History of Soap Sets

I was always very surprised Main Marian featured the old rounded logo in all but the last series - this must be a record for the latest use of the old BBC logo. I seem to remember On The Record using the slanted squares in 1989 and seeing MCMLXXXIX in the slanted font.

Even though I had already seen 1989 in this font, it still really surprised me when I saw the first 1990 episode of EastEnders with MCMXC in the slanted style. Notably, Grange Hill in 1990 still had the rounded logo at the end. Also in autumn 1992 they started adding the BBC logo above the copyright date.

does anybody know why it's in roman numerals (C)MMX

I always believed that it was in the hope that most people didn't know what the roman numerals meant and therefore couldn't work out how old programmes/films were.

ITV tend not to use roman numerals anymore. There is a similar mix on the use of roman/arabic numerals on US programmes.

Brief Corrie set history with pics from Corrie.net

At first the studio was indoors because it was only supposed to run for 13 weeks!!

http://www.corrie.net/profiles/places/set1b.gif

The set was moved outdoors at the end of the 60's (note in this pic you can see the health centre behind the houses)

http://www.corrie.net/profiles/places/set2a.gif

Then the street we all recognise today was built

http://www.corrie.net/profiles/places/set3a.gif

More detailed info and recent developments (Victoria Street etc) in the links below

http://www.corrie.net/profiles/places/sets.html
http://www.corrie.net/profiles/places/set2000.html

Yep - and on more than one occasion a camera was pointed at the Radio Times printed copy of the "1" to get the logo into an aston or slidefile to key over a trail...

I'd forgotten that! The promotions production area at TV Centre had a well used rostrum camera right up to the end in 1998ish. They used to use it for pack shots of Fast Forward and Radio Times magazines as well as Video collections and so-on for promotional slides and trails. As noggin says, it was also routinely used to get logos and production stills onto the telly too.

It was often easier to do this than source electronic imagery and convert it into Aston format. Also of course a high quality image takes up what only a few years ago would be considered a huge amount of disk space. Astons used to have floppy disc drives (5 1/4 inch proper floppys!), later ones have MO disc drives. Floppys in particular hold relatively little data by modern standards. MOs are still used here and there with old kit (a complete Aston Pagefile or two can fit onto an MO and can be sent to a centre to update a graphics package for example).

However these days even high res jpegs, tiffs and targa files and so-on are pretty easy to handle and can be easily imported into most broadcast kit and directly into editing systems. Many systems can directly import .mov files too (though there can be a myriad of codec issues and field priority problems in my experience). Even Photoshop format files can be imported directly into some kit.

I remember Astons with 8" discs... The original Aston 2 and Aston 3 had them an used them for caption AND font storage. Aston 4 and Caption had 5.25" discs - but ISTR that they also had a hard drive for storage (?). The Aston 3 continued in manufacture (it was good at Right to Left type like Arabic) and was upgraded to a 3.5" floppy and called the 3A or 3B ISTR.

On Aston 4/Caption you only had 16 colours/greyscales to play with - so converting a video grab to a logo was quite an art in the Logo Compose application. Much easier when Motif/Ethos arrived and you had full 24bit grab and processing ISTR - and you used either removable Syquest or later MO drives for backup.



I remember the original Classic Paintbox (c.1983) used RSD (removable hard drives) and the V Series switched to MOs in 1989/90ish. Even in 1995 some BBC regions were still using Classics - and getting Election and Network artwork to them was an issue.

The Slidefile still store was also widely used in the 80s and 90s and used removable TAPE drives... Each tape held a relatively small number of uncompressed stills - and it took forever to backup or load a full libarary. (But then shrinking an image on them took minutes in some cases...)

correction, it's not the health centre building it's the bonded warehouse. although the health centre buildings are / were the rear part of the bonded warehouse. This means the corry set has also changed it's position as the old set ran north to south with the terrace facing west, the present set runs west to east with the terrace facing south

simple map facing north(ish)

o
l
d

c
o
r bonded warehouse new corry set
r
y

s
e
t

really appreciate all the info

Has anything been publicly said about the new EastEnders set? Have they started actually building it yet?

I think Casualty is classed as a soap (or ongoing drama!) these days, as it is on nearly every Saturday night of the year.

This is the current exterior set of Holby Accident & Emergency which made it's first appearance in 2002:



It is filmed on an industrial estate in Lawrence Hill in Bristol:



The original exterior set was filmed in Ashley Down, Bristol at The City of Bristol College (formally Brunel College of Arts & Technology) from 1986 (Series 1) until 2001 (Series 17 Episode 15). Before the buildings were used as a college it was actually an orphanage.

Here is the main entrance of the college which I seem to remember doubling up as the main entrance to the hospital on at least one occasion (the actual casualty set was around the corner from this):



I can't find a picture of the original A&E exterior set anywhere, but I do remember it very well as I went to college there for 4 years. It was quite common to see a Christmas tree up outside in the middle of summer while they were filming their Christmas episodes and to see the cast in a double decker bus which they used as their canteen.

Here is a birds eye view of the Casualty exterior set from 1996 with the arrow pointing to the ambulance bay:



and here is the same shot from 2007, long after Casualty had moved a few miles across Bristol to Lawrence Hill:



The college still has a campus there, although not as large now, with some of the buildings demolished and converted into residential use.

The ambulance bay was actually destroyed in the last scenes filmed here (Series 17 Episode 15) when a car crashed into it, bursting into flames:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQJd7eY18Lo

I might be wrong on this, but I have done a quick look on YouTube and it doesn't look like the exterior of A&E was shown again until 9 episodes later (Series 17 Episode 24), when the entrance had been rebuilt and surprise surprise the surrounding buildings looked totally different (almost as if it was in a different location ) :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cukjVtYEneQ

Expect the exterior set and probably the interior set to change again next year because the whole production is moving from Bristol to Cardiff. It will be interesting to see how they deal with that - maybe another fire is called for in the story line?

well they can't have a 3 million pound referbishment of an NHS hospital because that's far to unrealistic

interesting info on the casualty sets there, if you look at the set for the Bill on bing maps, it has birds eye view and round the corner is the outdoor set from night and day