A lovely and unusual item was added to the archive this week. At the end of every early episode one of these end titles rollers was printed. The roller in the images below was taken from the episode “who wants to be a millionaire”
And someone, usually Tony Dow or Adrian Pegg would have to wind it through on a machine for a camera to record
I suppose at home we thought it was all done automatically, but it was more basic than that
Society president Perry Aghajanoff says
“It’s amazing one has actually survived all these years”
We asked Assistant Floor Manager Adrian Pegg about its use: “In the days before captions could be generated by a computer, these ‘roller captions’ had to be ordered by the production to be delivered on the day of the studio.
On the studio floor there was a roller caption machine, and one of the first jobs for the AFM was to time the roller with a stopwatch so that the gallery could run it at the end of the recording.
It was a simple operation, but in the days of the unions only the stagehands could touch or operate it, all I could do was get them to do it and to time the thing! A camera had to be pointed at it, and the gallery called for it to be run on cue (if ever you see a slight judder as the roller starts moving that is the stagehand pushing the button a little too harshly and making the thing wobble – look out for that on old shows).
Normally they ran vertically, but you may remember that ‘That’s Life’ always had a horizontal roller, with everything hand painted by graphics. A very simple task nowadays, but this is how it was done until the late 80’s at least”
