This film was among my top titles for the year and I would thoroughly recommend it. It is a widescreen film so it will lose significantly on television but if that is the only way to see it then it is worth watching. Unfortunately whilst it is screening tonight [April 14th] on BBC 2 [including HD] it is not being presented properly. The BBC WebPage lists the running time as ‘2 hours 1 minute’: this despite it also showing a link to IMDB where the running time is given as 128 minutes, [exactly 128m 29s S&S]. Presumably this is because the BBC is squeezing it into a two-hour slot from 9 p.m.

I sent in an enquiry to the BBC about this and the first reply I received advised that the film would be ‘cut’: in which case I reckoned this would involve about three minutes missing. So I followed up by asking what was being cut. The I received the following:

” Having looked in to this further we can clarify that there were in fact no scenes cut from the film ‘Selma’ and therefore no content was missing.

The running time for this film (including credits) is 122 minutes and we broadcast a version nearing 119 mins. We simply speed up the end credits to fit the slot allocated and this accounts for the difference in running time.”

I am not sure where the running time of ‘122 minutes’ comes from. Even if they are confusing video with film the number still seems incorrect. Film runs at 24 fps whilst video in the UK runs at 25 fps: so in this case it would be five, not six, minutes shorter.

As for ‘speeding up the end credits’! The credits of Selma commence over the final rally in Montgomery with King’s speech; there follows reprisals of the key characters in the film accompanied by the Aacademy Award winning  song Glory performed by Lonnie Lynn and John Stephens.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences treated this film poorly. Only one award and trailing behind the inferior Birdman (2014). This is the sort of disdain that the actual Martin Luther King and the many protesters at that time suffered: [and of course, a lot worse].

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The actual transmission ran 118 minutes. As threatened the BBC channel ‘speeded up the credits, but not all of them. So we had the frames with the cast and the initial rendering of ‘Glory’ at normal video speed: but then the rest of the credits, and the accompanying song, went by too fast for either the text or the music.

And then, despite the claim in their email, part of the content was cut: about three minutes of credits and the rendition of ‘This Little Light of Mine’ sung by ‘workers in Selma’. All this to ‘fit in’ the schedule which followed the video film with ‘Later… with Jools Holland’. The latter was allowed to continue till 1205 a.m.

The logic of this escapes me. What seems clear is that the film was programmed because the 14th was what is commonly called ‘Good Friday’ and the subject and characters seemed appropriate to that religious day.  Presumably when we get The Passion of the Christ on BBC its protagonist will have to expire right on the hour!