We're busy behind the scenes!

Well, it’s a year ago since I posted this news and progress is still on-going now in July 2017. A lot of photos have been scanned but uploading them takes time. The next tranche will cover our final show, The Shell Seekers, and will expand the associated memories attaching to it. Hopefully, this will happen within the next fortnight. Watch this space . . . !

Well, since my previous posting life has dramatically got in the way – as it often does. But now here we are in mid-December and I have more free time to devote to this website.

Back in August Bushy Fade asked (tongue-in-cheek) whether we were busy clearing snow to keep the audience dry? Obviously not a summer occupation but he was referring to one particular moment during a winter show (can’t just recall which one now) when – at the start of the interval – a patron found Fred and, rather meekly, informed him that water was dripping down onto his seat B2 and could anything possibly be done to alleviate the problem?

*sigh* Luckily there wasn’t any complex set-change into Act 2 so ladders were hurriedly brought round and Fred (in full DJ) shinned up and found the roof tile which had slipped enough to allow rain penetration.

Early March 2018 now, and almost all the show photographs from the archive have been identified, scanned, tidied up, resized and uploaded to their relevant entries on our website.

The next task will be to add the names of cast members to each image – a daunting prospect and one which I’m afraid will naturally take quite some time because not only the electronic image needs captioning but each physical photograph in the archive requires the same annotation: sadly there’s no guarantee this website will survive for the same length of time as the archive itself should – once our work is finished, the archive will be lodged with the Oxfordshire Museums’ Resource Service as part of their own local history archive.

However, having the show entries at last populated with supporting photos is in itself a huge step forwards and we ask your patience in the coming months as we continue our task.

July 2018 and work gently progresses. In fact, now we’ve discovered around 20 ancient VHS tapes, each of which carries one entire performance of a show. Unfortunately the tapes had been stored in a damp room and were absolutely covered in mould; so much so that I couldn’t even wind them by hand, never mind in a VHS player.

In despair I took them to a local computer repair shop whom I’ve used down the years (Quick Fix Computers, Broad Street, Banbury OX16 5BT – 01295 251581 – website at http://www.quickfix-computers.co.uk ) and these marvellous chaps act as agents for a video/film transfer company. I was most impressed, just two weeks later, to receive 21 shiny new DVDs onto which each show had been carefully copied once the wizards had somehow purged the tapes of years of mould etc. As a satisfied customer I can very heartily recommend them.

Of course, now I have the task of watching each one on a computer and trying to get screen shots of suitably interesting moments during each show. It may take a while . . .

Stephen’s a very patient chap – it’s ‘only’ taken me four months to add the programme and (as a bonus) a newspaper critique for Le Chandelier which he’d found in his home. I believe Graham’s seeing whether he can embed the Pam Ayres recording into our site, but there may be copyright issues to sort out first.

Update time – mid April and we’ve started to view and abstract stills from some 20 videos of past shows. This is exceptionally time consuming (the video has to be viewed in real time and, when a suitable frame appears, freeze it, take a shapshot, process it via Photoshop and add it to this website in jgeg format under its correct show page. Repeat ad infinitum to end of show!) but will at least provide images from shows for which there are no pre-existing photographs available.

And while this process is in its early stages, an idea struck us: many shows do have photographs of the action and, currently, some have every image captioned whilst others merely tell the viewer “awaiting caption”. This quickly leads to rather boring repetition. By far a better proposal is to add at the beginning of the photo series one further one which contains thumbnails of the cast members – in order of appearance – so that the viewer will recognise that person as the photo show progresses.

So far only Absent Friends has been thus treated and although the appearance of the thumbnails needs fine-tuning, I think it’s fair to say the idea actually works. So; one done, around a hundred to go – and that’s before we really get stuck into the video backlog.