This post is in 3D (Unless you have one eye)

You and I are luckier than most of the animal kingdom because we have stereo binocular vision. Our two eyes see the same thing from two slightly different viewpoints (parallax) which, when overlaid and sorted out by the brain, creates depth of field and distance.

For as long as photography and film have existed, people have been trying to achieve the same effect for entertainment purposes. In 1838, Charles Wheatstone invented an item called the Reflecting Mirror Stereoscope which consisted of a pair of mirrors placed in front of the eyes and angled at 45 degrees towards a pair of drawings of an object viewed at different angles. The effect was a very rudimentary version of 3D, but it is the same basic idea still used today. Wheatstone then asked photography pioneer William Fox-Talbot to provide him with appropriate Talbotypes. The trick was to take the photos from the same distance, with the same focus, but with a horizontal difference equal to that of the human eyes.

 

Parallax in action: Sit back and cross your eyes so the images overlap. Voila! 3D!

And a headache, probably. Image of comet Wild 2 (c) NASA 

Stereoview cards, using the new technology were available by 1852 and, within 10 years, the London Stereographic Company alone had sold more than a million. Indeed V Jenkins, a photography historian, says that the viewers were as popular in post civil-war America as televisions are today. By far the most popular subjects for stereographic cards were portraits and landscapes, though other genres included comics, disasters and, of course, erotica. The 3D peep-show cabinet was patented in 1857 in America, and would consist of a chronological set of stereoscopic cards attached to an endless belt turned by hand. It's not hard to see the progression that takes us from this to Piranha 3DD, 150-odd years later.

The first moving 3D images were shown using the Bioscope, invented by Parisian Optician Jules Dubosq. But the first person to display these stereoscopic moving images for a paying public was Emile Reynauld, another Parisian. He was the owner of the 'Theatre Optique' but his catchily named Stereoscopic Binocular Praxinoscope caused him no end of financial problems,and he ended up throwing the whole thing into the Seine. The popularity of stereographic images was such that when movies began to be made it seemed obvious that they would be soon shown in 3D.

In 1901, a Charles Francis Jenkins filed a patent for a system of creating 3D movies which is basically the same as that which is used today differing only in the fact that rather than red-green or polarised specs, he would have mechanical glasses that shut each eye off alternately. It seems that he never built his machine. Rumours abound that Hollywood is close to glasses-free 3D but, actually, it did exist in 1940s Russia. Moscow's Stereokino theatre used an ingenious structure of 30,000 evenly spaced copper wires on which the movie was projected forming a kind of 'perspective grill'. The problem was that you needed to sit in a very specific position to get the effect (limiting the available seats) and not move; even the slightest movement of the head meant a constant wriggle to get back to the right point. The theatre ran for 18 years though.

Stereo anaglyph of the same comet, also by NASA. You'll need those funny specs though.

Although today's polarised system of 3D was invented back in 1895 by British physicist John Anderton, it was the different-coloured lens system that first had its day.  The anaglyph (red-green) system was first used for feature films in 1922 for 'The Power of Love'. However, the breakout movie for 3-D was 1924's 'Plastigrams' which had no storyline, it just involved vignettes such as a baseball being thrown into the audience and a hose being pointed at the camera. One of the brains behind this work of moving picture brilliance, Jacob Leventhal, also invented the bouncing-ball thing that you see on karaoke machines. For one movie, Leventhal took the ingenious move of having two endings, one happy and one sad, which could be viewed individually through either the red or green lens. From that point on, 3D was here to stay.

That said, it does tend to come in waves. We had actor and magician Andy Nyman as a guest on the most recent series of The Museum of Curiosity and he's a big fan of historical 3D gimmickry. His theory is that the great 3D eras all correspond with perceived threats to the cinema; in the 1950s it was the arrival of TV, in the 70s it was video and, here in the present day, it's the Internet and digital piracy. Here are some interesting facts to consider:

The 1953 3D movie 'The French Line', starring a buxom Jane Russell was advertised with the tag line 'She'll knock BOTH your eyes out!'.

'House of Wax' was the first 3D movie to feature stereo sound. Its director, André de Toth wasn't able to enjoy the 3D effect as he only had one eye.

The most profitable 3D movie ever (by cost to takings ratio) was 'The Stewardesses'. This 1969 movie cost just $100,000 to make but made $27 million thanks to its promise to 'leap from the screen onto your lap

Like it or loathe it, 3D cinema is here to stay. Critic and film historian Mark Kermode has commented that there's been such a huge investment in recent years that Hollywood can't go back now.

So why all this talk of 3D? It's because I, like Andy, also have a love of gimmicky 3D. But my particular love is the View-Master.

Some of my collection. I have more ... lots more. And no life, apparently.

 

 

The old and the new. My Model B (1944-47) and my Model O (2000-present).

I have quite a collection now including a Model B (1944-47), a Model C (1946-1955), Model E (1955-1961), a Model F - which had a built in light source (1959-1966), Model G (1956-1977), Model J (1975-1994) plus a couple of novelty models from the 1990s. But it isn't the viewers that are the stars of the show here - it's the View-Master reels that they show that I love.

Extraordinarily, despite the View-Master being in constant production since 1939 until the present (and made by a number of companies including Sawyer's, GAF, VMI, Mattel, Ideal, Tyco, Fisher-Price) the reels have never changed spec. You can use the same reels in any model of View-Master viewer - how many other technologies can claim that?

This is why I have a fascination with View-Masters; they are a form of social history. The 'travelogue' reels take you all over the world, but also through time. I have reels showing London in the 1960s, New York in the 1940s and Berlin in the post-war 1950s. I have reels of events such as Elizabeth II's Coronation, the marriage of Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly and the Moon landings - all in glorious 3D. I also have reels that reflect popular culture, TV and films in particular. Tarzan, Hopalong Cassidy, Thunderbirds, Batman (Adam West) and The Flintstones all look great in three dimensions. It also brings children's books to life: I have Aesop's Fables, and many nursery rhymes and fairy stories. Reflecting the time it was made, I also have an adaptation of Helen Bannerman's 'Little Black Sambo' - something you'd be hard pushed to find today.

I'm reliably informed that there is such a thing as View-Master pornography. However, I've never found any. The closest I have is a Brighton-based swimsuit contest from 1970 and a 'glamour girls' reel of topless 3D black and white lovelies from the 1950s. You can also have bespoke View-Master reels made from your own photos - although to be properly 3D you need to provide two parallax images or use a 3D camera.

What makes collecting View-Masters even more pleasurable is that they are cheap. You can pick up a set of reels - even very old ones - on ebay often for under a fiver. The viewers sell regularly for less than a tenner and, lets be honest, you only really need one good viewer. Even a brand new Fisher Price (current owners) gift set (viewer and a set a reels) will only set you back about £15. But there is something much more pleasurable, for me anyway, in the tactile smoothness and hefty rasp and clunk of a Sawyer's Bakelite Model E.

Glorious.

What's a Carry On?

It being the Christmas holidays, there is a surfeit of classic Carry On on the television. In the past couple of decades, these films have become synonymous with Bank Holidays and there's always one or two playing. Yesterday I found myself watching one of my favourites - Carry On Screaming - and a sudden thought struck me ... what makes a Carry On film a Carry On film?

I'm sure if I asked the average Jamal or Janet in the street they'd say 'the cast'. But is it? Carry On Screaming is a case in point; there's no Kenneth Connor, no Sid James, no Barbara Windsor, no Hattie Jacques. Charles Hawtrey's role as a cloakroom attendant lasts all of four minutes and Bernard Bresslaw's Socket the butler gets even less screen time. Joan Sims only gets about 10 minutes on film, a third of which is spent as a waxwork. The stars of the film are Harry H Corbett (in his only Carry On role), Fenella Fielding (two appearances in Screaming and Regardless), and Jim Dale (appeared in 11) with Peter Butterworth (16) and Kenneth Williams (26). Yet it is still undeniably a Carry On.

I would imagine that most of us have an idea of who we consider to be the 'Carry On Crew'. But, interestingly, some people on your list made very few appearances across the 31 films in the series. Barbara Windsor only made nine Carry On films plus the 'clip Show' - That's Carry On! Terry Scott made just seven and Leslie Phillips made four. And yet Patsy Rowlands made nine, Peter Gilmore made 11 and Michael Nightingale appeared in 13. Would you have included them in your list? Could you even say you know what Michael Nightingale looks like? Here he is:

 
 

Marianne Stone made nine, Billy Cornelius made eight - you may not know their faces either -  Julian Holloway also made eight and Valerie Leon and Margaret Nolan made six. Joan Hickson made five, as did David Lodge and Bill Maynard. Interestingly, two Doctor Whos have been in the Carry Ons too - William Hartnell appeared once (Sergeant) and Jon Pertwee appeared in four. Then, of course, there's Carry on Columbus, made in 1992, long after most of the original Carry On crew had died or retired ... but is still considered part of the canon.

So, if it isn't the cast, maybe it's the people behind the films?

That might be true but it doesn't explain films like The Big Job (1965) which featured Sid James, Joan Sims and Jim Dale, among others, and was directed by Gerald Thomas, who directed the Carry On films. It was produced by Peter Rogers, who produced the Carry On films, scored by Eric Rogers who scored the Carry On films, and scripted by Talbot Rothwell ... who scripted the majority of the Carry On films. So it's a Carry On in all but name (and was briefly re-badged as What a Carry On) but isn't considered one of the series. And it isn't alone; there's Watch your Stern (1961) which, despite being directed by Gerald Thomas, produced by Peter Rogers, and starring Kenneth Connor, Sid James, Hattie Jacques and Leslie Phillips also isn't a Carry On. And nor are Please Turn Over (1959), No Kidding (1960), Raising the Wind (1961), Twice Round the Daffodils (1962) and Nurse on Wheels (1963), which all share Carry On cast and production teams. To confuse matters still further, there's also a Carry On Admiral (1957), which stars Joan Sims, and a Carry On London (1937) starring future Carry On performer Eric Barker ... and neither have any connection to the Carry On franchise whatsoever.

Clearly, what makes a film a Carry On isn't just the choice of director, producer, writer, composer and/or cast. There's something else at play here. Maybe it's the movie company that funded them? It is true that the first 12 films (Sergeant to Screaming) were put out by Anglo-Amalgamated before the franchise moved to the Rank Organisation for the next 17 films. But when Rank cut their ties, Emmanuelle was funded by Hemdale Pictures and Columbus by Island World (part of 20th Century Fox). Meanwhile, The Big Job was made by Anglo-Amalgamated. So was Watch your Stern.

So what is it? What makes a Carry on?

I think the answer lies in satire. Now, while you may not immediately think of the Carry Ons as satirical films, they do all share one thing in common; they lampoon tradition and aspects of British life, whether it's the army, the NHS, camping holidays, seaside beauty contests, the unions, the Royal Navy or package holidays. They also spoof popular films such as Burton and Taylor's Cleopatra, Lawrence of Arabia, Beau Geste, The Scarlet Pimpernel, the James Bond films, Westerns, and the Hammer Horror movies. Even the Carry Ons that didn't get made, for whatever reason, fit this pattern. Among them were Carry on Smoking (Fire Service), Carry On Escaping (Colditz and various POW films) and Carry On Dallas. By contrast, The Big Job was a simple crime caper in the mould of films like Two Way Stretch, Too Many Crooks and The Lavender Hill Mob. And Mind your Stern wasn't taking the mickey out of the Navy; rather it was a 'man in wrong place at the wrong time' type scenario, like you'd find in some Norman Wisdom films and classics like The Mouse that Roared or Arsenic and Old Lace.

So maybe the reason that Carry On Columbus didn't really work, despite a great cast of comedians, was that it wasn't a satire; it was a string of predictable jokes clumsily built around modern politically-correct sensibilities and loosely attached to the fact that it was the 500th anniversary of Columbus's 'discovery' of the Americas.

So, is there a future for the Carry On franchise? There have been a couple of worthy attempts to make a new film in the recent past and they were in the satirical tradition; Carry On London was a 2003 project helmed first by Peter Richardson and later Ed Bye and starred people like Keith Allen, Vinnie Jones, Shane Ritchie and Daniella Westbrook. It told the story of a limousine company - Lenny's Limos - hired to take actors to the Herberts, a British spoof of the Oscars. It re-appeared in 2009 with the alternative title of Carry On Bananas with Charlie Higson rumoured as director and names like Paul O'Grady, Meera Syal, Liza Tarbuck, Frank Skinner, Lenny Henry and Jennifer Ellison attached ... but nothing came of it. And, in 2010, there was talk of a movie called Carry On To The Next Round, a kind of X-Factor/Pop Idol type spoof, with Russell Brand being lined up to play a Simon Cowell type character who becomes bsotted with a contestant played by Girls Aloud singer Sarah Harding. It also has failed to appear. At least not yet. And I'm not sure they ever will.

You see ... satire has moved on and I do wonder whether a new Carry On film could ever hold its own against things like Yes Prime Minister, The Thick Of It, The Day Today or Drop the Dead Donkey.

Secondly, there is the fact that the Carry Ons thrived on stereotypes: the saucy 'dolly bird', the frumpy secretary, the big thick bloke, the dirty old man, the battleaxe wife, the camp effete, the innocent unworldly young man, the henpecked husband, the matronly larger woman. These days we frown upon such stereotypes even though they will always be there and it is in our nature to recognise them. Sexual politics have changed. So too has the diversity of people in the UK. In the era of the classic Carry Ons, it was acceptable for Bernard Bresslaw to 'black up' as a native African bearer or an Arab tribesman and for Kenneth Williams to put on the accent of an Indian potentate. Rightly or wrongly, this was part of the films' humour. The few well-known black actors of the time, like Kenny Lynch or Rudolph Walker, were relegated to support roles. These days that would be completely unacceptable. The Carry On franchise was built upon white working class seaside postcard humour of a kind that has all but disappeared.

Which is why I think that maybe it's better to say ... Carry On no more.

The Carry On films are still great fun ... at least to people of my generation. But my kids - all in their 20s - are utterly bemused by them. They were firmly of their time. So why try to recreate them? And why bother? I remember hearing someone say once that, 'People don't really want The Beatles to reform ... they just want to feel young again.' I heard similar sentiments when the Star Wars prequels came out; the adults all derided them but kids loved them - even Jar Jar Binks. I saw the original Star Wars when I was 16 and it was magical and brilliant. No matter how much money or skill George Lucas threw at The Phantom Menace, he could never have made me feel like that again because time had moved on ... and so had I.

So I suspect that the Carry Ons are no more possible to resurrect than is Monty Python's Flying Circus. Both franchises occupy a place in our hearts and cinema/TV history that simply isn't reproduceable. Monty Python - the Next Generation? I very much hope not. Carry On 21st Century style? I really don't think that it's achieveable.

But who knows? I could be wrong. They've reinvented Doctor Who and James Bond for the 21st century. They may yet pull it off.

Hyuk yuk yuk.

No signal? No imagination.

I was watching an old Amicus horror film today; they don't make them like that any more. Amicus, if you don't know them, were a rival to Hammer in the good old days of 1970s British horror. They are most famous for their portmanteau fims - a series of short films strung together by a central overarching storyline - and they include Asylum, Tales from the Crypt, Dr Terror's House of Horror and The House that dripped Blood. Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee were in most of them but they did also boast stars like Donald Sutherland, Terry-Thomas, Diana Dors, Ian Carmichael, Roy Castle, Herbert Lom, Tom Baker, Burgess Meredith, Joan Collins, Jack Palance and many others.

However, what struck me about the film was the use of telephones as a dramatic device - something that we've now lost to some degree. For example, in one scene, arranging to meet someone at a call box results in a murder. In another, a predatory Britt Ekland snips someone's phone line prior to killing them. Does anyone do that any more? Or do they just unplug the router?

In these days of instant global communication and mobile/cell phones, it must be increasingly difficult to isolate the heroes from any chance of help. Writers have to include some artifice (radio mast hit by lightning) or a line like 'No signal!' in every such screenplay. Sadly, however, far too many opt for the latter rather than the former, as you can see in this excellent  'supercut' by blogger Rich Juzwiak..



'97% of the country has signal. We managed to find ourselves in the 3%.'  Yeah, you and just about everyone else, apparently.

'No signal' has quickly become a movie cliche; as boring and predictable as using air ducts to escape (there's a great rant on that very subject here), or using the hatch in the ceiling of a lift (have you ever been in a lift that had one??), or rubbing two wires together under the steering wheel to hot-wire a car (complete arse gravy - you try it). You can do better. And we deserve better.

Saying that, where's the consistency? Apparently, you can't get a signal in most open spaces in the world but you can get a signal in a bomb-proof bunker and accept a call from your daughter? That was the one irksome thing in the Season 1 finale episode of the otherwise excellent Homeland. And don't get me started on the iPhone that still had a charge after several years in a box in the Dirk Gently pilot ...

In Sky's drama Mad Dogs, the four stars agree to put their phones in a safe because they won't have a proper break 'if the office can get hold of us'. The subsequent murder of the safe's owner (and loss of the combination) means that they are truly isolated. That's infinitely better than 'No signal' isn't it? As you saw in the second half of that video just now, there are other, more inventive, ways to cut people off from civilisation.

The arrival of new technology means that, as writers, we have to be more inventive in finding new ways to circumvent it. So I think it's fair to say that the day I put 'No signal' into a book or script is the day I should probably hang up my writing hat.

Of course, I love new technology and don't really miss the old analogue phones on a cable. However I do miss the ability to slam a phone receiver down on the cradle in anger or frustration. Pressing the red disconnect button to the sound of a gentle beep just isn't the same, is it?