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Post by RossL on Mar 6, 2017 19:53:22 GMT
If you want to do something worthwhile make friends with the janitors at your local high school.
You wont find any Dr Who but there are thousands of old VHS tapes going back over 30 years being dropped into skips every year up & down the country - especially if you live in one of the smaller ITV regions. Some of those will have missing programmes, continuity, new clips, birthday greetings etc on them.
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Post by George D on Mar 7, 2017 14:21:12 GMT
The reason is why it has some potential of working for jw, etc is that everyone has the ability of being a success story. The odds are one in millions that there were some 16mm at their house. As there is often talk about the US possibly showing Pertwee or earlier, I'd invite those guys from 'American Pickers' to go a-hunting. Those guys manage to trawl through no end of great locations, and looking at some of those old barns crammed with all sorts of stuff I genuinely would not be surprised if DMP or POTD aren't tucked away on the backseat of a rusty Cadillac in Hicksville! Now theres an idea for the next BBC lineup. "Film Pickers" They go from film collector to film collector's house looking for missing movies/tv. If they find something, they pay a token amount from the shows' budget. Everyone loves the idea of being on tv and that could motivate someone to give something up.Also, it would give more info to the general public of what missing episodes are.
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Post by Alan Jeffries on Mar 7, 2017 16:47:18 GMT
Really? The BBC have priorities. Mostly to make new shows. They are squeezed for cash until their pips are showing. How could they justify 'Film Pickers'? The return would be miniscule compared with the effort and wages.
Yes. I would like more Who to be found and would buy them as most fans would. But we are in a minority of a niche market. Your average DVD buyer wants the latest Star Wars, Downton Abbey or Game of Thrones. All colour flash and action packed. They would not be buying a clunky, old(and in some cases) incomplete, black and white 1960's TV series. So the return and the budget to produce them would not be that high.
Alan
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Post by Hugh Pearson on Mar 7, 2017 17:02:41 GMT
My Canadian story - efforts in a similar vein perhaps - have yielded no response. TVOntario began broadcasting the Pertwee Doctor Who serials in 1976 and the Tom Baker ones in 1978. Until 1981, to fulfill their educational mandate, TVO created short intros (&/or outros) for each episode - 104 in total. Sadly in 2012, when I asked them about these, I was informed that they had not been retained by the broadcaster - not considered to have sufficient “cultural value” to Canadian TV I guess. So, missing material - ring any bells? The only source of these “shorts” today is on fan recorded VHS/Beta tapes - but how to track them down? In late 2016, I heard a CBC Radio interview about a company in Toronto that began a business to recycle these kind of tapes - a socially responsible effort both to reduce landfill and to provide employment to underprivileged individuals (manual sorting, separation of materials, etc). I contacted the interviewee, a director in the company (an English expat) to inquire about possibilities of watching the tape labels just in case anything related to Doctor Who (for those intros/outros) was being disposed of. I received no reply. Maybe I should not have admitted to being a bit of an anorak, but hey - it’s not trainspotting is it? Maybe he wasn’t a Doctor Who fan or maybe he just didn’t get my email. Do you think that I should follow up with a phone call?
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Post by scotttelfer on Mar 7, 2017 19:07:47 GMT
Really? The BBC have priorities. Mostly to make new shows. They are squeezed for cash until their pips are showing. How could they justify 'Film Pickers'? The return would be miniscule compared with the effort and wages. Yes. I would like more Who to be found and would buy them as most fans would. But we are in a minority of a niche market. Your average DVD buyer wants the latest Star Wars, Downton Abbey or Game of Thrones. All colour flash and action packed. They would not be buying a clunky, old(and in some cases) incomplete, black and white 1960's TV series. So the return and the budget to produce them would not be that high. Alan It would fit in perfectly with the tonne of other endless antique programmes.
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Post by Nicholas Fitzpatrick on Mar 7, 2017 20:21:06 GMT
It would fit in perfectly with the tonne of other endless antique programmes. My first thought was why would anyone watch something like that. But then I remember all this reality TV crap that I don't understand why anyone would spend time watching.
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Post by Simon B Kelly on Mar 7, 2017 20:34:03 GMT
It would fit in perfectly with the tonne of other endless antique programmes. My first thought was why would anyone watch something like that. But then I remember all this reality TV crap that I don't understand why anyone would spend time watching. We already have a British Pickers show called "Salvage Hunters", airing on Discovery and Quest. Apparently they're really cheap to make. Probably best to pitch the idea to an independent channel, though, so that it doesn't eat in to the licence fee. I can actually envisage two shows from this idea: "Film Hunters" (for film reels) and "Video Hunters" (for video tapes). I'd watch both!
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Post by John W King on Mar 7, 2017 21:50:44 GMT
I've done door knocking a long time ago collecting for a charity. It is an exhausting and some what fruitless task which is why in England it has largely disappeared. I personally would never do it again . The better bet as already suggested is to approach schools colleges and particularly universities. In 1973 I studied at Plymouth Polytechnic. They had their own tv studio and video taping equipment. Then a few years ago I had a couple of work colleagues who worked in the evenings at a local college of further education. One morning they were talking about having just dumped a load of old college videos into a skip..... When I asked them what was on the tapes they said they hadn't a @#$&%ing clue and cared even less. So I had no chance to investigate further.... I doubt any thing from the 60s would be held at these esteemed seats of learning but you never know. And Doctor Who has tended to be popular with students.
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Post by ianphillips on Mar 7, 2017 22:08:38 GMT
My first thought was why would anyone watch something like that. But then I remember all this reality TV crap that I don't understand why anyone would spend time watching. We already have a British Pickers show called "Salvage Hunters", airing on Discovery and Quest. Apparently they're really cheap to make. Probably best to pitch the idea to an independent channel, though, so that it doesn't eat in to the licence fee. I can actually envisage two shows from this idea: "Film Hunters" (for film reels) and "Video Hunters" (for video tapes). I'd watch both! Oddly enough, I was just looking for a show like this a couple of days ago. Completely unrelated.
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Post by Simon B Kelly on Mar 8, 2017 10:08:09 GMT
Just been browsing BBC Store and had to laugh when I stumbled across this: store.bbc.com/heir-hunters/series-11So the BBC already have a show with "Hunters" in the title. Following on with George's original idea, my proposal is therefore for two new shows in a similar vein: "Film Hunters" starring Phil Morris. Follow Phil and his team from TIEA as they travel the globe recovering, restoring and repatriating lost cultural heritage from TV stations, film buffs and bequeathed/inherited collections. "Video Hunters" starring Chris Perry. Follow Chris and his team from Kaleidoscope as they drive around picking up unwanted videotapes from businesses, educational establishments, abandoned lock-ups and homes throughout Britain. Perhaps I should get Steve Coogan to pitch it for me:
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Post by Ed Brown on Mar 10, 2017 17:27:17 GMT
Looking for a needle in a haystack doesn't even cover how extremely hard, not to mention unlikely something like this would be to succeed. Even if you came across a house with someone who has one, they might not tell you, nor know, nor want to hand it over. There's far too many variables involved to make this even remotely feasible and honestly it's the most extreme desperation and clutching at straws I've ever seen from the Doctor Who community in regards to missing episodes. Actually, the O/P's proposal is perfectly reasonable. I recollect, a few years back, a keen fan of the BBC's radio show The Clitheroe Kid led a drive to recover missing episodes from that series, on reel-to-reel or cassette. He found a lot of episodes! So his strategy can't be faulted. He wrote to practically every local newspaper in the UK, possibly by e-mail, a letter for inserting in the letters column, explaining that many episodes of the show that aired between 1958 and 1972 are missing from the BBC archives, and asking if any reader had any recordings taped off air during that period. I emphasise that he wrote to local newspapers, not to national ones. The sort of free papers that are now becoming less common, but still reach a surprisingly large proportion of the population. He seemed to ascribe his success rate to one fact especially: that although young people no longer read newspapers, he was trying to reach people old enough to remember the 1960s - precisely the sort of people who still do read the newspaper. And because he targeted mostly free papers, that gave him an even bigger readership.
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Post by John Wall on Mar 10, 2017 20:44:20 GMT
Audio recordings from the 60s aren't that rare - people were taping Dr Who from the start. What we're after is people with 16mm prints that went walkies from chez Auntie.
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RWels
Member
Posts: 2,854
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Post by RWels on Mar 10, 2017 21:27:04 GMT
Audio recordings from the 60s aren't that rare - people were taping Dr Who from the start. What we're after is people with 16mm prints that went walkies from chez Auntie. Yes they are! Maybe not that they were made, but certainly that they were kept, and found instead of thrown away. There are for example no audio tapes known for the missing '60s Sherlock Holmes episodes except for one. But Sherlock Holmes has always been very popular and had fanclubs in many countries. It's nothing less than an amazing piece of luck that we have audio for Marco Polo.
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Post by Ed Brown on Mar 11, 2017 22:41:26 GMT
Audio recordings from the 60s aren't that rare - people were taping Dr Who from the start. What we're after is people with 16mm prints that went walkies from chez Auntie. I think perhaps you missed the point: one can seek for anything in such a campaign - not just reels of tape. Reels of film, for instance.
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Post by John Wall on Mar 12, 2017 8:30:48 GMT
Audio recordings from the 60s aren't that rare - people were taping Dr Who from the start. What we're after is people with 16mm prints that went walkies from chez Auntie. I think perhaps you missed the point: one can seek for anything in such a campaign - not just reels of tape. Reels of film, for instance. Very few to be found - some stories had very few prints struck. On the other hand there were sufficient people with tape recorders that every 60s episode, surviving or missing, has at least one off air audio recording.
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