Therapy

you can tell which camera is actually recording at any given moment because a little red bulb on the camera body lights up. From the gallery Hal speaks to his floor manager Isabel through her headset, and she relays his instructions to the cast. Sometimes he decides he needs to change a shot, or insert a new one, but it’s striking how seldom he has to do this. He’s already “seen” the entire show in his head, shot by shot.
    Multicamera, as this technique is known in the trade, is peculiar to television. In the early days of the medium everything was done this way, even serious drama — and done live (imagine the tension and stress, with actors running round the back of the set to get into position for their next scene). Nowadays most drama and a good deal of sitcom is done on film or single-camera video. In other words, they’re made like movies, every scene being shot several times from various angles and focal distances, in take after take, on location rather than in a studio, and then edited at the director’s leisure. Directors prefer this method because it makes them feel like genuine auteurs. The younger ones sneer at multicamera and call it “joined-up television”, but the fact is that most of them couldn’t handle it, and would have their limitations cruelly exposed if they tried. With postproduction editing you can always cover up your mistakes, but multicamera requires everything to be pretty well perfect on the night. It’s a dying art, and Hal is one of the few masters of it still around.
    Ollie came into the studio later and sat down beside me. He was wearing one of his Boss suits — he must own a wardrobeful. I think he buys them because of the name. As he sat down the wide shoulders of the jacket rode up and nudged his big red ears. Bracketing his broken nose, these make him look like an ex-boxer, and indeed it’s rumoured that he started his career promoting fights in the East End of London.
     
    “We must talk,” he said. “About Debbie?” I asked. He looked alarmed and raised his finger to his lips. “Not so loud, walls have ears,” he said, though we were alone in the raked seating and the nearest wall was fifty feet away. “Lunch? Dinner?” I suggested. “No, I want to involve Hal, and the cast will think it’s funny if we get into a huddle on our own. Can you stay for a drink after the recording?” I said I could. At that moment I was surprised to hear Lewis Parker saying from the set, “Well, if she is pregnant she’ll have to have a termination,” and Debbie replying, “I suppose you think that will solve everything.” I turned to Ollie. “I thought those lines had been cut.” “We decided to respect your artistic integrity, Tubby,” Ollie said, with a wolfish grin. When I asked Hal about it in a coffee break, he explained that they had saved some time by cutting a bit of business in a later scene so there had been no need to lose the lines after all. But I wonder if this isn’t part of some plot to soften me up for the more serious matter of Priscilla’s role.
    It’s five to seven. Time for me to take my seat in the studio. Wonder what kind of an audience we’ve got.

 
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    Monday morning, 22nd Feb. The audience turned out to be bloody awful. For starters we had a Moronic Laugher among them. That’s always bad news: some idiot with a very loud, inane laugh, who goes on baying or cackling or shrieking at something long after everybody else has stopped, or starts up when nobody else is laughing, in the lull between two gags. It distracts the audience — after a while they start laughing at the Moronic Laugher instead of at the show — and it plays havoc with the actors’ timing. Billy Barlow, our warm-up man, spotted the danger right away and tried to subdue the woman (for some reason, it’s invariably a woman) with a few sarcastic asides, but Moronic Laughers are impervious to irony. “Did I say something funny?” he enquired as she cackled suddenly (she was a cackler) in the middle of his perfectly straight explanation of some technical term. “I think it must be in your mind, madam. This is a family show — no innuendos. You know what an innuendo is, don’t you? Italian for suppository.” There was enough laughter to drown the cackler temporarily, though I’ve known Billy get a lot more with that joke on other occasions.
    The warm-up man is essential to a successful recording. Not only does he have to