Why do we never have great documentaries in the Uk that go into detail

I watched this video the other day and just couldnt take my eyes off it despite not understanding the German.

I ended up watching another 2-3 of the series. I think there are 68 episodes in the series covering all sorts of trades/crafts.

You can enable English auto subtitles to sort of get an idea of the spoken parts.

This one is about a`` fiel`` maker (file and rasp maker)

**LINK**

Edited By mark smith 20 on 30/09/2017 10:49:57

Edited By mark smith 20 on 30/09/2017 10:50:41

Mark,

I had a look at part of the video and it looks superb. However, I can't see enough false tanned, silicon enhanced, botox'd so called 'celebrities' in the thick of it. It looks great to me but I doubt if it would appeal to the facebook generation I'm afraid. Is it me do you think?

Phil H

Phil, thats exactly why i like it ,no stupid introducer asking silly questions with the camera permanantly on their faces instead of showing you anything of interest.

I get sick of all the documentaries on UK tv where they concentrate more on the commentator than the content of what the show is supposed to be about and constantly recap everything thats already been said after each break. If you take out all that waffle from UK tv shows your lucky if theres 10mins content in a hour programme.

Edited By mark smith 20 on 30/09/2017 12:21:13

We used to have "Out of Town" to showcase traditional crafts, but there doesn't seem to be anything like that now. Perhaps the difference is down to early exposure in Germany to "Die Sendung mit der Maus" (The Show with the Mouse) and its excellent short documentary films like this which shows the manufacture of lolly sticks.

Brian

Many thanks for the link to "Der Letze seines Standes".

I know that BBC iPlayer is difficult to get work outside the UK but does this link work outside Germany?

**LINK**

It´s about a guy repairing tower/church clocks based in Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

Wiki has a list of some of the series (in German). some are available on YouTube and some direct from www.br.de (but as I said I´m not sure if you can get the latter outside DE). The locations range from Berlin to northern Italy and Vienna..

The series came from Bayern Alpha, now ARD-Alpha a documentary channel set up by Bavarian TV

There used to be a great series called "Industrial Revelations", presented by Mark Williams. Perhaps doesn't go into extraordinary depth but it's a good watch, check it out on youtube.

Other than that, yes, I do despair the loss of good documentaries.

Michael W

Michael W, yes it is interesting but id rather listen to the expert in the craft or whatever not the constant views of this guy talking. Whats wrong with just hearing his voice without having his face in the camera constantly. This is the problem i`m referring to with modern UK TV of any interest.

Dick, i`ll check that series out.thanks,

BBC made several programmes in the Handmade series - no music, no voiceover, part of their "Slow TV" movement. The ones I still have on my digi-corder are on chair making, knife making and glass. Not available on i-Player but on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ice3crrwtqo&list=PLks5KymylUJgm-LhvWwHp9ahePg_2xKG8

A good film, I enjoyed watching it.

There is a TV programme called "How its made" which appears to be of French Canadian origin but is voiced over by a Brit.

Each half hour programme gives an overview of how two or three different items are made.

It is just the video of the production process and the descriptive voice-over.

I find it quite informative without all the hyperbole and false drama of the average pseudo technical reality programme.

JimB

(First post in this forum).

I think this is the difference in attitude towards engineering between UK and Germany.

I grew up in Birmingham in the 50s. Not everybody was an 'Engineer' of course but an awful lot of people, my relatives included, worked in industry and had some sort of empathy with it.

Thanks to successive governments, financial services became the god.

My observation of the antics of a lot of todays generation (not all of course) can be put down to a complete lack of understanding of anything remotely technical or practical, other than the latest Apps on their facebox..

A bit late in the day, but better late than never, (never quite understood the logic of 'too little too late' the last few years has seen the realisation that we don't have engineers any more.

Bill D.

I can remember as a young lad in the late fifties early sixties going down to our local library in the evenings to watch films. I am talking real films here, shown on old fashioned projectors. These featured many old crafts and skills such as clog making, Coopering, Fitting steel tyres on wooden cart wheels etc. One in particular showed a huge stationary engine flywheel being cast. It included footage of the moulders preparing the mould, the molten metal being prepared and poured and finally the removal of the fly wheel from the sand. There was another showing ships propellers and one of a large naval gun being erected and tested.

I don't know where these films came from or who was responsible for their production or even why they were shown but I never missed a one. Looking back I must have had free admission because I certainly didn't have any money for tickets or anything. I often wonder where those films went. Maybe they will surface on the net one day.

I'm going to suggest a different picture. In the past far too many British firms featured obsolete tooling and production methods, over-staffing, low productivity, reliance on vanishing local raw materials, overpaid workers, incompetent management, uncompetitive and outdated products, unacceptable damage to the environment (as in Aberfan), spanish practices, institutionalised petty theft, demarcation disputes, horse-play, high accident rates, subsidies, poor customer relationships and a die-hard refusal to accept anything new like the metric system.

However, now that all the unprofitable ventures have gone what's left is hot stuff. British engineering is world class and making a solid living. It's done it by shifting to things like aerospace, pharmaceuticals, design, project management, and telecomms etc. Engineering changes the world and then engineering has to adapt again. Although low profit manufacturing and heavy engineering has mostly been outsourced, it's very wrong to suggest that 'we don't have engineers any more'.

Speaking of today's generation I was chatting to my nephew today. He's 23. He was telling me what he's doing at work with 5G. High-technology - no screwdrivers, tape measures, lathes, welders, oil or heavy lifting involved. Like the steam engine, electricity, and wireless 5G is expected to be transformational. No-one knows how much value it will deliver, but think trillions. Much more profitable than, say, Shipbuilding ever was.

The past was a wonderful place but it's daft to want to recreate it. The future is different. Youngsters always build on foundations provided by granddad, but they'd be very unwise to copy his methods. Their skills and interests are focussed on what happens next. You have to judge them by today's needs, not the standards of yesteryear.

Dave

Dave

Modern methods aside , i like watching old films like this ,i have little interest in modern technology although do try to follow it.

Pathe news has lots of interesting clips though usually very short. This one may be interesting to many on here.

**LINK**

Well said Dave.

I agree documentaries now in the UK are poor, over dubbed with music so you can't hear what's being said. Trouble is the average person has the attention span less that an goldfish so the producers adds in rubbish and all they are interested in is viewer numbers. I blame the cop out degrees of media studies that were all the rage over the last few years. Was James Burke any better though?

Having just retired from 45 years in engineering (electronic comms) I was exasperated by the lack of vision and forward planning that the senior management showed in the last few years with no youngsters taken on in the last 5 years. When the exodus of 60 to 65 year olds happen they started to panic.

Gripe over

Hugh

At school we used to have films shown in the lunch hour of mainly technical subjects, many of them were made by Castrol. I left school in 1972 though so it was a while ago.

Mike

Some good points made in this topic, but, to cut to the chase, there are no good detail technical programmes because of the dire quality of TV in the UK. Producers are closely pressed to make progs that appeal to a younger audience and that audince is perceived as being completely turned off by anything technical or requiring thought in a technical sense.

Mr Blair said we would have 200 channels...which has been a complete disaster due to there already being probs with filling up the orignal 3, so a complete "dumbing down" happened TV producers would defend themselves by insisting that they must chase a young audience who have been brought up to look down their noses at anything to do with 'making' or crafts and hands on technology etc.

Back in the 60's and 70's it was often claimed that TV had killed off books and reading and that there would soon be no more new titles. The same was suggested for the future of magazines. however, if you go to any branch of WH Smiths you can now see magazines on every cubject many of them crafts/making/technical, so the market is clearly there still it's just the out of touch attitude of TV executives and producers who have their own problems staying relevant to their business......much of their business now being taken over by the incredible growth of YouTube....a lost opportuntity if there ever was one!

What is the attention span of a goldfish?

I was listening to a programme on Radio 4 where they were comparing human attention spans with a goldfish, measuring attention spans etc (and could find no credible stats in favour of the hypothesis that attention spans had reduced, just that there was a perception that dumbing down was needed). However when they got to talking about the attention span of said goldfish, I was distracted by brats returning from a walk, and missed it. It wasn't on i-player either. I did get the impression it was longer than expected from the program build-up.

Regards

Richard.

.

Allegedly ... somewhat less than the time it takes to do a circuit of the bowl:

Ergo, it is not aware that it is imprisoned.

MichaelG.

I don't think this is indicative of my personal experience. I've never heard an engineer refuse to use the metric system in the U.K since it was introduced. The largest market of foreign export being the U.S, this is unlikely to have made much of a difference even if it was true. The fact that we adopted the metric system isn't really shouting "die hard" imperial at me, this is remarkably open minded move considering we were the antithesis of metric system for a long time.

I know of one large engineering firm who outsourced all it's labour to spain, despite being a profit-making venture. I also know of other companies who had full order books for years and the management still made the move, so they weren't exactly in an uncomfortable position, nor were the workers demanding too much.

I don't know how profitable the next "G" is going to be(there only seems to be a few years until they move onto the next fad), but I can almost guarantee you it'll employ a fraction of what ship building would've employed during it's day, and that the golden age of ship building lasted far longer.

You also can't guarantee that our super hifi brit technology wont be exported to under-developed economies in the same way that ship building was, it only takes a few years now for it all to shift elsewhere.

Finally for about the most political thing I will say here, I've gotten so fed up with one group or another saying they'll reverse the fortunes of this cursed island. That actually it's all rubbish, the outfit changes, the window dressing. But those endless departments are all the still the same underneath. You can't change that. They'll do whatever they were gonna do, regardless of who's in charge, so you might as well not care one way or another. 

Michael W

Edited By Michael-w on 30/09/2017 21:48:28