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I have spotted a good few mistakes on various items, firstly in the film That`ll Be The Day David Essex picks up a Buddy Holly LP and plays it but the song is Ritche Vallens singing Donna.In a television drama about the late Bobby Moore and his wife Tina after their divorce they meet up on Clapham Junction station ,the station signs are in maroon but they should have been green,I know I used to train spot there.In a film about the 1963 Great Train Robbery the robbers posed as army soldiers but their trucks had civilian number plates instead of army ones. On a radio broadcast at the time of the Civil Rights marches in Washington USA they played Blowing in The Wind the commentator said it was by the coloured American group Peter,Paul and Mary, they were all white,you might think I am been a bit fussy but I would think someone would check these things out.Any more mistakes can anybody come up with?

I'm sure we can come up with dozens of examples if not hundreds. It is easy for producers of historical dramas and reconstructions to get things right, but it's also expensive. If you're expected to find period cars, guitars, aircraft, phones, clothes, record players etc, they are difficult to locate and expensive to hire. It's tempting to cut a few corners by using something that's nearly right, secure in the knowledge that most people won't notice.

(Unless of course they're sad old anoraks like me.)

A BBC drama series from 2007 - "Lilies" - was set in Liverpool just after World War 1 (circa 1920-1922).

At that time, the area in which the central characters were living - Garston - was a completely separate municipality from the City Of Liverpool. It would have been a Lancashire urban district, like other areas nearby: Crosby, Litherland, Huyton, etc. Garston was, eventually, incorporated into the City of Liverpool: in 1926. Today, it is hard to imagine it ever having been anything but a (pretty far-flung) part of the city, but back then, both Garston and Wavertree were separate places with their own councils and town halls, and Speke (where the airport was later built, followed by a huge council estate) was a Lancashire rural district.

I am telling you this because... yes... you've guessed it... Garston residents in "Lilies" speak of living in "this city" and of their home in Liverpool. No Garston resident would have done that at that time. It's like living in Lambeth or Southwark and saying you live in Westminster.

Another gross error was the showing of a local corner pub in Garston. The pub was one of the Walker brewery chain, complete with the etched glass windows, etc. There were several hundred such Walker's pubs in Liverpool before the Sacking Of The City by its own council in the 1950s and 1960s, but they were very localised, predominantly in the Victorian parts of the city, within the Queens Drive ring road and essentially in the north end, the south end as far as Dingle (but no further south) and out into the eastern edges of the city towards Huyton. Other breweries operated in the southern post-Victorian suburbs of Aigburth, Cressington, Grassendale and Garston, mainly Greenall-Whitley, a Lancashire/Cheshire brewery with a minimal footprint in central Liverpool.

There were, then, no Walker's pubs in Garston. But I bet some production assistant thought they were being dead clever in locating the essential features of a Victorian Walker's pub for the studio shots. Right era; dead wrong company.

Can you see it?

The maid forgot to tidy up!

Ah yes , a plastic boatel on the right for the Victorian ginger beer!!!

Mike

Crikey!...you ask for more examples?!!!

How long have you got?

With some films and TV series etc, the producers etc obviously do try hard for authenticity and accuracy to avoid anachronisms...but even the best productions often include unintended errors and howlers!

A favourite of mine is Foyle's War...but even that excellent series had a few obvious and jarring mistakes, not only props, hairstyles, etc but dialogue and incorrect every day expressions, as well as sometimes modern attitudes and social norms in characters and plots..which didn't exist back in the period depicted..

Hi,

As a mountaineer and photographer, I often find myself shouting at the BBC TV news presenters when they talk about Everest yet always show a shot of a fine but smaller mountain called Ama Dablam. They did it again on a recent TV programme about Ben Fogle attempting to climb Everest. The striking introduction to the whole programme about Everest focussed entirely on this other mountain. I always ask myself, why oh why can't the researchers do the job properly and get the right image rather than one which they think will simply look good on screen. Who are they fooling by trying to substitute something which is obviously wrong? Do they recalling think no-one will notice, or they probably just don't care !!

Cheers, Ian

It's a sad fact that large numbers of us don't notice.

Although, possibly not quite so sad as large numbers of people who are more interested in finding minor errors than enjoying the film or programme in the way the producers intended!

ITV did it again tonight, with Episode 4 of Vanity Fair.

For some unfathomable reason, the production company has seen fit to use pop records as the opening and closing theme music (presumably they think there's a message in the unintelligible lyric).

That's bad enough, but tonight, in a scene where music is played live (music which is pictured as being played in a film for the characters to hear is referred to as diegetic) in a café the day before the Battle of Waterloo, the "orchestra" plays a melody by Alexander Borodin (born 1833). The tune is one of those later adapted for the musical "Kismet", where it is known as And This Is My Beloved.

For non-diegetic music (such as a score over the titles which the audience can hear but the characters obviously cannot), I have no problem with "modern" music. Think Miklos Rosza, for instance, and his brilliant score for "Ben Hur". But playing music within the scene which wasn't written at the time depicted is the height of production laziness.

https://www.tvadvertmusic.com/2018/09/vanity-fair-theme-tune-singer/