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Open University TV memories

Started by ajsmith, May 21, 2015, 12:24:29 PM

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ajsmith

Just thought I'd start this thread for any memories anyone has of seeing old Open University shows, particularly the Hauntological fuel of the 70s/80s. I remember seeing a lot of OU shows on the TV as a kid in the 80s, were they maybe shown on BBC2 on a Sunday morning? Associate them with that kind of 'the last of the weekend drips away before it's Monday morning and school again' kind of malaise. One I have a vivid memory of was a show on anti-matter, which illustrated some theory by showing a vignette of a space pilot from another dimension made of anti - matter attempting to communciate with a human pilot. What sticks in my mind is the anti matter pilot was represented as a bright orange faceless man in body stocking, a bit like The Raston Warrior Robot on Sunny D. Anyone remember anything else noteworthy from these shows?

Blumf

Pa-pah, Pa-pah, Pa-paah, Pa-paar, Pa-pah, Pah-dah-daaah-daaaaaAAAARRRR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rrakl3MOQx8

Quote from: Blumf on May 21, 2015, 12:35:35 PM
Pa-pah, Pa-pah, Pa-paah, Pa-paar, Pa-pah, Pah-dah-daaah-daaaaaAAAARRRR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rrakl3MOQx8

I used to find those opening credits a little surreal when watching them as a small child on our black and white TV in the 70s.  There was something a little weird and chilling about that sequence of trumpet notes.

Cerys

I'm reasonably certain that the Open University programmes are one of the reasons I love the oboe so much.  This despite the fact that the oboe doesn't appear to be in that fanfare.

University Challenge used to be on after it.  Did anyone else ever get a University Challenge answer, and feel really smug because you were eight and you got it right, even though it was a complete guess and you hadn't understood the question anyway?

Uncle TechTip

I'd be interested in exploring this hauntological aspect. Was it really true? What was it that was so spooky about them? The minimalist sets, caused by virtually no budget? The quiet delivery? Was it just cos you were young and fearful of the unknown? For the record I think it's a load of bunk.

great_badir

I only ever saw the tail-end of its early weekend morning showings, presumably waiting for whatever was on after it[NB]maybe one of those weird Eastern European claymation things[/NB] and it always seemed to be the guy with the thick brown hair and matching beard/'tache, thick-rimmed NHS glasses and all-brown wardrobe.  If memory serves he did the BBC micro programming slots.

great_badir

Quote from: Uncle TechTip on May 21, 2015, 12:53:54 PM
I'd be interested in exploring this hauntological aspect. Was it really true? What was it that was so spooky about them? The minimalist sets, caused by virtually no budget? The quiet delivery? Was it just cos you were young and fearful of the unknown? For the record I think it's a load of bunk.

That and the paedos presenting them.

ajsmith

Quote from: Uncle TechTip on May 21, 2015, 12:53:54 PM
I'd be interested in exploring this hauntological aspect. Was it really true? What was it that was so spooky about them? The minimalist sets, caused by virtually no budget? The quiet delivery? Was it just cos you were young and fearful of the unknown? For the record I think it's a load of bunk.

I'm thinking more of the weirdness of this anti-matter vignette I remember. I thought they would often do low budget sci-fi playlets to illustrate scientific points? Or have I just conflated that memory as being from OU when it was something else entirely?

Alberon

I'm sure I remember seeing this back in the day, so I don't know if it was used in a school's programme as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvbgYEJ08bQ

FredNurke

Quote from: Cerys on May 21, 2015, 12:41:35 PM
I'm reasonably certain that the Open University programmes are one of the reasons I love the oboe so much.  This despite the fact that the oboe doesn't appear to be in that fanfare.

University Challenge used to be on after it.  Did anyone else ever get a University Challenge answer, and feel really smug because you were eight and you got it right, even though it was a complete guess and you hadn't understood the question anyway?
Yes!
About 20 years later I was on the programme, and it was pretty much the same feeling.


Bingo Fury

Quote from: Uncle TechTip on May 21, 2015, 12:53:54 PM
I'd be interested in exploring this hauntological aspect. Was it really true? What was it that was so spooky about them? The minimalist sets, caused by virtually no budget? The quiet delivery? Was it just cos you were young and fearful of the unknown? For the record I think it's a load of bunk.

It probably is complete and utter bunk, but it's something that seems to strike a chord with a lot of people my age. At the time, it all seemed normal, but I've spent a lot of time re-watching things from the '70s and it awakens a feeling that's a bit like, "Christ, the '70s really was an eerie decade, wasn't it?" There were still loads and loads of derelict buildings and wastegrounds that property developers hadn't got around to building on yet. Large parts of the country hadn't changed in decades and had a grimy, uncared-for aspect. Exteriors, interiors: run-down, old-fashioned, dated, bare floorboards and musty smells in shops. Interest in the supernatural was really high, and all those things fed an atmosphere which is perhaps more noticeable in retrospect than it was at the time.

Maybe it's just a thing of young kids being easily spooked and credulous, but you never seem to hear people who were kids in the '80s and '90s talking about their childhoods being coloured by some all-pervasive eerieness - just fuckers like me who slam Dragnet into the CD player and go, 'Do you see? Do you see?'"

non capisco

Quote from: Phoenix Lazarus on May 21, 2015, 12:39:42 PM
I used to find those opening credits a little surreal when watching them as a small child on our black and white TV in the 70s.  There was something a little weird and chilling about that sequence of trumpet notes.

Correct me if I'm just completely imagining this but I'm sure Open University programming in the early 80s either began or ended with a long silent sequence of that logo motionless against its yellow background, then the fanfare would play and the logo would start bouncing around the screen from corner to corner. Then once the fanfare had finished it would go back to being still again. Then after a period of minutes the fanfare would suddenly start up again and the logo commenced bouncing around like it thought it was in Pong or something. It must have been some kind of countdown to the programmes starting or just a way of filling dead minutes of airtime if programming was under-running. I was a bit unnerved by both the moving logo and the fanfare, but then I was a sensitive wussy little flower back then, as opposed to the hard-bitten MAN I am now who never bothered  to learn how to drive and cries at Sufjan Stevens songs.

massive bereavement

I used to watch it when it was on after "The Late Show" circa 1990 but the golden OU era of the 70s completely passed me by as my parents never watched BBC2. I was under the impression that it only showed "Play School" in the mornings, "Playaway" on a Saturday and the test card at all other times.

I was looking for some OU stuff from the 70s on youtube a few weeks back and was surprised to find there's nothing but the ident. I'd assumed there would have been a lot of old N1500 tapes found with OU material on them, similar to schools programmes from that era, but apparently not.

Blumf

Quote from: massive bereavement on May 22, 2015, 12:16:00 AM
I was looking for some OU stuff from the 70s on youtube a few weeks back and was surprised to find there's nothing but the ident.

Have some Non-Euclidean geometry with a very 70s beard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an0dXEImGHM

Very disappointed the OU haven't just pushed a lot of this old stuff out for public reference. They can't make that much money just from the rights to the films, it's all in the enrolment fees surely. Freeing the videos won't stop people going for the degrees.

Panbaams

Quote from: Blumf on May 22, 2015, 01:11:50 AM
Very disappointed the OU haven't just pushed a lot of this old stuff out for public reference. They can't make that much money just from the rights to the films, it's all in the enrolment fees surely. Freeing the videos won't stop people going for the degrees.

Don't be. It's because (a) the OU isn't a nostalgia factory, and (b) there isn't the money to do it. The OU's worked hard to shake off the perception people have of the impenetrable/laughable TV programmes it used to make, so it isn't going to waste all that effort by putting up old stuff for people to point at and laugh. And the money is a problem. Obviously there's The Current Financial Climate, but the ELQ rules from a few years back haven't helped either. Either way, it'd cost a lot of money for what would essentially be a vanity project.

That said, the old TV shows may not even be the OU's to give away – they were made by the BBC. The BBC had a building on the Milton Keynes campus where the shows were filmed – quite a modest-sized building, but big enough for both a studio and a bar. (Old-school BBC. You'd never get that now.) These were Beeb staff, with @bbc.co.uk email addresses, not OU people. Gradually the number of BBC staff onsite was whittled down (the bar got turned into the office they worked in) before they all eventually got recalled to the mothership. The OU goes in for high-profile co-productions with the BBC nowadays and any filming it needs to do for OU courses, it does itself.

If it's free learning you're after, the OU puts out loads of stuff – there's the OpenLearn site, and it also owns FutureLearn.

Blumf

Well, if they're BBC copyrights I'd say that's even more reason to free them. They do have cultural significance (something the BBC is supposed to be about, hence the licence fee),and the Beeb should be doing some work to preserving older material (help make up for it's past vandalism).

There are other, better, materials around now, all that Kahn Academy jazz, MOOC's, and that, so I doubt they'd be stepping on any toes. This is about making available an interesting and unique bit of British history to future generations.

shiftwork2

Perhaps not what you were after but I remember watching a Physics module in the 1980s presented by a mesmerically strange guy.  After an exquisitely-timed pause his name appeared on screen: Dr Stuart Freake, and we all laughed fit to split.  He's still around although looking much less freakish than I remember.  Sorry Stuart, I feel bad now.

Pranet

When I was a student and then unemployed and basically nocturnal I used to watch it quite a bit. I remember at the moment a documentary about post holocaust fiction with Martin Amis and JG Ballard that always used to be on all the time, a production of  Endgame, something about Boswell meeting Jame Hume on his death bed, and some play about a revolution in Africa starring Craig Charles. Oh, and a thing explaining the concept of infinity that I was so taken with I sent off for the fact sheet. At times it was a bit like what I wish BBC4 was more like.

buzby

I was lucky enough to get a Binatone black and white portable for my bedroom one Christmas in the early 80s. If I had trouble getting to sleep I used to lay in bed watching it until I drifted off (the TV came with a crystal earpiece with an 8ft long lead, so I wasn't keeping everyone else awake). If I was up early on a Sunday I used to watch it then as well (as there was basically nothing else on at that time).

I remember there being quite lot of complex maths programmes, and the odd one on farming and agriculture. If you got something a bit different it was usually quite interesting  though. One was on mechanical engineering and featured the design and testing of electricity pylons. There was another about astrophysics that did the classic 'balls on a rubber sheet' example to demonstrate the warping of spacetime. Another one (which was a bit of a favourite of mine and I ended up seeing  few times) was about Victorian religious and  funerary architecture (Highgate cemetery featured heavily).

Blumf

Quote from: Pranet on May 22, 2015, 08:55:16 PM
Oh, and a thing explaining the concept of infinity that I was so taken with I sent off for the fact sheet.

Hotel Hilbert, starring the lovely Susannah Doyle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGmdp0EOGeo

Pranet

That's it! Good lord, astonishing.

Lisa Jesusandmarychain

#22
Quote from: Cerys on May 21, 2015, 12:41:35 PM
I
University Challenge used to be on after it.  Did anyone else ever get a University Challenge answer, and feel really smug because you were eight and you got it right, even though it was a complete guess and you hadn't understood the question anyway?

I still do that nowadays. I'm not eight, though :( (to be fair to myself, I average a fair few correct answers correcct with it just being guesswork a small part of the time. It's always quite gratifying to get a question correct when all of the brainboxes on there clearly don't know the answer, so you have quite a delicious feeling of smugness saying "Ah, ya thick gits." to the television screen, and  can pretend to be the young Kevin Bacon in that scene in 'Diner' (Director Barry Levinson, 1982. Look out for the young Ellen Barkin in there, too, she's quite the hottie).)

Lisa Jesusandmarychain

Oh, btw, I've put the 'No, You Bloody Well Don't!' tag in as an obscure-ish gag for all you fans of Spike Milligan's "Q" series out there.

Blumf

Not OU stuff (that I've noticed so far) but this channel has some nice old BBC education videos.

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6G6nfxpNP4tLZdJFIkx69w

studpuppet

My OU memory is of driving to my aunt's house with my new girlfriend on Boxing Day in about 1995.
On the way there, we had to make an hour's detour to meet an academic at Oxford railway station, who handed over a large plastic bag containing five VHS tapes of the complete Ascent Of Man. At the time legal wrangles meant the series couldn't be released commercially (thankfully since rectified).
The OU used to show the Ascent Of Man as part of its Sociology and Anthropology courses late at night or very early on Sunday mornings so I always missed them. One episode used to get used in lots of different courses though: Ep11 'Knowledge Or Certainty'. Still the strongest, most emotional piece of television I've ever witnessed:

https://youtu.be/wXwj4jMnWZg?t=6s

Glebe


And then You and Me or something would come on. While you're recovering from flu or whatever.