The video special effects generator works on all the permutations of speed and pacing, punctuation and bordering. It is its facility to mix, not in elementary chromatics, but by the processes of dissolve, wipe, fade and superimposition of detail that the exhilarating velocity of information is achieved in programmes like Entertainment this Week. Pushing the image pushes the rate of exchange of information, synaesthetically nourishing the fodder of the video magazine. E. T. W. is television’s television, transmitting from the centre of a radiating synthesis of last entertainment.

Interludes in E.T.W. are never quite still. At the end of each segment before the oncoming advertisement, Dixie and Steve chat inaudibly, with the lights of Hollywood stretched out behind them, while matted over them will be a tickertape list of the top 5 midnight movies or the top 5 pop singles of the week, then appears a rolling zooming rectangle that eventually squares up to announce what items are coming up next, then the signature card and then the local ads.

E.T.W. operates as a fast breeding gossip chamber since it finds itself as the only programme empowered to monitor the rest of network television and film. It was the first show to inform us that Jennifer Reals did not perform the dance sequences in Flash dance

and that the Bee Gees were successfully sued for plagiarism by an amateur song writer. E.T.W. has a keen nose for the skin job and a sensitivity to the peoples’ response (to, say, the axing of a popular TV serial) versus network decision making. Its vast archival reach is awesomely displayed whenever it cares to do a 3 minute thumbnail sketch of, say, the history of colour film processing or the evolution of Rockabilly music,

E.T.W.’s series of disconnected fragments are stabilised by the interventions of cheery anchor men and women and by the strategic use of the special effects generator. Video special effects and cine special effects are quite distinguishable and produce their own separate consequences despite the fact that processes, matting for example, are given the same name in both media. Video effects piece together like a jigsaw puzzle and tend to a crowding of images in space, while cine-effects blend evenly with the manipulated scene and tend towards the fantastic occurring in panorama. In The Oberwald Mystery the video effects generator replaces gels and the cine optical printer to inject, without resistance, double images, ghostly presences and colourised atmospheres according to each character’s affinity. At the desired moment the colouriser can strike the sky a brilliant yellow or bathe the villain in a discrete purple atmosphere.

> Continued