There’s a distinctive quality to british tv. I can immediately tell, on mute even, if the tv comes from england. Maybe it’s Europe in general? So what’s the difference?
It probably has to do with with the conversion from PAL to NTSC television format. This involves changing the framerate and reducing the resolution, which could easily impart a distinctive look to the video.
I always find the US shows have the colour* turned up higher than UK shows.
*By colour I mean that button on the remote that affects the picture and isn’t contrast or brightness, the other one. Sorry, I don’t know what the correct term for it is though.
It works both ways. It’s not an issue with recent high definition TV, but older US TV has a distinctive, slightly fuzzy look to it on European TV because of the lower resolution used by the American NTSC.
I notice that BBC international news (on PBS/CSPAN) tends to (IMO) have a sort of washed out look to it compared to major market American news and the production values appear to be somewhat more basic/more primitive in terms of set “look”. I assume this is just for the BBC feed we get and that local news in London would be just a technologically “slick” as major market US news.
Tuco - it’s probably colour saturation. The UK show Hollyoaks was deliberately filmed with high, “TV-advert”-style colour saturation, compared to other UK productions.
Also: not all US shows are really bright. Some are deliberately filmed sepia toned (as I understand it) like The Practice.
And yes - US shows look much fuzzier when converted to PAL.
The colour control mechanism used in British tv and much of Europe is designed to take account of timelag variations in the tv chrominance information.(Colour~chrominence)
When a tv signal is broadcast it is a fairly wide range of requencies, around 5 to 6 MHz, around the central transmitting frequency.
The tv signal is made up of many components, such as line and frame signals, sound, chrominence, video and data such as Oracle.
There are also referance signals transmitted, which are like fixed markers within the whole of the tv signal.The referance markers are used to set certain decoder circuits in the tv set, all other points of the tv signal are referanced to them.
You have a referance from which the fm stereo signal operates, and there is another for the chrominence.
When signals are transmitted over say a few hundred miles, you get shifts within the signal package, we call them phase changes.
By having a referance signal, like for chrominence, it can be determined how much out of phase that information has become, and take steps to correct it.
European tv uses a method called PAL, phase alternating line, what it does effectively is trade off colour strength(saturation) for colour accuracy(hue)
The result is that tv over here tends to look a bit washed out, but the colour tones are more accurate.
In the US, if you pick up tv from several differant transmitters at differant distances, you get good colour saturation, but as you switch from channel to channel you may well find that the colours are somewhat inaccurate, so that faces may appear to be a lot more yellow, or that reds slip toward browns.
US tv sets used to have a hue control, not a colour control, this was used to pull the colour clock around to the proper state, this in effect is a manual version of what European systems do automatically.(
(Colour clock - imagine a circular disc with every colour painted on it such they run nicely into each other, if this colour clock within the tv signal rotates a little then every colour is interpreted by the tv slightly wrongly, whose colour clock has remained stationary, and that colour phase change is pretty much what happens)
Another effect of the PAL system is that our definition of images is not as good as the US, since we end up transmitting and displaying each line twice, resulting in half of US picture quality.
This is especially noticeable on large screen tv sets, in the US htey are almost cinema like in quality compared to European tv sets.
As digital tv takes off these differances will disappear, the US will get better colour rendition and Europeans will get better definition and colour saturation.
PAL = Picture Always Lousy - Europe
NTSC = Never Twice The Same Colour - US
That’s not the special US version, BBC always looks like that. There are no stock tickers, summaries of headlines or boxes telling you the weather in Arkansas. UK Sky News, on the other hand, is far more similar to US news networks. I’m the sure the BBC could also pull it off if they wanted. They’ve either done their research and found that people prefer a less cluttered screen or they are trying to project some sort of image of reliability in the same way banks do. It’s been the same for as long as I can remember.
Thanks guys. Excellent post, Casdave.
I liked Bill Bryson’s crack about Welsh-language TV, in Notes from a Small Island. How they look like any ordinary British people in English-type living rooms, drinking tea from Wedgwood china and wearing Marks & Spencer sweaters … but when they open their mouths they speak in “Martian.” 
This is still around. Typically there’s a “tint” control (which changes the picture from green to purple) as well as the “color” control (which changes it from black&white to saturated color).
I’m puzzled by this part - both PAL and NTSC are interlaced, and PAL has 575 active lines compared to NTSC’s 480. Perhaps the large screen sets were showing HDTV, which hasn’t arrived in Europe yet.
casdave: do you know what causes that purple and yellow cast that washes over cheaply-made US programmes viewed on UK television?
I also think the production styles, budgets, etc. are different and distinct. Obviously, the clothing and interiors are pretty different also, but I get the feeling watching “Britcoms” that they don’t have as many takes, retakes, extra camera angles, additional actors, etc. than the leading US comedies. I wonder what the comparative budgest are.
everton
That colour change is caused by a phase change in the colour information.
When a tv signal is broadcast, bits of it get delayed or advanced in relation to the rest of the signal, that’s your phase change.
Human eye is very sensitive to colour change but is does do a good job at making colour fill the to the correct boundaries.You might have seen apintings where the colour when seen close up, does not really follow the drawing ourlines well at all, but from a little distance the eye can cope with it.
The eye can compensate well for low contrast and for poor image quality, so this is why PAL is designed to trade off image quality and saturation for colour accuracy.
It’s like the timing in a car, you can advance or retard the colour clock, but if the point from which you take your measurement change, it is throws everything out.
Because US tv uses a differant method of colour control you don’t have the correct referance point.
If the US tv signal gets kind of stretched or smudged, there isn’t any way for PAL to dealwith it and when it gets converted from US standard to Euro standard it all carries through.
Usram
In terms of colour information although we have supposedly 625 lines, a number are used for frame timing and a number are used for tv data like teletext, so you are right that we have 575 active lines.
It’s misleading though, because PAL sums up line information to get the correct cancelling effect for phase shifts.
In effect we get around half the line information that US tv does, we display the same line twice.
Thank you casdave. Most informative.
I’ve noticed that laughtracks on Britcoms sound much different than those on American shows. They seem to have a British accent, of sorts – more like “ararar” than “hahaha,”; they’re louder; and they stop quite abruptly.
On British British television, as opposed to American British television, I’ve also noticed that programs often start at odd times, rather than on the half hour and hour as is usually the case in the States and Canada. I’ve seen schedules that look something like this …
9.25 Gardening Tips From the Queen Mother
9.50 A Man and His Dog
10.20 Gardens of Leeds
10.50 Coupling
11.15 Shetland Sheepdog Races
11.40 History of Fine British Cuisine
11.45 Coronation Street
12.35 Perennial Parade
13.10 Scottish Soccer Hooligan Weekly
Can you give any examples of shows that you think have laugh tracks?
elmwood, LOL.
I mean “ar ar ar”, wot.
Are they all filmed live? Shows I can think of with laughter in the background are Mr. Bean, Fawlty Towers, Ab Fab, men Behaving Badly, and … I don’t know the name of it, but it takes place in a department store … Are You Being Served, I think.