undercurrent

February 02, 2004

The Mystery of Morse

(unfamiliar with british TV minutiae by any unfortunate chance? Give up now. )

Isn't it time someone set up a tribute site for Ken Morse, the man who for a generation has interpreted the sedate lost world of the still image for children of the cathode ray tube? He is the one constant factor since the dawn of the BBC age...

Can there be anything more resonant with every single period of your TV-watching life, than the words
ROSTRUM CAMERA - KEN MORSE
floating up the screen?

Perhaps Ken Morse's ubiquity and apparently eternal monopoly on the rostrum camera market actually prevents his presence from being an evocative memory marker. His dark art remains impartial, unattached to any particular genre, style or period. He's undatable, omnitemporal. He could be Gallifreyan.

I remember when I first learned about the dots in films that flick up in the top corner to signify the end of a reel - once you know, you will never be able to ignore them. KEN MORSE - ROSTRUM CAMERA is like that. He only ever appears 'in person' at the end, when the credits roll, and every time, I greet his name like an old friend. I imagine him as a dignified bearded gent in an old-fashioned wood-lined workshop; when he's not filming with the effortless ease of a master-craftsman, he's meticulously adjusting the springs of the rostrum camera apparatus, cleaning the lens lovingly with a soft cloth, or carefully oiling the hinges of the custom-built (by himself, in his spare time) fur-lined mahogany rostrum-camera-case. When he turns up on set, young Shoreditch cads shut up their chatter of 'reality TV' and 'idents' and hover uncomfortably, cognizant of a superior presence. He'll be the only man left at the BBC with a contract that extends beyond next week. He's got a private parking space right outside the main entrance next to the DG - Morris Oxford, immaculate as the day he bought it.

As far as I know the function of a rostrum camera is to translate printed images for TV by hovering above them and on occasion to pan slowly to reveal their contents. There's a lot of it about, and Ken's responsible for it all. Probably an obsolete technology now that you can just scan'n'pan onscreen. But despite this, and although Ken must be retirement age by now, he can still be spotted in the credits, gliding gently upward, right there where he should be, where he's always been.

update : this site maintains, convincingly, that it's all a conspiracy, and that there is more than one Ken Morse.

Posted by robin at February 2, 2004 03:59 PM