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Post by richardwoods on Jul 5, 2015 17:08:20 GMT
The other year when I bought this great, oft repeated during 70's holidays, series on DVD for a friends birthday I was saddened but not altogether surprised to find that the final episode only exists in the original French language version. Does anyone know what happened? Does anyone on the forum know if audio recordings of the UK version of this episode exist? As a rollicking good yarn, I would have thought it would have been a prime candidate for home taping by young audio enthusiasts. In fact speaking from personal experience, I remember recording episodes of the series as a teenager on reel to reel, sadly I wiped them years ago but I doubt I'm alone? It would be good if this series could be completed by matching French video with fan audio.
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Post by richardwoods on Jul 5, 2015 17:27:50 GMT
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Post by richardwoods on Jul 5, 2015 20:03:17 GMT
Found this on the web and answered my own question, at least partially. The question remains, if the technical fault was vision related, why couldn't the audio from the faulty BBC version be married up to the French version? Were the two edits different, does anyone know?
Although the UK version of the serial ran to a dozen episodes, most viewers have only ever seen 11 of them – the dubbed print of episode 12 suffered from a technical fault which caused a loss of vision partway through. The BBC attempted to show the episode on a couple of early runs of the series, and indeed once managed to air virtually the entire 25 minutes with only a slight interruption, but still ran into the same problems each time. As a result, and no doubt to the frustration of those who had followed the long serial over numerous weeks, the final edition was never properly shown, although in response to viewer requests, the conclusion was later featured in Ask Aspel.
Fortunately for the BBC, episode 11 acted as an acceptable ending in its own right, with the truce signed, the Castle liberated, and Francois finally seeing off Don Alonso in an epic sword fight. Apart from confirming the wounded Guillot survived the climactic battle, episode 12 had little to do with the story proper, largely set a year after the events of the previous instalment and recounting a very slow reunion between Francoise and Isabelle. As most later showings were simply truncated to 11, without much really being lost in the way of the storyline, it’s quite possible viewers never even noticed.
While Francois could stop a war virtually single-handed, it seems even the miracles of modern technology cannot resolve the same technical fault that first sent BBC1 haywire almost 40 years ago. On a recent DVD release of the complete English language version of The Flashing Blade, that problematic 12th episode has been replaced by an appropriate edit of the original French language version, complete with the original credits and theme music.
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RWels
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Post by RWels on Jul 5, 2015 21:00:03 GMT
...sadly I wiped them years ago but I doubt I'm alone? It would be good if this series could be completed by matching French video with fan audio. There's the nub, what comes in as audio-only is quite unpredictable. It's often not the ones that we want. (I myself wouldn't mind "The adventures of Floris"'s English version.) Sometimes it's one episode, sometimes a whole collection - the latter often in good quality because the people who recorded those took care of that. I've seen a lot of comedy for some reason - particularly verbal humour. Finally, stations and institutions are NOT keen to take back audio-only. From their point of view there's very little use for it and it's not always good quality. Most home recorded audio tracks never make it "back" because they're wiped or no-one realises they're missing or they're refused by the owners. Luckily KAL will take it. For the US there's www.atvaudio.com/index.php. Theoretically voice artists could dub the episode while imitating as much as possible the original English voices. I once wondered if making an appeal to the blind might be an idea (following a youtube comment from a nearly blind viewer). I wonder what was behind that episode never playing correctly, even after several attempts...? Sounds very mysterious. |
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Post by John Green on Jul 5, 2015 21:57:36 GMT
Great post,RW.All power to atvaudio,but I suspect that quite a few of their listings are for shows which exist in full,complete with picture e.g. Burl Ives' Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.
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Post by Richard Marple on Jul 5, 2015 22:00:55 GMT
I assume the dub was done onto audio tape before being edited to fit the pictures.
Back in the day was it going to cost too much to marry the 2 elements together? assuming the dubbing tapes still existed then.
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RWels
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Post by RWels on Jul 5, 2015 22:20:24 GMT
Great post,RW.All power to atvaudio,but I suspect that quite a few of their listings are for shows which exist in full,complete with picture e.g. Burl Ives' Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. Oh that is undoubtably true. |
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Post by richardwoods on Jul 6, 2015 20:33:42 GMT
I assume the dub was done onto audio tape before being edited to fit the pictures. Back in the day was it going to cost too much to marry the 2 elements together? assuming the dubbing tapes still existed then. Makes you wonder if the faulty episode 12 still exists in the archives. As it didn't play it would surely be a prime candidate to junk. If it does still exist and, as implied the fault was only picture related, you might have expected an attempt to match the French Visuals with the English soundtrack, particularly as the DVD folks went to the trouble of removing the first 3/4 of the longer French part 4 to create a "new" episode 12. |
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RWels
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Post by RWels on Jul 6, 2015 22:01:11 GMT
Doesn't sound likely, unless it was stored somewhere else from the others as a problem case. Someone somewhere may still unknowingly have an audio tape but it's such a needle & haystack thing that it may never be found.
As I said, I wonder if some concerted effort should be made to ask the (older) public for audio reels. A campaign specifically for the most wanted audio tracks from TV might work. There are for example a couple of shows for which the video part exists but no audio (on the site there is for example "Sierra Nine" and there are a few more). Other choices might be things that were live, or that are very likely to have been recorded, like Sherlock Holmes. In cases like that, the audio would be better than nothing.
There may also be UK programs that survive only in French or German dubs, although I don't know any examples.
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Post by richardmarson on Jul 7, 2015 20:02:30 GMT
One example is The Letter from the Somerset Maugham series. This only exists with its French dubbed soundtrack
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RWels
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Post by RWels on Jul 7, 2015 22:10:24 GMT
One example is The Letter from the Somerset Maugham series. This only exists with its French dubbed soundtrack Interesting. Is that a TV episode from 1960? Yes, that would be another one of which a home audio recording would be really useful. |
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Post by Richard Marple on Jul 8, 2015 11:48:28 GMT
IIRC some episodes of Paul Temple only exist with German soundtracks.
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RWels
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Post by RWels on Jul 8, 2015 16:55:19 GMT
IIRC some episodes of Paul Temple only exist with German soundtracks. Or was it that the Germans still had them in colour? I read it before, but I thought it had never been proven if that story was true. (I could be wrong.) |
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Post by Richard Marple on Jul 8, 2015 20:40:30 GMT
IIRC some episodes of Paul Temple only exist with German soundtracks. Or was it that the Germans still had them in colour? I read it before, but I thought it had never been proven if that story was true. (I could be wrong.) I remember them been mentioned on here a while back. For what was a high profile series the BBC didn't seem to take much care of it, even though I imagine it must have sold quite well abroad, or were people gettin bored of spy/thriller series by the early 1970s? |
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Post by richardwoods on Jul 8, 2015 21:23:28 GMT
Nah, Spy thrillers were all the rage in the early 70's, didn't stop lots of Prime time examples such as Spy Trap being randomly junked, sadly.
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