The Stone Tape – Behind the scenes

The Storyline:

The Stone Tape is a ghost story that is both dramatic and scary in parts, involving a research team from an electronics company that moves into an old stately pile to start work on finding a new recording medium.

However, in one room, an apparition appears from time to time, climbing a set of stairs that don’t go anywhere, and falling from the end. Members of the research department think that the image is a psychic impression which has been trapped in a stone wall and gets ‘played back’ when something triggers it. (Hence the reference to ‘Stone Tape’). However, the ‘recording’ seems to have degraded over time.

Jane Asher plays Jill Greeley who seems to cause the apparition to appear more times than other members of the team. Research into the apparition shows that there had been sightings as far back as the war years when American personnel had been billeted in the building. After some tests cause the phenomena to be ‘erased’, Jill is walking along a corridor when another psychic presence appears and forces her into the room and up the steps from where she falls to her death and becomes the ‘haunting’.

It ends with a local historian arriving who has some information about the events and says that his research has found that reports go back many centuries!

Behind the scenes:

The three frames shown are from the opening sequence as Jill (Jane Asher) arrives at the house, the remainder is studio based. Around the early 1970’s an experimental single camera unit was set-up to evaluate equipment and requirements, so this sequence is a very early example of a single camera shoot, if not the first, with every shot change being a VT edit. It must be remembered that the VT then was 2” with a ten second run-up so editing took time!.

The VT editor was Geoff Higgs, who I knew very well. I worked for a department of the BBC which trained TV production staff and Geoff came in regularly to give lectures to courses. I spoke to him about this production and he confirmed that the sequence had been shot single camera and that each shot change was a VT edit.

Robert (Bob) Wright lit the production and also, in 1964, Hamlet at Elsinore a joint production with Danish TV done as an outside broadcast, as well as five episodes of The Six Wives of Henry VIII in 1970.

An interesting followup:

Sometime in the late 1970’s, I was on holiday in Wales with my then girlfriend. On an edition of the BBC local news programme, there were two items run one after the other…

The first was a report about a pub in South Wales where two researchers were attempting to see if they could get ‘sound’ from the original lime mortar on the walls (sound familiar?), while the second was about an exhibition of illustrations by Gerald Scarfe being opened in Cardiff. Gerald Scarfe is married to Jane Asher! Spooky or what?

Dave Buckley

The photos on this link  https://www.vtoldboys.com/arc11.htm are of a single camera training shoot being done around 1981/2 in London by my BBC department. I am in the first photo on the second row and second photo third row – wearing brown! The camera is an Ikegama HL79 which had first been used for the Summer Olympics in Moscow in 1980.