Archers sets sadly not included

May 7, 2020 6:39 AM

From The Young Ones to Swap Shop and of course Doctor Who and The Queen Vic, the BBC's empty sets collection has a neat new Teams/Zoom/Skype background for everybody.
posted by MartinWisse (19 comments total)

Excellent. Not all of the sets are empty, in fact.
posted by Segundus at 7:00 AM on May 7, 2020

Switchboard for Swap Shop must have been a dull job. 500 kids a week trying to get rid of an action man? Plus Noel Edmonds. Who even to 6 year old me seemed to be a class A ballbag.
posted by biffa at 7:15 AM on May 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'm going to consult the incredibly helpful Protect and Survive manual!
posted by pompomtom at 7:48 AM on May 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

(Note to mods: you may want to strip the Facebook link-tracking cookie ?fbclid=... from the end of the URL)
posted by acb at 7:50 AM on May 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

I just learned about Royston Vasey two days ago!
posted by stevil at 7:51 AM on May 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

Mod note: URL cruft stripped, added a couple tags, carry on!
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:54 AM on May 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

This is great fun. (Even if it is notably lacking in Red Dwarf.)

I was unreasonably excited to get a new version of the zoom software that allowed virtual backgrounds, only to discover that it fails completely if your real background includes several different wall colors, pictures, and windows. I could set up a background flat or move my desk to the middle of the room and remove artwork. . . but I don't actually care that much.

Seeing 1/2 of my apartment mated to the Star Trek TNG engineering section is pretty trippy. I'm not sure it comes off as entirely professional. But if you turn the laptop just right, the corners line up pretty well and my living room joins up nicely with the warp core workstation area.
posted by eotvos at 9:33 AM on May 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

Prediction: as working from home becomes the new norm, homewares shops will start selling roll-down background screens to transform your kitchen/junk room/bedroom into a neutral background.
posted by acb at 9:44 AM on May 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

Thanks cortex!

Mickeysoft's Teams, for all its annoyances, does video backgrounds very well. People really liked that screenshot of 'Re-open America' protestors looking like zombies from Dawn of the Dead I put on last week.
posted by MartinWisse at 9:45 AM on May 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

A client wants to do a Zoom meeting soon and I've been resisting for all the sensible reasons, but now I am but jelly.
posted by maudlin at 10:21 AM on May 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

Oh man. I wish my mom was still around so I could surprise her by showing up on the set of one of our favorite movies Quatermass And The Pit.
posted by lumpenprole at 12:35 PM on May 7, 2020

OMG! I'd been looking for a good clean pic of that 1976 TARDIS console for ages.
Thank you!
posted by cheshyre at 2:16 PM on May 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

I've got a colleague who has a board room background until 4pm and then she switches to a pub background for the rest of the workday. I have another colleague who, judging from his background, has been camped out in a beer garden for the last few weeks 24 hours a day.

My computer processor apparently isn't good enough to handle virtual backgrounds, but I love the idea and wish I could use some of these.
posted by lollusc at 7:53 PM on May 7, 2020

Some Red Dwarf sets.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 9:10 PM on May 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

Some of these are great! I've been using the hotel lobby from "2001" for my virtual background, but in the next week or so I need to go into the office to pick some stuff up. My plan is to go around and photograph the conference rooms where my meetings usually happened so I can use them for meetings.
posted by rmd1023 at 7:18 AM on May 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

There's a screwdriver on the floor of the TARDIS, and it's not sonic!
posted by heatherlogan at 9:10 AM on May 8, 2020

Regarding the absence of Archers sets, my asshole rooster decided, during the course of my videoconference the day before yesterday, to come prancing onto the back deck (where he and the hens are forbidden) and perch imperiously on the deck chair outside to the window of what constitutes my office these days (i.e. the little dark corner behind the washing machine) in order to crow nonstop for twenty minutes straight. It was a perfectly Archers sort of moment, and only slightly more annoying than having to listen to Tracy Horrobin's seemingly endless diatribes about the cricketing failures of Ambridge or continue to drown in the treacle of Ed and Emma's inevitable reconciliation.

Midway through this performance, thinking that I was having a Lassie animal communication moment, after losing a favorite BlueBelle hen to a damn fox in nearly broad daylight this week, I hastily yelled "hang on a mo'—I have to see if there's a fox in the coop!" before sprinting into the yard to check on the hens. It was a source of great hilarity for all involved in the conference, and my asshole rooster was just being an asshole, not informing me of a prescient security risk.
posted by sonascope at 12:11 PM on May 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

I would love to reenact a favorite trope in the Queen Vic set, but I believe my gentleman caller would take exception to my training his seven-year-old to have a pretend slapfight in the role of Peggy while I naturally took the part of Pat.

Seems unfair. I have to attend countless pretend tea parties these days—it doesn't seem a lot to ask of a little kid to expected them to learn the proper way to use the phrase "mutton dressed as lamb" in contentious situation.
posted by sonascope at 12:19 PM on May 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

My plan is to go around and photograph the conference rooms where my meetings usually happened so I can use them for meetings.

This is brilliant. Last week I went into work briefly (with high level permission and pretty good reasons) and realized before I had time to bike home that I had an imminent meeting with important people. I'm not proud of the time I spent in my solitary, safe-as-houses office trying to find a camera view that wouldn't raise questions. The idea of claiming it was a virtual background never occurred to me.
posted by eotvos at 9:54 AM on May 12, 2020