I'm sorry I'll read that again

[Peter Bradford]

Is there any way to find out if the BBC are missing any episodes from this radio series? Thank you.

[Stuart Monk]

Hi, Peter.
Thanks to amazing work by Keith Wickham I believe that the complete run of ISIRTA is available to the BBC and being broadcast on 4 Extra - there may be some edits which have been restored from off-air recordings that would benefit from improvement, but there are no 'missing' episodes.
Cheers,
Stuart

[Peter Bradford]

Thank you for your reply.

It’s just that I am hoping to start transferring my old quarter inch audio tapes to my pc this winter and most likely have a few episodes of what I believe was the final series in the early/mid seventies. ( the ‘cod’ stereo radio episode for example).

I won’t bother transferring them if the BBC already has complete recordings of this series. Thanks again.

[geoffleonard]

Some of the repeats on 4Extra are derived from those which were broadcast on the World Service (or similar) many years ago, and they had been edited for "inappropriate" content. It's very odd listening to favourite sketches and waiting in vain for a line that's been removed.

[jimsieroto]

I've been listening to ISIRTA since BBC4E/BBC7 started and as far as I know, they've never repeated episodes 5 and 6 of the final series 9. You can track them down on the internet, but I don't know why the Beeb don't transmit them. We're midway through series 5 in the current cycle, so maybe in a few months time?...

[Mark McKay]

BBC7 used to play those episodes (possibly cut) but now banished by the PC brigade.

[lawrence mayes]

I think I have a complete set of all the ISIRTA shows encoded to mp3. Many are from the original b'casts in the 60s and 70s and some from repeats on Radio 4 and more recently on Radios 7 and 4x.

Many of the repeats are from TS discs, which were edited primarily for time, reduce the running time to around 25 minutes - the originals run quite close to the full half-hour. What is usually lost is the first sketch (that precedes the opening 'Angus Prune Tune') and one of Bill Oddie's songs; the running order is often changed as well. There are also occasional edits for content. The 1970 Panto edition has been reduced from its original 42 minutes to 27 minutes presumably to fit the TS format. I don't think that it's ever been repeated at its original length (maybe the BBC no longer have it).

I've found Roger Wilmut's site to be most useful: www.rfwilmut.clara.net/research/notes.html. He has the running order for all the original b'casts which is of great help in identifying particular programmes. He uses a slightly different numbering scheme for the series; he calls the pilot series 'Preparatory' rather than '1st' and numbers the subsequent series sequentially from 1. I use this scheme.

I have episodes 5 and 6 of the final series and my records show that I recorded no 5 from BBC R7/4x and probably no 6 as well.

[Gary Critcher]

there's nothing missing from the ISIRTA archive at the BBC, I'm told they now even have the programmes recorded in New Zealand when the cast (or most of them) were on tour there in 1964 (?).

[Hugh Pearson]

Another link that may be useful -> fourble.co.uk/podcast/isirtagain

[Ed Brown]

Sadly, the Fourble link is broken now.

Once again, episodes 5 and 6 of the final series have not been broadcast, being deemed politically incorrect by the Beeb's thought police.

So if you do have the original tapes, do please transfer them. The website Archive.org will accept wav files, if you care to upload them there. Better still, if the tapes are mono, after encoding the wav file, delete one of the two channels to halve the file size, then use lossless FLAC to encode the remaining channel as a flac file, thereby halving the file size again.

You can then more easily post the resulting .flac file, which will be only a quarter of the size of the original wav file.