Concept and creative process
The titles for ‘When the Boat Comes In’ heralded, with its catchy traditional theme tune, a series that was to run for four series from 1976–1981. Starring James Bolam, it told the story of a veteran of the First World War, returning to his impoverished native hometown in the North-East and the realities of post-war Britain for a homecoming hero. The scene was set in the titles by a panning shot over a frieze of sepia-printed photographs of the local area and its inhabitants, replaced during the pan by colour photographs of the cast in costume and role. The sequence was filmed on a rostrum camera, with the replacement photographs dissolving in on the move by fading out the outgoing sepia image. The film in the camera and the artwork’s position were then reset by the requisite number of frames, and the in-coming colour photograph was faded in by the same number of frames.