&c1=usa&c2=(none)&c3=The+Guardian&c4=Television,Digital+TV+and+radio,Media,Technology,BBC+(Technology),Digital+video+(Technology)&c5=&c6=Stephen+Armstrong&c7=2007_12_12){kind=small}
- The Guardian,
- Wednesday December 12 2007
In years to come, it may be called Keysgate - the moment when the kind of analysis, snide abuse and gossip that famous women are routinely subjected to became something famous men were obliged to put up with too. And, unusually for a moment of sexual equality, it began in the nation's football stadiums. At the start of the 2006 football season, 50-year-old Sky Sports presenter Richard Keys became painfully aware of banks of chanting fans calling out "Werewolf!" and gesticulating with their hands in his direction. Keys had always been on the hirsute side, but his channel's new high-definition broadcasts showed the hairs on the back of his hands in brutal four-times-normal-television clarity.
Shortly after the start of that miserable season, the hairs suddenly disappeared, and tabloid newspapers ran speculative stories about laser surgery or heavy waxing. Keys - and Sky Sports - have maintained a manful silence ever since, but in TV presenter circles it is widely speculated that he "had something done".
A shiver passed through the industry at that moment, as the ranks of programme producers, actors and presenters realised exactly what high-definition television would mean. Once HDTV becomes commonplace, every show runs the risk of becoming a "stars looking rough" cover for a weekly gossip magazine. Indeed, last week the Queen was reportedly asked to give special permission for her Christmas message to be filmed in the unforgiving format. "The Queen will have to stick on some extra slap," the Sun warned.
Given that the nation is still struggling to get used to the idea of digital TV, it's easy to get talk of "high definition" confused with all the other jargon that no one understands. In theory, high definition is what happens after digital. High-definition screens have more pixels making up the television picture, and said picture is created faster and in sharper definition. Every shot in high-definition is effectively a microscopic examination of skin complexion and condition, with even the tiniest imperfections becoming unbearably visible.
In fact, high-def has been playing havoc with celebrity egos since it rolled out five years ago. In 2005 Cap Lesesne, a New York plastic surgeon, reported a female newscaster in her 30s asking him for a nip and tuck because her show was about to make the switch. On normal TV, she explained, you couldn't see her few tiny wrinkles. In high-def, they stood out like "folds of origami". "When she walked in here," Lesesne said, "'high-def' was the first thing that came out of her mouth."
When Good Morning America debuted in high definition in the same year, host Diane Sawyer noted that viewers could tell when she had stayed up too late the night before. And New York Times reviewer Clive Thompson once told me: "I watched a high- def close-up of The West Wing's Bradley Whitford and a normally insignificant mark on his forehead suddenly stood out like a third eye. I couldn't stop staring."
Of course, this sort of thing has become a delight to certain rather mean internet sites. Since the introduction of HDTV in the US, the website TVPredictions.com, for example, has been running a "top 10 scariest stars in high-def", with Demi Moore, Donald Trump and Cameron Diaz all faring badly. George Clooney, Anna Kournikova, Eva Longoria, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Ben Affleck and Halle Berry, however, have been hailed as "high-def honeys".
Indeed, at times it seems the new technology is little more than an excuse for celebrity baiting. In February, the New York Post interviewed makeup artists at the Academy Awards and ran a list of stars who panicked when they found their interviews would be shown in the format. Penelope Cruz and Peter O'Toole, the newspaper told a breathless public, had opted for additional makeup - with O'Toole asking that even his hands be touched up. Clint Eastwood, however, the Post reported with grudging admiration, rejected even an old-school cover-up of his age spots.
"It's harder to retain any modicum of decency [on high-def]," says Mariella Frostrup, whose Sky Arts programme The Book Show has been filmed in high definition for the past year. "I don't really wear much makeup but I've caught my face in the monitors during rehearsals under high definition and it's been pretty terrible. I look like a Friday 13th version of myself. I'm just glad I'm doing a studio show and not any outside broadcasts. The makeup artists now have - I've no idea how to describe it - basically, a live version of an airbrush. They hold it close to your face, there's a small pump and a tube and it blows a sort of foundation all over your face. I have to say most of the authors have been quite taken with it. Some of them don't want it, and they ask how they'll look. I say, 'No different.' I've lied. But the problem is, you can see we're wearing the stuff."
Makeup artists are now engaged in an arms race with the new medium, but they face the Frostrup Paradox - while makeup is more necessary than ever, its artifice is more obvious than ever. You can't pile on the powder when every grain looks like a boulder. "The whole thing is almost too realistic, too digital and computery," says Alexis Vogel, a veteran LA makeup artist. "It's harder to change people from their natural form. We'd all like to go back to the old days." Rumour has it that Tony Blair only realised the spray-on-makeup option was available halfway through filming The Blair Years - which is why he suddenly looks so much better in the third programme.
There is another problem with HD: the majority of studio sets will have to be completely rebuilt. Traditional sets are essentially theatre-style flats made from wood and paint, with the magic of cameras maintaining a miraculous, fuzzy illusion of reality. This will no longer be possible in the crisper, sharper future.
Right now, HD technology is used to make a small minority of British programmes. The BBC makes 15% of its output in HD and is way ahead of the other broadcasters. Because the US market is almost entirely HD, however, all US imports and all UK programmes sold abroad are shot in HD. Thus CSI, Ugly Betty, 24, Rome and Blue Planet all employ the format. There's now an official timetable for all programming to adopt HD - the BBC had targeted 2010, but is going to miss that by some distance. Even so, producers are getting ready. Channel 4 will move Hollyoaks to HD in 2008 and it seems likely that the BBC will make a similar switch with EastEnders, Casualty and Holby City.
"There's a lot of carpentry and brickwork to be done before we go to high-def because if we did it now it would look ridiculous," says Diederick Santer, executive producer of EastEnders. "A lot of our set works fine on standard tape but it's basically scenic painting. The newer sets are made out of brick or are brick-faced but the older ones won't look good. So if we're obliged to go to HD - and I'm sure we will soon - it'll mean rebuilding Albert Square."
Studio sets for news, sports or quiz shows will also require constant retouching as scuffs, cracks and leftover pieces of tape stand out like sore thumbs. "It's like walking up to a painting," says Gary Reichs, who runs Brown Eyed Boy, the production company that makes sketch show Little Miss Jocelyn, and recently filmed a pilot in high definition. "It brings all the brush strokes into focus and you can lose the beauty of the overall picture. Our show Splitting Cells is very cartoony, so the format worked, but if we were going for naturalism I'm not sure what we would have done. Blood, for instance, is a massive problem. HDTV picks up red especially vividly and traditional stage blood looks ridiculous. Even props - like cheap cutlery in a supposedly upper class-scene - need a rethink."
This has lead to unexpected cottage industries springing up to service high-def's detail. New York's Strand Bookstore, for instance, now offers a "books by the foot" service for worried studios. In the old days, you could just stick any old books, even fake books, into sets of shelves in the background if you wanted a library effect. No longer - not now that viewers can read the spines of every book. Most recently the Strand Bookstore has supplied books on palaeontology, marine biology and pre-Columbian society - all in muted colours and predating 1957 - for the forthcoming Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull movie. "People have gotten so character-specific these days," says store manager Jenny McKibben. "It can't just be the right colour. With high-def, they can just freeze the film and say, 'Oh, that's so inappropriate.'"
Natalie Dormer, the British actor who plays Anne Boleyn in the drama The Tudors, currently showing on BBC2, says filming the costume drama in HD meant more hours in costume and makeup as well as time, money and attention lavished on costumes and props. "It's created a bit of a culture of fear in Hollywood," she says. "Every possible imperfection is far more visible, and that's especially tricky on period costume."
Indeed, Vincent Letang, senior analyst at Screen Digest, believes that all live studio shows cost 20% to 30% more when they move to HD. For drama and comedy, he expects the increase to be far greater. Besides the makeup, sets, props and equipment, camera crews need to be completely retrained. "Because most traditional televisions are still small with roughly square screens, everything has to be filmed to fit that shape," he says. "HDTV, however, is widescreen - the picture is an elongated rectangle - so during last year's World Cup, cameramen had to cope with shooting pictures that both took advantage of longer, wider HD screens but made sure that the ball and the key action stayed within the small square picture that most consumers still watch."
This screen-size difference will play merry hell with older programmes on the super-resolution of new sets. Programmes made without HD-compatible equipment - which includes most programmes made before 2003 and all movies made before 1953 - will, when displayed on an HDTV set, fail to fill the screen, thus displaying a black space on either side of the image. US experience shows that viewers find this so annoying that they either distort their standard-definition shows by stretching them horizontally to fill the screen - giving everything a too-wide or not-tall-enough appearance - or zoom the image and remove the top and bottom of the original picture. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a survey at the end of 2006 showed that while 10% of American TVs were HD, 83% of those viewers were not satisfied with the service they were getting.
So what is the point of all this change? The answer appears to be "not much". As Wikipedia puts it: "HDTV is the answer to a question few consumers were asking." It's simply a sharper picture and, as such, is a technological innovation that exists because someone worked out how to do it. Just as the internet was originally a way of securing the US military's computer network in the case of nuclear attack, so HDTV was created in the Soviet Union during the 1950s to allow video-conferencing between high-ranking military officers. It was left to the Japanese to develop a commercial version through the 70s and 80s.
As anyone who brought a now obsolete technology such as a Digital Audio Tape player can testify, the fact that someone can build something doesn't mean that the consumers will come. The broadcasters, however, are hoping to broadcast all TV in high definition in the fairly distant future. They hope that after the government makes the big switch from analogue television to digital - a move that should be finished by 2012 - the space once filled by analogue TV could be used for HD broadcasts.
If you're considering buying an HDTV this Christmas, however, it's worth thinking things through carefully. To benefit from the full HD experience, you need the programme to have been made in HD, you need the channel to be broadcast in HD, you need a special HD set-top box, and you need an HD-compatible television set. Only Sky and Virgin are currently offering completely HD channels, and their viewing bouquet is less than overpowering. Virgin boasts a single HD channel and some HD video-on-demand downloadable programmes. Sky does better, but still offers fewer than 20 HD channels, which include Sky One, Sky Arts, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, National Geographic, two sports channels and four movie channels, as well as the BBC and Channel 4's new HD channels, which were launched this week. All this, of course, requires a Sky subscription.
In April 2008, FreeSat should appear, which is like Freeview but on a satellite (and you will need a satellite dish for it). That should have HD channels from all the main broadcasters, requires a dish and an HD set-top box, but is then free for life. Even so, most channels on Freesat will not be broadcast in HD for some time. To further confuse things, there are two separate HD formats battling it out for the DVD market, in much the same way that VHS and Betamax fought for home video in the 1980s. To buy a set that can cope with most of the technology changes possible in HD over the next few years, you will need to spend at least £1,500. On the upside, you will get to see the Queen looking really, really wrinkly.
Of course, there's another sad truth at the heart of Keysgate and the switch to high definition - if HDTV shows up all the little differences we have, it will inevitably, given the world we live in, encourage a move to bland uniformity. "I've got freckles and I could spend hours disguising them, but I don't want to," says Frostrup. "However, it's the opposite attitude that is now rife throughout HD. That airbrush guarantees a flawless American news-anchor face on every single presenter. But I don't want everyone on my TV to look like a flawless American news anchor."
- Contact us |
- Print |
- Clip |
- Share | Email
-
Contact the Media editor
editor@mediaguardian.co.uk
- Report errors or inaccuracies: reader@guardian.co.uk
- Letters for publication should be sent to: letters@guardian.co.uk
- If you need help using the site: userhelp@guardian.co.uk
-
Call the main Guardian and Observer switchboard:
+44 (0)20 7278 2332
