ABSTRACT
When Shakespeare was to be retold for a modern audience it was a television news studio location which helped to update humour written four centuries ago. Much Ado About Nothing is a play that relies on misunderstandings and overheard conversations, sowhere better to set amodern television production of the play than a television news studio – perfect for eavesdropping. It is also a place of illusion. The news studio is often an elevated backdrop of a city at night, presided over by a pair of benign oracles who dispense wisdom to the cabled and online world from behind the swish, uncluttered lines of a vast and authoritative presenter’s desk or standing in front of a vast wall of video and graphics. Walking into a news studio is like stepping into a cupboard or factory. It will
either be a fraction of the size it appears to be on screen, or cavernously large. To the first-time visitor, the news studio is a bewildering array of lights and a snakes-nest of cables. Ceilings are high and incredibly cluttered with lamps of all shapes and sizes. Cables used to snake everywhere but are now covered with safety mats. Even the set which appears so swish and urbane on the screen, looks uninviting
in daylight. The illusion is all in the lights and the tricks of the camera – and the tricks are getting more and more sophisticated.All hail the virtual studio. The plain green background is switched out and replaced with a computer-generated image or the video-wall where a reporter stands and gestures to the changing images and clips behind him. Sets and backdrops exist only in the minds of the computer programmers. They
can be changed at the touch of a key, or tilted, rotated, zoomed into or panned across, all in perfect synch with the foreground. Even the camera operator is being keyed out of existence, thanks to motion sensors that lock on to the presenter and follow him around. Illusion is piling on illusion.
