Mikeie
Friday 7th February 2014 5:50pm [Edited]
16 posts
Quote: billwill @ 7th February 2014, 4:23 PM GMT
"The Stage" archives are not necessarily any more correct than Aaron's summaries here on BCG. Where did they get their data?
Alomo as a Limited Company was dissolved some years ago now after its holding company SelecTV was bought by Pearson and subsequently transferred (bought?) by Fremantle. The assets were mostly just the back-catalogue of TV programmes. The SelecTV companies were administered from the Fremantle Stephen Street office for a while, but I don't think Alomo itself actually produced any more programmes after the transfer and as I said it was eventually dissolved.
So the detailed records of exactly where Alomo did each of their productions are probably in a dusty attic or cellar in the Stephen Street office.
If you went to the end of each recording (most are now on DVD) the credits should show where the recording took place.
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I remember attending a recording of Love Hurts, at IT advisor/support, which was shot single camera style. It was somewhere north west of London, possibly in Elstree Studio, but it might have been on location. Certainly nowhere near Teddington for that episode.
billwill
Thanks for showing interest in my posting.
The Stage archive is made up from pages of the publication scanned into their database, thus you can look back at issues from 1880 to 2007. There is a browse facility or you can search on particular words, to locate articles or features that contain the word you're looking for.
As you point out SelecTV were the parent company of Alomo, although they also owned other production companies such as Witzend and Clement-La Frenais and I think there's a good chance that both these also had material recorded at Elstree during the early nineties. Although I don't think that approaching Freemantle with a request for production information on TV series made over 20 years ago would meet with much success or interest, as the company obviously have more important things to do.
Crediting the studio where something was made on the closing credits was a practise of Lew Grade's ITC and this came to a conclusion with Return of the Saint in the late seventies. I don't know any series since than that has continued this.
Having watched an episode of Love Hurts this afternoon, I'd say that it was shot on 16mm film on location, in the style pioneered by Euston Films for Thames Television, with Special Brach and The Sweeney in the mid-seventies. They used the interiors of actual buildings as opposed to doing interiors inside a stage or studio and made this sort of TV series less expensive to produce. I had come across a couple of interviews with Adam Faith where he was quoted as saying that he had been at Elstree Studios working on Love Hurts and took this to mean that filming had actually taken place there. However, as Michael pointed out only the production office was based there and Faith would have been involved in rehearsals only.
