Charm Bracelet - How To Succeed At Murder

Avengerholic · Post by **Avengerholic** » Tue Aug 02, 2022 2:45 pm

All that time an effort 5 years ago and one solitary, (long distance) colour photo seen today shows that the charm bracelets were actually gold and not silver as I had originally believed

Frankymole · Post by **Frankymole** » Tue Aug 02, 2022 8:53 pm

Hah. Charm bracelets in the UK are normally silver though some charms on them can be of different metals, so it was a sensible assumption to make. The trouble with black and white TV is that designers would not use the same palette as they would in colour, because certain shades just look wrong or have bad effects on the camera like "bleaching", which is why they sometimes used green paint instead of bright white (even when an object was meant to be white in the fiction) and deep blues or browns instead of stark black which could soak up too much light and look flat. The gold may well have looked more like silver and less like cheap tin foil when it went onto B&W film!

I'm interested in the colour photo though...

Avengerholic · Post by **Avengerholic** » Wed Aug 03, 2022 9:48 am

There were indeed, I think I was swayed by the fact my mother had a silver one back in the late 70's. It never crossed my mind that the ones seen in the Avengers could have been gold tone. I did notice that only one bracelet seen in the episode was real, the rest were clearly rather crude plaster sculptures, no doubt made and painted by the prop dept..

I'm certainly going to have to bite the bullet and re-dip mine.

mousemeat · Post by **mousemeat** » Wed Aug 03, 2022 2:14 pm

Frankymole wrote:Hah. Charm bracelets in the UK are normally silver though some charms on them can be of different metals, so it was a sensible assumption to make. The trouble with black and white TV is that designers would not use the same palette as they would in colour, because certain shades just look wrong or have bad effects on the camera like "bleaching", which is why they sometimes used green paint instead of bright white (even when an object was meant to be white in the fiction) and deep blues or browns instead of stark black which could soak up too much light and look flat. The gold may well have looked more like silver and less like cheap tin foil when it went onto B&W film!

I'm interested in the colour photo though...

true..silver at times, doesn't age well..as well as thinly plated gold.

Frankymole · Post by **Frankymole** » Wed Aug 03, 2022 4:40 pm

Yes, antique silver can look beautiful (I remember the table settings from some Army and Navy mess dinners) but goodness it needs an awful lot of care and endless polishing to avoid tarnishing. Or in the worst cases going completely black, oxidisation I guess.

Post by **dissolute** » Wed Aug 03, 2022 9:26 pm

I've discovered a product called Renaissance Wax that saves you having to polish silver all the time. Museums use it so they don't continually remove minute amounts of artifacts by polishing them all the time.

Frankymole · Post by **Frankymole** » Wed Aug 03, 2022 10:18 pm

Sounds like a good idea. The army mess managers probably make soldiers do polishing as "jankers" though!

mousemeat · Post by **mousemeat** » Thu Aug 04, 2022 3:40 am

Frankymole wrote:Yes, antique silver can look beautiful (I remember the table settings from some Army and Navy mess dinners) but goodness it needs an awful lot of care and endless polishing to avoid tarnishing. Or in the worst cases going completely black, oxidisation I guess.

exactly...my wife has some silver table settings, etc...past down from 3-4 generations..and yeah, it looks great..but she has to spend some time caring for them...not my cup of tea, you know ?