Candice writes:
On Valentine’s Day there was discussion on Radio 4 about Brief Encounter and the most interesting thing I learnt was that the screenplay was edited by telegram, because Noel Coward was in India at the time the film was being made. I wondered about the implications of this and how it must concentrate the mind on the task – does it account for every word in the script being very carefully chosen with absolutely no room for superfluous talk, and does that in turn help to make it such a wonderful film?
It made me think about the differences in the way I’ve been editing documents recently - by email, in collaboration with several others using ‘tracking changes’ and ‘comments’, and actually being able to waffle at length with the risk of the precise intended meaning being lost – either in formulation or in transmission.
So is there something to be said for the discipline of editing by telegram? Probably not, but an interesting idea I thought.