Kev Hunter
Member
The only difference between a rut and a groove is the depth
Posts: 608
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Post by Kev Hunter on Jul 22, 2016 10:56:03 GMT
Good points well made, Rob. And isn't wonderfully ironic that the Rolf Harris stuff (like anything with Savile in) will probably never be seen again.
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Post by Richard Marple on Jul 22, 2016 11:18:38 GMT
I did wonder of some producers managed to pull strings to get their programmes kept.
In an interview Barry Letts mentions he wasn't aware of junking but had he known about it he would have made sure the episodes he produced were kept. I might be paraphrasing that somewhat.
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Post by Peter Stirling on Jul 22, 2016 13:08:34 GMT
How many hours of 1969 colour footage have we got of Prince Charles going to Wales to open an envelope from his Mum?
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Post by robchapman on Jul 22, 2016 13:49:24 GMT
Funny you should mention that Peter, but it goes without saying of course that they have kept ever Trooping The Colour, as you would expect, but I'd have thought there was room on the end of the odd reel for an old Bleep and Booster say, or Sarah and Hoppity. or even just a nice Polish cartoon, circa 1973.
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RWels
Member
Posts: 2,863
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Post by RWels on Jul 22, 2016 14:20:33 GMT
I don't know if Lewison is ignorant or dishonest but he is a good researcher. I'm not over enamoured with him as a writer (and despite writing a doorstop of a book about Benny Hill he has a spectacularly tin ear for comedy) but if you want to find Ringo Starr's ex-dustman he's your man. Peter Cook told the Not Only But Also story several times over the years and if you know anything at all about his chaotic life you'll know that 'salary' was never uppermost in his thoughts. Yes, but did he just want a copy of a tape that was still in use? That he would then have NO way of using? Or did he want ownership of the series? Why didn't he tape it at home? Anyway the whole problem is the junking of the telerecorded films, isn't it. If the telerecordings had never been destroyed we would not be talking now.
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Post by Nick Cooper on Jul 26, 2016 13:24:08 GMT
I don't know if Lewison is ignorant or dishonest but he is a good researcher. I'm not over enamoured with him as a writer (and despite writing a doorstop of a book about Benny Hill he has a spectacularly tin ear for comedy) but if you want to find Ringo Starr's ex-dustman he's your man. Peter Cook told the Not Only But Also story several times over the years and if you know anything at all about his chaotic life you'll know that 'salary' was never uppermost in his thoughts. As for 'archiving practice' well like 'archiving policy' there wasn't one simple procedure was there? In my occasional access to the BBC archive over the years I've always been surprised to see which entertainment shows have been preserved en masse from the 1960s/early 70s. Almost every Ken Dodd/Rolf Harris (uh-oh) and Nana Mouskouri show for instance has been kept. So its not just about the simple expediency of storage space and costly tape is it? Other criteria must be at play. Someone must decide at some point that the Beatles on Juke Box Jury or Huff Puff Junction isn't worth keeping but the New Generation dancing on the Lulu show is. Go figure. We do know that at the time - i.e. the 1960s - the "rules" regarding what was actively archives and what was junked were, a) haphazard, and b) subjective. Programmes made on film or as telerecordings - plus the occasional internal telerecording struck from VT for internal use - did stand a good chance ending up in the BBC Film Library, but given the attitude that television was a more ephemeral medium, some selection of what was worth retaining for posterity took place. What actually exists now is also misleading, because it includes a lot of BBC Enterprises copies. They took series that they thought were viable - and clearable - for overseas sales, so that's a quite significant piece of gatekeeping to consider. I'm not sure why you think Ken Dodd had a better survival rate than Benny Hill, because of 33 episodes of the 1960s BBC Ken Dodd Show, only three survive, compared to 25 out of 64 1950s/1960s BBC Benny Hill Show episodes still exist. Juke Box Jury is also a pretty silly example, as well. Out of hundreds of episodes there's only two complete ones held. The series had been running for 4½ years by the time the Beatles appeared on it. The BBC hadn't bothered retaining a single one of any of the preceeding 200+ episodes, so what would have been so pressingly different about the Beatles edition, whatever stage the career of the band was at at the time?
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Post by robchapman on Jul 26, 2016 14:01:15 GMT
.[/quote] The series had been running for 4½ years by the time the Beatles appeared on it. The BBC hadn't bothered retaining a single one of any of the preceeding 200+ episodes, so what would have been so pressingly different about the Beatles edition, whatever stage the career of the band was at at the time?[/quote]
Because they were clearly the biggest pop phenomenon since Rudolph Valentino? Just guessing. Bit of a grumpy harumphing response to my general point about the apparent randomness of it all wasn't it?
My last contact with the Ken Dodd stuff was early 90s. If as you say there are now only three left this would suggest that others have disappeared since then, or that I was looking at all Ken Dodd related items not just The Ken Dodd Show.
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Post by Nick Cooper on Jul 27, 2016 13:47:14 GMT
Because they were clearly the biggest pop phenomenon since Rudolph Valentino? Just guessing. Bit of a grumpy harumphing response to my general point about the apparent randomness of it all wasn't it? Except that there was no "randomness" to Juke Box Jury retentions - they simply never bothered keeping anything before the Beatles edition, and hardly anything was archived subsequently. If they had been keeping one out of every four or five editions, or even if they'd selectively archived one or two each year, you might have a point, but you're appealing to exceptionalism. "They should have kept that specific edition because... Beatles!" Yeah, maybe someone could have said, "Hey, this lot are quite popular - maybe we should keep this one," but it was more likely to be considered to be just as ephemeral as the rest of the series, and the format of the programme made it inherently far more ephemeral that many other programmes. There's not much re-use potential in panellists giving their predictions on the future performance of records that by definition can only be "new" once. I would have thought that the chances of a substantial number of episodes going missing from the BBC Archives between the 1990s and now are pretty much zero.
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