High definition puts great expectations on set designs

In Albert Square, the cornices of the Queen Vic pub are crumbling. In the Dragons' Den, the brickwork looks as woeful as some of the contestants' business ideas.

The BBC is to spend thousands of dollars upgrading the ageing sets of programmes so that they do not suddenly look in disrepair or fake when broadcast on high definition television.

The production designers of flagship BBC shows seen in New Zealand including Dragons' Den and EastEnders say the sets needed updating to stop fake facades or surface damage becoming visible to viewers.

Cath Pater-Lanucki, who designed the boardroom set where candidates on The Apprentice suffer the wrath of Alan Sugar, said the BBC had told her it would like to film the series after next in high definition, which was a "really scary" prospect.

"Those Perspex sheets that we use to make the glass walls are about eight years old now and they are quite scuffed and scratched. Any dust, fingerprints or smears on them are definitely going to show.

"If we go to HD, I think we'd have to replace all the Perspex on the set and we would have to have a props man on set the whole time polishing surfaces."

The BBC has set aside a special fund to help productions make the switch to HD.

However, "my worry is that they're not going to put the budgets up accordingly," Ms Pater-Lanucki said. "I don't think the reality has really hit anyone".

Nik Callan, a production designer at Eye-catching Design, has worked on numerous BBC programmes including EastEnders and Dragons' Den, which has just been broadcast in HD.

He and his team had to repaint the Dragons' Den set. The show is filmed at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire and the set is designed to make it look like an old industrial warehouse with pretend bricks painted on.

"We've had to upgrade all of the set because of HD," he said. "Every brick you see on the Den is painted - we had to have every single one done. Realistically, it costs thousands of pounds to upgrade a set for HD, and productions have got to allow for it."

He said the EastEnders set at Elstree studios in Hertfordshire dated to 1985: "All of the brickwork that you'll see on any of the buildings really needs to be replaced."

HD creates even greater problems for make-up artists and costume departments, as their work is seen in close-up shots. Beads of sweat, badly glued false moustaches and uneven stitches are plainly visible in HD.

Last year, it emerged that the BBC was considering rebuilding the EastEnders set. Shaun Moore, a production designer who worked on the soap's original set, said this could prove more cost effective for the BBC in the long run, as the fake building facades required constant maintenance.

"Some parts of the set were built in real brickwork but other parts built with wood and plaster have degraded much quicker and don't look so good now," he said.

HDTV: HOW IT WORKS
* High definition television broadcasts offer much sharper pictures than the standard service because five times as many pixels are used.
* Pictures on a television screen are broken down into thousands of tiny pixels which if looked at through a magnifier can be seen broken down into sub pixels - groups of blue, green and red dots. Digital broadcasts transmit the pixels as numerical data, translating them back into dots when received in the home.
* A standard definition digital television set has a picture made up of 414,720 (720 by 576) pixels. A high-definition set has a picture filled by 2,073,600 (1920 by 1080) pixels.

- INDEPENDENT