Great Blog On Archiving, Bob Pratt, Top of the pops etc.
Oct 1, 2018 18:37:59 GMT
Dale Rumbold, Jeff Leach, and 9 more like this
Post by Kev Mulrenan on Oct 1, 2018 18:37:59 GMT
Had to share this! It's so interesting!
Sounds of the Sixties – the Unsung Heroes
Guest Contributor David Jeffcock writes …
On December 7th 1991 the tenth and final episode of a pop and rock archive series I once produced called Sounds of the Sixties was broadcast on BBC Two. Since then it’s been repeated some twenty times, most recently in August this year, on BBC Four. And it’s often been carved up and re-fashioned. Not least, so as to remove the several creeps and monsters, including one Jimmy Savile, OBE, who have fallen from grace since it was made.
The most striking thing about the series for me, though, is the fact that over a third of the archive performances (31 out of 87) were not, at the time, to be found in the official BBC Film and Tape Library. I hinted at this, for those in the know, by giving a ‘research’ credit to three people, none of whom were, in any conventional sense, tv researchers. Two of them had left the BBC more than a decade before the series was made, the third was a VT engineer. They were the most prominent members of a small band of enthusiasts, working in the bowels of Television Centre, who had preserved some of these historic records of popular music performances because they couldn’t bear to see them destroyed, in accordance with BBC policy at the time. (To take the case of the most important pop music programme in the 60s, Top Of The Pops, for example; from its beginning in January 1964 up until the end of the decade the BBC had kept only three full episodes of the show – which was transmitted weekly – plus a very small handful of bleeding chunks.)
When I began work on Sounds of the Sixties the existence of this cache was a closely guarded secret. More than 40 hour-long video tapes were, in effect, hidden in the Video Tape area; some in lockers, some in the sub-basement, some on top of heating ducts. Snippets of this alternative archive had been used in a very successful series of the mid 1980s called The Rock & Roll Years, and the programme makers had put me in touch with Bob Pratt, a VT engineer and the main guardian of the precious hoard. He made the tapes available to me.
But there were still some strange and frustrating examples of performances Missing in Action. Mystifyingly, a programme – that had been kept by the BBC – celebrating ten years of TOTP in 1973 included several brief clips that were not to be found amongst the VT stash. But then I was put on the trail of the man who had them.
Alan Colegrave had worked, not in VT but in the Tele-Recording area, where live tv broadcasts were recorded onto film. Every time he saw that TOTP was being recorded (or rehearsed), in 1964/5, he would wind a spare chunk of film (known in the trade as a ‘short end’) onto an idle machine and record it – unbidden. This material – about forty minutes of it – he then shared freely with anyone who wanted to watch it. He it was who had provided the archive for the tenth anniversary of TOTP. When he later found the reel of film sprawled, can-less, on the ‘TK’ suite floor he decided that if the programme makers themselves weren’t interested in preserving it, he’d take it home. And then he left the BBC. Finally I was put in touch with him, got my hands on the reel of film and had a broadcast quality copy made.
I can still vividly remember putting on a VHS of this pop tv El Dorado for the first time, sitting on my own in a small, bare office smelling of carpet cleaner. I felt like a scientist awaiting the results of a crucial experiment. The opening shot was mute. A man was stood with his back to camera. Not a great start. But then he turned round and sang the opening words of Go Now. It was Denny Laine and The Moody Blues. I had never seen a frame of this before. And material completely new to me kept coming. Fifteen of these performances went straight into Sounds of The Sixties – my rule being that only a full song or number could qualify.
The other sixteen non-official performances in Sounds of the Sixties came from VT. A few video tapes were available for ‘editing training purposes’ – luckily for future music fans. Because engineers and editors in the 1960s and early 70s often kept copies of any items that interested them, which could range from shots of a historic steam engine to a particularly naff performance by ‘Pan’s People’ to a live free jazz set by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. And comedy. Pete ‘n’ Dud’s brilliant Superthunderstingcar send up of Gerry Anderson’s ‘supermarionation’ shows was kept by VT, not the BBC Library.
One custodian in particular, Nick Maingay, formed a one-man rescue squad. In the early 70s one of his responsibilities was to supervise the wiping of video tapes so they could be re-used. But if he saw a music performance by an important late 60s or early 70s band coming in to be erased – by Jimi Hendrix, The Who, The Small Faces, Fleetwood Mac, or Joe Cocker, say – he would keep a copy. He also ‘curated’ material gathered by fellow enthusiasts. One of them was the in/famous live performance by the Jimi Hendrix Experience on Happening For Lulu (yes, really), in 1969, when the band cut short a performance of Hey Joe to launch into Sunshine of Your Love, so as to forestall the original plan to have Lulu join Hendrix for a duet on the former. Maingay also kept a copy of Cream’s last ever concert, at the Albert Hall. Sixteen of the performances in Sounds of the Sixties were sourced from material kept by him, and other VT editors and engineers.
There’s been a lot of nonsense written about why the BBC junked so much material in the 1950s and 60. In particular, the corporation are regularly blamed because they re-used videotapes, and thus lost forever some of these great pop and rock performances. But before 1968 the BBC had little choice in this regard. Their tapes, supplied by Ampex (one of whose investors was the ever-canny Bing Crosby) were designed not to be archived, but to be re-used. And Ampex had a patent on these ‘Quad’, or ‘2 inch’ tapes that lasted until 1968. Unsurprisingly, they were extremely expensive, and the BBC only had around 60 of them. They had, therefore, to be used again. Indeed, like ‘hoovering’, to ‘ampex’ became an in-house verb, synonymous with ‘record’.
But this fact by no means lets the corporation off the hook. For one thing, after 1968, when the Ampex patent lapsed, much cheaper tapes were available. But even after that, the cache of popular music programmes in the BBC library is extremely patchy – and remained so up until around 1973. After which TOTP was, for the most part, preserved. Ditto The Old Grey Whistle Test. But only, in the early days, because its producer, Michael Appleton, having been tipped off as to what fate lay in store for them, had taken to marching down to the VT suite after the broadcast, collaring the tapes of all the ‘inserts’ recorded – including a 1972 performance by David Bowie – and hiding them in his office.
The reasons the popular music/rock shows tended not to be kept, at least officially, is down to a combination of four factors. In the first place, the great majority of programmes in the 1960s were transmitted live, including most comedy and drama programmes. Not only did this have practical implications; it was part of the mindset. Television, which began in earnest in Britain in 1946, was ephemeral. Transmitted into the ether, whoosh, it was gone. Radio, of course, shared the same attitude. There seemed therefore no good reason to keep a record.
Except one. Every programme broadcast had to be kept for at least six weeks, in case legal proceedings were taken against the BBC or complaints were made. Live programmes were recorded on film. Later in the 60s, programmes that had been recorded on video tape were also copied onto film – leading to a considerable drop in quality, despite the great expense involved. The video tapes were then wiped ready for re-use. The ‘insert tapes’ of a programme were wiped with no copies made. Unless that is, they were kept by people in VT for their private archive.
The 2” tapes, it’s fair to say, were extremely bulky. 2 inches deep, but of course that didn’t count the thick plastic container. The 16mm film copies, on the other hand, were just that measurement across, plus a thin layer of tin. A forty minute programme could be kept in a can the size of a small pizza. I mention this only to show that had there been a will to do so, it would most certainly not have been beyond the wit of BBC man or woman to have kept all of these film recordings. Not as good quality as the original videotape recording (even in 405 lines black and white) but a whole lot better than zip.
The main reason why so little pop and rock footage up to 1973 survives was down to the cost of storage. That’s because, after the legal period of conservation was up, the managers of each BBC programme department would be asked each year which of their past productions they wanted to be kept, and which could be junked. Storing their programmes in the BBC Library cost the department money. And despite what you may read about the congenital profligacy of the BBC, even then it was under financial pressure to save money at every turn. What’s more the people working there, never mind running it at the time, would have believed it was their duty to spend the licence fee on making new programmes, not keeping old ones.
Or repeating them. Wrangles with record companies, artists’ management and other interested parties, all of whom – understandably – wanted more than the BBC was prepared to pay for a repeat meant that it was usually not worth the candle doing so. And besides, with just two channels to run, and no ‘daytime’, the BBC in the 1960s didn’t need to fill up air-space by showing its back catalogue.
The only way more of this popular material could have been saved for posterity would have been for a tranche of money (where was the Lottery when we needed it?) to have been advanced to the BBC, as it was to museums, art galleries and libraries, to fund the storage of its past productions. Fat chance of that, even in the days when the corporation was a little more popular as an institution than it is now.
And so, while programmes in the music field that the Light Entertainment management thought were of cultural value might be saved for posterity, items they decided were unimportant were trashed. The only evidence of any recognition of a duty to preserve some of this supposedly less worthy material was that a very small number of film recordings of a live series (sometimes only one!) was kept in the television archives, as a representative example. (The same was true for Children’s programmes, like Crackerjack, on which the less frightening 60s pop acts often appeared.)
This snooty approach to sorting the cultural wheat from the chaff meant that the kind of teenage-oriented popular music that got into the singles charts after Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock was especially vulnerable to assault. All ‘pop’ music tended to be tarred with the same brush; it was a trivial passing fad. And who in their right mind would want to see again a half hour acoustic concert – one of his last – recorded in Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1965 by a scruffy young folkie called Bob Dylan (lost) when you could see endless performances by an even scruffier old folkie like Pete Seeger (saved)? The middle aged Light Entertainment managers ‘got’ jazz, and 1940s and 50s folk. And of course over in Music & Arts a much, much greater proportion of high-end classical and opera material was kept intact. (For which I personally am very thankful, having regularly raided it over the years.)
But television and ‘pop’ music were the bastard children of the 1950s, despised and derided as cultural flotsam and jetsam, even actively pernicious, unloved by the great and the good. Television programmes were expendable; pop music programmes the lowest items on the totem pole.
But, sad to say, the real vandalism took place in the 1980s, by which time the official BBC policy was to keep much more of its material – which could now be stored on smaller 1” tapes. This crazed orgy of destruction took place because of the introduction, in 1982, of that bane of Old Age Pensioners everywhere, the domestic VHS. As well as music and comedy, it had long been the habit of VT editors to save any ‘Alright On The Night’-style bloopers and cock-ups. The best would be edited into the annual ‘Christmas Tape’ and shown, in a suitably festive spirit, to all those production staff who had behaved themselves and been good boys and girls during the preceding months. Regular presenters were also in on the joke. Any real disaster during a recording session would be followed a doleful look to camera and the words, ‘Merry Christmas VT!’ (The funniest piece of television footage I know, the Blue Peter baby elephant rampage, comes from this source. The programme’s formidable producer, Biddy Baxter, would have killed to make sure this footage disappeared forever.)
Come the widespread use of the VHS, however, these unconsciously comic gems – along with non-BBC copyright footage that had been compiled on the VT ‘private tapes’ – started making good their escape from the confines of Television Centre. Actors soon started to get fed up that their less than finest moments were straying into the public domain; and the BBC could hardly sanction material supplied in good faith by third parties blundering out into the wild. Fair enough. But what happened next was bovine. The VT management, no doubt only following orders, staged a dramatic Entebbe-style raid on the ‘private tapes.’ Any captured were exterminated, with no quarter given.
This was absurd. It was perfectly possible to go through this material and work out what was BBC copyright, and what wasn’t. I managed it, simply by going through all the paperwork. Instead, anything not officially ‘recognised’ by the official BBC libraries was declared an outlaw. Despite its being obvious that it was indeed BBC copyright. (The logo plastered all over episodes of TOTP offered a clue.) And so, thanks to this bone-headed and short-sighted policy, some really important material – legend has it this included the Beatles live on TOTP in 1966 and some early, pristine, now lost forever episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour – was wantonly destroyed. In the 1980s! And if tragedy is too strong a word, it was certainly a damn shame.
Fortunately, this scorched earth policy didn’t quite succeed. Bob Pratt got wind of what was afoot and managed to hide his tape collection from the prying eyes of the ‘Programme Prevention Officers’, as they were known to production folk at the time I joined the corporation in the early 80s. Then the redoubtable Ann Freer, the producer of The Rock & Roll Years, insisted on including extracts from this material in her show, whatever misgivings the BBC Management might have had. Clearing the way for me to follow suit.
And so it was that large swathes of this precious sub rosa archive went into Sounds of The Sixties. If only, if only, I kept thinking, as I struggled to find enough half-way decent material to fill ten half hours, Alan, Bob and Nick had really put their backs into it when they compiled the basement tapes they could have saved more. But under the circumstances it’s a miracle they managed to keep any. Merry Christmas VT!
© David Jeffcock, December 2016
Sounds of the Sixties – the Unsung Heroes
Guest Contributor David Jeffcock writes …
On December 7th 1991 the tenth and final episode of a pop and rock archive series I once produced called Sounds of the Sixties was broadcast on BBC Two. Since then it’s been repeated some twenty times, most recently in August this year, on BBC Four. And it’s often been carved up and re-fashioned. Not least, so as to remove the several creeps and monsters, including one Jimmy Savile, OBE, who have fallen from grace since it was made.
The most striking thing about the series for me, though, is the fact that over a third of the archive performances (31 out of 87) were not, at the time, to be found in the official BBC Film and Tape Library. I hinted at this, for those in the know, by giving a ‘research’ credit to three people, none of whom were, in any conventional sense, tv researchers. Two of them had left the BBC more than a decade before the series was made, the third was a VT engineer. They were the most prominent members of a small band of enthusiasts, working in the bowels of Television Centre, who had preserved some of these historic records of popular music performances because they couldn’t bear to see them destroyed, in accordance with BBC policy at the time. (To take the case of the most important pop music programme in the 60s, Top Of The Pops, for example; from its beginning in January 1964 up until the end of the decade the BBC had kept only three full episodes of the show – which was transmitted weekly – plus a very small handful of bleeding chunks.)
When I began work on Sounds of the Sixties the existence of this cache was a closely guarded secret. More than 40 hour-long video tapes were, in effect, hidden in the Video Tape area; some in lockers, some in the sub-basement, some on top of heating ducts. Snippets of this alternative archive had been used in a very successful series of the mid 1980s called The Rock & Roll Years, and the programme makers had put me in touch with Bob Pratt, a VT engineer and the main guardian of the precious hoard. He made the tapes available to me.
But there were still some strange and frustrating examples of performances Missing in Action. Mystifyingly, a programme – that had been kept by the BBC – celebrating ten years of TOTP in 1973 included several brief clips that were not to be found amongst the VT stash. But then I was put on the trail of the man who had them.
Alan Colegrave had worked, not in VT but in the Tele-Recording area, where live tv broadcasts were recorded onto film. Every time he saw that TOTP was being recorded (or rehearsed), in 1964/5, he would wind a spare chunk of film (known in the trade as a ‘short end’) onto an idle machine and record it – unbidden. This material – about forty minutes of it – he then shared freely with anyone who wanted to watch it. He it was who had provided the archive for the tenth anniversary of TOTP. When he later found the reel of film sprawled, can-less, on the ‘TK’ suite floor he decided that if the programme makers themselves weren’t interested in preserving it, he’d take it home. And then he left the BBC. Finally I was put in touch with him, got my hands on the reel of film and had a broadcast quality copy made.
I can still vividly remember putting on a VHS of this pop tv El Dorado for the first time, sitting on my own in a small, bare office smelling of carpet cleaner. I felt like a scientist awaiting the results of a crucial experiment. The opening shot was mute. A man was stood with his back to camera. Not a great start. But then he turned round and sang the opening words of Go Now. It was Denny Laine and The Moody Blues. I had never seen a frame of this before. And material completely new to me kept coming. Fifteen of these performances went straight into Sounds of The Sixties – my rule being that only a full song or number could qualify.
The other sixteen non-official performances in Sounds of the Sixties came from VT. A few video tapes were available for ‘editing training purposes’ – luckily for future music fans. Because engineers and editors in the 1960s and early 70s often kept copies of any items that interested them, which could range from shots of a historic steam engine to a particularly naff performance by ‘Pan’s People’ to a live free jazz set by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. And comedy. Pete ‘n’ Dud’s brilliant Superthunderstingcar send up of Gerry Anderson’s ‘supermarionation’ shows was kept by VT, not the BBC Library.
One custodian in particular, Nick Maingay, formed a one-man rescue squad. In the early 70s one of his responsibilities was to supervise the wiping of video tapes so they could be re-used. But if he saw a music performance by an important late 60s or early 70s band coming in to be erased – by Jimi Hendrix, The Who, The Small Faces, Fleetwood Mac, or Joe Cocker, say – he would keep a copy. He also ‘curated’ material gathered by fellow enthusiasts. One of them was the in/famous live performance by the Jimi Hendrix Experience on Happening For Lulu (yes, really), in 1969, when the band cut short a performance of Hey Joe to launch into Sunshine of Your Love, so as to forestall the original plan to have Lulu join Hendrix for a duet on the former. Maingay also kept a copy of Cream’s last ever concert, at the Albert Hall. Sixteen of the performances in Sounds of the Sixties were sourced from material kept by him, and other VT editors and engineers.
There’s been a lot of nonsense written about why the BBC junked so much material in the 1950s and 60. In particular, the corporation are regularly blamed because they re-used videotapes, and thus lost forever some of these great pop and rock performances. But before 1968 the BBC had little choice in this regard. Their tapes, supplied by Ampex (one of whose investors was the ever-canny Bing Crosby) were designed not to be archived, but to be re-used. And Ampex had a patent on these ‘Quad’, or ‘2 inch’ tapes that lasted until 1968. Unsurprisingly, they were extremely expensive, and the BBC only had around 60 of them. They had, therefore, to be used again. Indeed, like ‘hoovering’, to ‘ampex’ became an in-house verb, synonymous with ‘record’.
But this fact by no means lets the corporation off the hook. For one thing, after 1968, when the Ampex patent lapsed, much cheaper tapes were available. But even after that, the cache of popular music programmes in the BBC library is extremely patchy – and remained so up until around 1973. After which TOTP was, for the most part, preserved. Ditto The Old Grey Whistle Test. But only, in the early days, because its producer, Michael Appleton, having been tipped off as to what fate lay in store for them, had taken to marching down to the VT suite after the broadcast, collaring the tapes of all the ‘inserts’ recorded – including a 1972 performance by David Bowie – and hiding them in his office.
The reasons the popular music/rock shows tended not to be kept, at least officially, is down to a combination of four factors. In the first place, the great majority of programmes in the 1960s were transmitted live, including most comedy and drama programmes. Not only did this have practical implications; it was part of the mindset. Television, which began in earnest in Britain in 1946, was ephemeral. Transmitted into the ether, whoosh, it was gone. Radio, of course, shared the same attitude. There seemed therefore no good reason to keep a record.
Except one. Every programme broadcast had to be kept for at least six weeks, in case legal proceedings were taken against the BBC or complaints were made. Live programmes were recorded on film. Later in the 60s, programmes that had been recorded on video tape were also copied onto film – leading to a considerable drop in quality, despite the great expense involved. The video tapes were then wiped ready for re-use. The ‘insert tapes’ of a programme were wiped with no copies made. Unless that is, they were kept by people in VT for their private archive.
The 2” tapes, it’s fair to say, were extremely bulky. 2 inches deep, but of course that didn’t count the thick plastic container. The 16mm film copies, on the other hand, were just that measurement across, plus a thin layer of tin. A forty minute programme could be kept in a can the size of a small pizza. I mention this only to show that had there been a will to do so, it would most certainly not have been beyond the wit of BBC man or woman to have kept all of these film recordings. Not as good quality as the original videotape recording (even in 405 lines black and white) but a whole lot better than zip.
The main reason why so little pop and rock footage up to 1973 survives was down to the cost of storage. That’s because, after the legal period of conservation was up, the managers of each BBC programme department would be asked each year which of their past productions they wanted to be kept, and which could be junked. Storing their programmes in the BBC Library cost the department money. And despite what you may read about the congenital profligacy of the BBC, even then it was under financial pressure to save money at every turn. What’s more the people working there, never mind running it at the time, would have believed it was their duty to spend the licence fee on making new programmes, not keeping old ones.
Or repeating them. Wrangles with record companies, artists’ management and other interested parties, all of whom – understandably – wanted more than the BBC was prepared to pay for a repeat meant that it was usually not worth the candle doing so. And besides, with just two channels to run, and no ‘daytime’, the BBC in the 1960s didn’t need to fill up air-space by showing its back catalogue.
The only way more of this popular material could have been saved for posterity would have been for a tranche of money (where was the Lottery when we needed it?) to have been advanced to the BBC, as it was to museums, art galleries and libraries, to fund the storage of its past productions. Fat chance of that, even in the days when the corporation was a little more popular as an institution than it is now.
And so, while programmes in the music field that the Light Entertainment management thought were of cultural value might be saved for posterity, items they decided were unimportant were trashed. The only evidence of any recognition of a duty to preserve some of this supposedly less worthy material was that a very small number of film recordings of a live series (sometimes only one!) was kept in the television archives, as a representative example. (The same was true for Children’s programmes, like Crackerjack, on which the less frightening 60s pop acts often appeared.)
This snooty approach to sorting the cultural wheat from the chaff meant that the kind of teenage-oriented popular music that got into the singles charts after Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock was especially vulnerable to assault. All ‘pop’ music tended to be tarred with the same brush; it was a trivial passing fad. And who in their right mind would want to see again a half hour acoustic concert – one of his last – recorded in Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1965 by a scruffy young folkie called Bob Dylan (lost) when you could see endless performances by an even scruffier old folkie like Pete Seeger (saved)? The middle aged Light Entertainment managers ‘got’ jazz, and 1940s and 50s folk. And of course over in Music & Arts a much, much greater proportion of high-end classical and opera material was kept intact. (For which I personally am very thankful, having regularly raided it over the years.)
But television and ‘pop’ music were the bastard children of the 1950s, despised and derided as cultural flotsam and jetsam, even actively pernicious, unloved by the great and the good. Television programmes were expendable; pop music programmes the lowest items on the totem pole.
But, sad to say, the real vandalism took place in the 1980s, by which time the official BBC policy was to keep much more of its material – which could now be stored on smaller 1” tapes. This crazed orgy of destruction took place because of the introduction, in 1982, of that bane of Old Age Pensioners everywhere, the domestic VHS. As well as music and comedy, it had long been the habit of VT editors to save any ‘Alright On The Night’-style bloopers and cock-ups. The best would be edited into the annual ‘Christmas Tape’ and shown, in a suitably festive spirit, to all those production staff who had behaved themselves and been good boys and girls during the preceding months. Regular presenters were also in on the joke. Any real disaster during a recording session would be followed a doleful look to camera and the words, ‘Merry Christmas VT!’ (The funniest piece of television footage I know, the Blue Peter baby elephant rampage, comes from this source. The programme’s formidable producer, Biddy Baxter, would have killed to make sure this footage disappeared forever.)
Come the widespread use of the VHS, however, these unconsciously comic gems – along with non-BBC copyright footage that had been compiled on the VT ‘private tapes’ – started making good their escape from the confines of Television Centre. Actors soon started to get fed up that their less than finest moments were straying into the public domain; and the BBC could hardly sanction material supplied in good faith by third parties blundering out into the wild. Fair enough. But what happened next was bovine. The VT management, no doubt only following orders, staged a dramatic Entebbe-style raid on the ‘private tapes.’ Any captured were exterminated, with no quarter given.
This was absurd. It was perfectly possible to go through this material and work out what was BBC copyright, and what wasn’t. I managed it, simply by going through all the paperwork. Instead, anything not officially ‘recognised’ by the official BBC libraries was declared an outlaw. Despite its being obvious that it was indeed BBC copyright. (The logo plastered all over episodes of TOTP offered a clue.) And so, thanks to this bone-headed and short-sighted policy, some really important material – legend has it this included the Beatles live on TOTP in 1966 and some early, pristine, now lost forever episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour – was wantonly destroyed. In the 1980s! And if tragedy is too strong a word, it was certainly a damn shame.
Fortunately, this scorched earth policy didn’t quite succeed. Bob Pratt got wind of what was afoot and managed to hide his tape collection from the prying eyes of the ‘Programme Prevention Officers’, as they were known to production folk at the time I joined the corporation in the early 80s. Then the redoubtable Ann Freer, the producer of The Rock & Roll Years, insisted on including extracts from this material in her show, whatever misgivings the BBC Management might have had. Clearing the way for me to follow suit.
And so it was that large swathes of this precious sub rosa archive went into Sounds of The Sixties. If only, if only, I kept thinking, as I struggled to find enough half-way decent material to fill ten half hours, Alan, Bob and Nick had really put their backs into it when they compiled the basement tapes they could have saved more. But under the circumstances it’s a miracle they managed to keep any. Merry Christmas VT!
© David Jeffcock, December 2016