I have been watching Alfred Hitchcock Presents on Netflix. The date of production reads 1955 and yet these are obviously prerecorded episodes.
What I want to know is, was there not an era when TV was live and live only? I would have thought that 1955 was in this era.
What was the first show to air in a prerecoreded form?
Also, was Mr. Hitchcock’s intro and closing done live? (I doubt it)
There was really no “live only” era on television. By the time TV came around, sound film technology was readily available, and plenty of shows were distributed on film. The first practical video tapes (for broadcast use) were available by the late 1950s. Live broadcasts were recorded for reruns via kinescope.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents was filmed (including Al’s intros.) But there were certainly more live shows than there are today.
Why were shows presented live in the fifties if the technology were available to film them and air them later. Is it a cost thing?
The first commercially available video tape recorder was introduced by Ampex in 1956, so prior to that time most “studio” shows were done live. However, even in the “live” era many shows were produced on film and edited prior to broadcast, which would certainly be the case with “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”
Also, we have copies of some shows which were aired live, due to a machine called a kinescope, which was essentially a film camera pointed at a TV monitor to record the show as it was aired.
There were multiple trade-offs in creating television broadcasting networks. Some of them carried over from radio and some new problems emerged.
Radio shows were mostly done live. In fact, they were done live twice: once for the eastern timezone and a second time for the western time zone. Transcription was done by huge records called platters. These were expensive, fragile, low in quality, hard to ship, bulky to store, and difficult if not impossible to edit. They started seeing more use with the Armed Forces radio networks during WWII but they weren’t a good solution. In addition, the musicians’ union tried to suppress all use of pre-recorded music and was mostly successful. You needed a live musician for the theme, for accompanying a singer, and for musical effects.
Television had these problems and worse. The radio network was countrywide. A network of coax cables that were capable of relying the broadband television signals took time to build. The bones of that system was in place by 1949 by true national broadcasting waited for microwave transmission in 1951. I’d still bet it was 1953 or later that the system was complete to most midsize cities.
Networks lived with this, mostly by broadcasting only for a few hours in prime time and slowly expanding to other hours. Shows were broadcast live to the regional network in the northeast - which had probably 90% of the tv sets anyway - and used kinescopes to get the programs elsewhere. Kinescopes were cameras literally pointed at a tv monitor. Quality was awful. Even after the coast-to-coast network developed most shows outside of prime time, such as the Today and Tonight shows, continued to run live.
A big factor was cost. The technical requirements for early television were fairly low. Camera crews were often hired employees of the network and could be used on multiple programs. Film required more experienced technicians and had costs for stock and processing. Filmed shows also took longer, as multiple takes and sets could be used, and that also drove costs up. Going from b&w to color stock also was very expensive, and it took years to realize that a market for syndicated shows in color made it economically feasible - The Adventures of Superman filmed in b&w starting in 1952 for the first two seasons, e.g., before switching to color. But many shows stayed in b&w until the 60s for cost reasons.
That same year I Love Lucy debuted and is usually referred to as the first show filmed in front of a live audience and then broadcast later. That’s a major dividing line, since everybody told Desi Arnez that it couldn’t be done and he proved them wrong and made a fortune. (Superman was always syndicated; network shows had the resources to do live broadcasts.) When one person makes a fortune, everybody else follows. So I wouldn’t be surprised that many shows were filmed by 1955. But lots of shows weren’t and stayed live until the late 50s. By that time it was harder to get away with the fluffs inevitable in live, underreheased television (dead bodies walking offstage, doors that wouldn’t open, actors entering at the wrong cue) and the whole technology of television was getting better every year.
So there’s no one date that’s a dividing line. It was a process, with lots of change happening every year but many things being done the old way. I don’t know what the first regularly schedule show to use film was, but people understood that they could show movies, newsreels, and other filmed programs as time-fillers from the very beginning. But live tv had a caché that we don’t appreciate anymore. That’s why Saturday Night made such a big deal of being live. The spontaneity and tightrope-walking air of live tv was an important piece of having this exciting innovation in your living rooms. Many people were against filmed shows because they thought that too much would be lost. Maybe something was, and sports and cable news fills that void. Film was just not the obvious way to go to people in the early 50s as we would think in hindsight.
The shows that were easily or logically done live (news, and especially variety shows, sitcoms or game shows in front of a live audience, kids shows, interviews and late night shows) were done that way because it was cheap. one-hour mysteries were essentially small movies; they may have been able to skimp on production values, but there was still the expense of camera, film development, editting, etc. That makes sense for a major production like a mystery show, but not for a throw-away like a live variety show or a sitcom.
Of course, it didn’t take studios long to realize the value of at least having a copy of even some live shows for reruns, etc. -so film what is happening live. Then for those really wanting the comedy opportunity, mimic the sitcom format while putting the show together outside of real time with cameras and editing.
The sitcom “format” is so classic that even today, with live audiences but retakes, and limited fixed stages the resultant format is put together more like a classic sitcom that appears to be shot “live”.
Also, making a “film” cost money. A nationally syndicated show could afford to make a full movie, but local shows especially were a heckuva lot cheaper live.
Then there’s the whole issue of how to distribute a TV signal coast to coast live; or ship movie reels everywhere…
I’ve been looking all over some reliable figures about the cost of filming vs. live, but the only thing I can find is an unsourced claim that I Love Lucy’s production costs were “double” what it would have cost to broadcast a live version, and that it would have cost far more if Desi Arnaz and Karl Freund hadn’t literally invented new production techniques.
Remember that CBS couldn’t sell the show to sponsors for what it cost to produce. To get the show on the air, Lucy and Desi famously agreed to basically produce the show at a loss, in exchange for retaining ownership.
Here’s an article that claims that the first filmed series on network TV(which had a lot cruder production values than ILL) cost >$10,000 per episode to produce, while NBC would only pay $8,800 – and couldn’t even get a sponsor to pay that much.
A while back, the Olympics were in a time zone which meant that the USA would see them taped, not live. I remember the newscasters discussing something which totally surprised me: That it is much easier to do a live show than a taped one.
While it is true that a live show is very hectic, that pace lasts only for the length of the event. A taped show requires editing and all sorts of post-production processing. Audiences are willing to put up with minimal processing for a live show, because they understand the impossibility of polishing it well, but they insist on seeing the polish if it was taped.
When they pointed this out, I remembered back to an episode of “ER” which had been broadcast live, with an almost amateurish home-movie quality to it. No way would people accept that other than as an occasional “special event” — or on a regular basis for the news and sporting events.
“As the World Turns” and “The Edge of Night” were aired live every day right up until 1974 or 75. They were probably among the last “plot” series on American TV that aired live on a regular basis.
(Actually, they weren’t live EVERY day during the Watergate hearings in '73 when lots of daytime television was pre-empted. But that was a definite exception.)
I imagine that nearly all television from 1939-47 was aired live (except for occasional movies run as filler–yes, there were movies shown on TV in 1939:
http://www.tvobscurities.com/2010/02/w2xbs-schedule-week-of-november-26th-1939/).
Many of the most popular TV series of the 50s, like Arthur Godfrey and Garry Moore’s daytime series, depended on spontaneity and immediacy to connect with viewers and keep them tuned in. Filming them would’ve been extremely time-consuming and cost-prohibitive (Godfrey’s show lasted 90 minutes a day, Monday to Thursday–Garry Moore’s show expanded to 90 minutes and replaced Godfrey on Fridays).