Meeting: Headline Bradford

April 2012

A retrospective of dramatic events which made newspaper and local TV headlines in the 1970s and 80s and captured on film by Colin Sutton, who provided a ‘live’ talk-over commentary for the show of around 400 digitally restored colour slide images.

Report by Peter Richmond

The main part of April’s meeting was given over to Colin Sutton, who showed a number of his photographic sequences which are produced using a combination of RISC OS and PC hardware and software. Colin brought his own Digital Light Processing (DLP) video/data projector (as opposed to our 3 × LCD model) to ensure a good quality picture, and as ever his photos shone through.

One of the stills sequences showed how part of Bradford had been converted by a film crew to look like a 60s version of Berlin – complete with fake cafes, shop fronts, Wall and a ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ border crossing with guards and a look-out tower. This was all for a ‘made for television’ film in the late 80s. There were two other sequences around Bradford, looking at a large-scale fire and the floods that occasionally hit the city due to the fact that Bradford Beck flows right underneath the centre.

As a short follow-up to the subject of emulators and programs for the BBC Micro, Steve Bass followed Colin by loading up some software that had started life on a cassette tape. This had been ‘rescued’ and converted to a format suitable for use with BeebEm, which can run on a PC. Steve did just this, using the Club’s RisCube.

Finally Peter Richmond ended the evening by looking at some more hints and tips for RISC OS software and hardware.