Viewers of the Game of Thrones recently spotting a Starbucks takeaway coffee cup on the table in one of the scenes brings to mind a couple of similar mistakes in Commodities, a six-part TV docudrama series on coffee, tea and sugar that I had worked on back in 1985.
My role was to translate the interviews done in China on the tea plantations, and help out with the editing in the cutting room.
At one point, we were going through the footage for me to check out the sync-ing up of the subtitles. The scene started with a (reconstructed) historical snippet: a male tea-picker, some 200 years ago in south China, picking tea in the sun, wearing a conical straw hat and just a pair of short trousers. I suddenly spotted that his tanned bare arms had a band of paler skin where the modern-day wrist-watch would’ve been.
When I pointed this out, the director said they’d found another one in the coffee footage. They’d set up a scene of a revolt on a Brazilian coffee plantation, supposed to be back in the 18th century, with the coffee pickers wearing what looked like loin-cloths — presumably because of the heat — but some of the loin-cloths clearly showed a Y-front underneath!
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