaries, it is vital to have two questions permanently in mind: how to start and how to finish. The bits in the middle will, to a large extent, look after themselves, but the start and finish are desperately important, first to grab the viewers’ attention, and second, to leave a lasting memory that will encourage them to buy a cinema ticket or add the programme to a PVR schedule.

I know this advice is all a bit vague, but technique and content here can be so varied and contrasting that I can only talk in the most generalistic of terms. Techniques appropriate for promoting a light teen movie will be out of keeping if your film concentrates on atrocities such as genocide. The only common ground is that you have lots to say, but very little time in which to say it.

 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—How to Make a Trailer

Here are some basic rules that might help you produce such a trailer or promotion. Remember, you are creating a montage that must:

• Start with very good material to hook your viewer.
• Show off the programme’s creative talent (acting, writing, set design, special effects, and music) with your creative talent.
• Introduce the main characters.
• Let the audience see when and where the film is set and introduce the story.
• Not spoil any of the surprises in the plot.
• Let your trailer ask questions, rather than offering too many answers.
• If you are in any doubt, contact the programme makers about suitable material, especially with regard to plot revelations. They know the piece better than anybody.
• Display the range of emotions the film covers.
• Show off some of the programme’s special effects and expensive shots.
• Leave the audience wanting more.
• And finally, tell the audience where and when it is to be shown.

All of this seems a bit obvious when you write it down, but it is worth examining all these points as you approach a final version to determine whether your trailer has more or less achieved this list of goals.

Like a commercial, a trailer must tick all the boxes, and it has to be packed into a very small space.

8.6 Key Points—Different Programme Styles

It would be a good idea to bring the key points that I have made in this chapter about different programme styles closer together, to enable an easier comparison.

Comedy:

• Cutting rates are high in comedy because of all the necessary actions and reactions.
• Always remember the rule—‘see it launched, see it land’.
• Performances are generally fast, sharp and well-timed. Your edits must look the same.
• The process of filming any action can expose pauses which, even though they were acceptable in a live context, now only serve to slow things down.
• In a multi-camera environment, isolated camera recordings (ISOs), can make the funny…funnier, but these extra shots must always feel natural and not pull the viewer away from something that they were enjoying.
• Audience reaction will need just as much editing as the lines which caused that reaction.
• Editing comedy can sometimes involve stretching a moment out by using several shots from different viewpoints.
• If in doubt—tighten.

Panel and Game Shows:

• The recorded show largely consists of one very long take.
• Few retakes are attempted. If a gag fails, it fails.
• Pace here is paramount. This is enhanced in the edit suite, often with music and graphics propelling the show forward.
• Survival of the fittest is the name of the game show.
• Once again, audience reaction, and how it is edited and mixed with the main dialogue, is one of the required skills.
• Rounds of applause and laughter are all generally shortened.
• You must contain the mechanics of the ‘game’ in as short a time as possible, without losing any of the fun it created.
• An editor here adopts more of a judgmental and editorial role.
• With different performers the golden rule is…if you alter their content, make sure you don’t alter their performance style.
• Build up a quickly accessible stock of laughter and applause tails. You will need lots of these audio sticking plasters.
• Alternative sound tracks from the source recording will help you isolate specific sounds, for editing purposes.

Interviews and Chat Shows:

• Just as with comedy, reaction shots are extremely important.
• Again, editorial judgement has to be added to the editor’s role.
• Selection of the best material available must go hand in hand with a good assembly of those choices.
• Free-flowing dialogue, from both interviewer and interviewees, must be allowed to contain more of the individual spoken idiosyncrasies of the participants.
• Include as much eye contact, or lack of it, in your cut as you can.
• Don’t make early cuts, to a yet to be asked question, for example.
• ‘Sound then Vision’ works well in any interview—be reactive, not predictive, with your shots.
• Never cut back to the host too quickly after the start of a new answer from the interviewee. Let your audience see that answer get going before you change the shot.
• Edits that require you to break the preceding point should only be considered if absolutely necessary.
• Be careful not to cause any change in the emotional content of an interview to happen too quickly, by badly thought-out edits.
• Continuing my strange analogy—the circus has to leave town before the funeral procession can start to take its place.

Documentaries:

• The new variable in documentary editing is the programme order.
• The most crucial aspects of any documentary are…’how to start’ and ‘how to finish’.
• Start with strong material to hook your viewers, and end with something equally profound.
• The phrase ‘I’ve got a great idea’ from any of the production team, including you, usually results in lots of work changing things around.
• Be careful to save and categorise old cut versions, as they might prove useful again as ‘great ideas’ come and inevitably go.
• Source material can continue to arrive in the edit suite, long after the programme has started to take shape.
• Knowing when to stop might be the hardest decision you, and your production team, will have to make.
• When the ‘great ideas’ only serve to make the programme different and not necessarily better, it is time to stop and leave it alone.

Trailers and Promotions:

• Just the same as documentaries…‘how to start’ and ‘how to finish’ are crucial.
• A trailer should include the best bits of the programme or film without giving away too much of the plot. No spoilers, please!
• Contact the programme makers if you are in any doubt about the inclusion of certain material in your trailer.
• The programme makers will almost certainly have other ‘clean’ elements which would be useful in your trailer, such as music or graphics.
• Shots in trailers have their durations counted in frames—quick cuts followed by snatches of dialogue can say a lot in a short time.
• Cross-cutting scenes will allow you to shave any dialogue down to the bare minimum.
• Trailers must reflect the material they are trying to promote but can give it a different treatment.