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Clip description
Shannon is reunited with her old neighbour Mervyn Leggatt (Peter Carroll), a Communist party member whose intellect and commitment she admires. She is tempted by his proposal that she take over the running of the Proletariat Club and is finally persuaded to do so by her new neighbour, Olivia Asche (Lorna Lesley).
Curator’s notes
This production avoids the claustrophobia of being shot in a studio by opening up the visuals in many ways, using the studio imaginatively. The first scene in this clip, for example, is a studio interior dressed to look like an exterior: the roof-top terrace of an old office building. Street lighting, billboards and the bare walls and metalwork of the studio itself contribute to the illusion.
The scene in the park is beautifully but simply shot. The two girls doing all the talking are static while the extras, like the balloon man, are choreographed to enhance the scene’s atmosphere and colour. The girls’ conversation may have been laid on afterwards, since the shot is kept steadily wide, prohibiting the use of a boom. There were effective radio mikes in 1979 but post-synchronised dialogue was still a common technique, particularly when the scene was taking place in a location that had a lot of extraneous noise, like Hyde Park.
Note the dissolve that gently transports us from one of the most beautiful parts of the city to what would have been considered its uglier area. Both sequences are shot from a single, static camera position; the extras providing action in the first and the walking actor and some vehicles doing the same in the second.
