5
« on: Thursday 10 May 18 13:19 BST (UK) »
Sorry I forgot to post a message telling everyone here the program was to be shown, it took me a little by surprise as I was expecting it in the summer, The other 10 programs will probably be shown early August the same as Series 11 was.
I was also sworn not to mention Michael Buerk joining the program. He may not be to all of your tastes but he was a pleasure to work with, the most professional person I have dealt with in the TV industry.
Everyone here will prefer series 1-4 of the program not only because it was new (and featured me a lot more!) but because it was more about research than social history. The stories were all filmed "live" it was Series 5 where we introduced "retro" stories.
Retro stories are a lot easier to film and importantly cheaper, there is a script for most of it as the story is already know, all the heirs have been found and the social history discovered before they first camera is picked up.
Live cases have a lot more research but several are filmed before a good one is found and taken further.
Fraser and Fraser were the only firm doing live case from series 4-10, we then stopped doing so many because it is so much harder to film and really slowed us down, the program was shifting more to Social history and less on research so there was nothing to gain. You must remember that series 1-4 we were at the Family Record Center or in the office and doing manual research without computers, a birth search could take 20 man hours so there was a lot to film, even in this time some of our searches were on computer and we would have to recreate the image on microfilm so as not to tell everyone we had computerised records. Now it takes 20 seconds to do a search and a person sitting at a PC doing one search is very similar to the next person doing something different. Hence there is more social history. When we were working on them last the production company liked showing all our work where we had taken a gamble as a mistake, or where were were 2nd to an heir as a lost case, forgetting that we had signed the other 95% of heirs or by taking a gamble we were a day ahead of the competition, Spec research should never be shown as a mistake only a way to get a shortcut that doesn't always pay off, or some time we will work 2 or 3 families knowing that only one will be correct, again hardley a mistake. I had arguments about this and it was one of the main reasons we stopped them, I just had nothing to gain.
Finders currently try some live case and for those who watched the first 10 programs you will have seen them look at some cases that are less than £10k just to make it look like they are busy. F&F wont do this if we start a case and find no value we drop it, for me I just have too much other work that is not filmed and too many staff to waste time on a story just to make the firm look good on tv. I have removed the other things I could say about finders! but to me a £3,000 live case and I think there were 3 in the first part of the series didn't make good stories, there is little research and poor social history.
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