Post by petercheck on Dec 18, 2018 16:52:17 GMT
Keith Badman (well-known archivist, researcher and author) requested that I post this for others on the Missing Episodes forum to see. I think many of you will find it rather interesting...
Hi Peter,
Following the BBC announcement at the weekend that 514 episodes of TOTP (approximately 3440 performances) are missing from their archives, I thought I would share this information about where some other complete shows might be hiding...
In 1996, during research on my co-authored Rolling Stones book, Good Times Bad Times, I came across paperwork relating to overseas sales of Top Of The Pops. Covering the years 1968 and 1973, many excerpts (and complete shows) were, as we know, dispatched to foreign broadcasters at the time. Due to the subject I was covering, I was particularly drawn to the fact the edition, transmitted on July 10 1969, was sent to the national Swiss broadcaster SRG for inclusion in their pop music show, Hits-A-Go-Go. (The BBC archive was naturally informed about this.)
I contacted SRG and was told that (unlike the rival Beat Club series) they had precious few records of what songs featured in the Hits-A-Go-Go series and many (not all) of the surviving episodes of the series they had were either unavailable, due to either copyright restrictions, or they were still on the old tape format. (Proof of how little, early B&W Hits A... shows were then available came in approx. 1993 when NDR in Germany aired a best of the series, it ran in the region of just a couple of months, most of which focused on the series' 1970s colour editions.)
Pleased to say, over the last decade or so, the Hits A... masters have finally been dusted down, digitized to the modern format and found to feature some amazing lost TOTP clips, Status Quo, King Crimson, Black Sabbath, Dave Dee etc., Jethro Tull, etc. and the most recent of which, The Rolling Stones' performance of Honky Tonk Woman, taped just a few hours after Brian Jones's death.
I asked SRG back in 1996 whether that complete TOTP edition (aired on BBC1 on July 10 1969) or any other entire shows from that period were still in their archives. They sadly had no idea. I suspect now, with their vaults much more organised than they were almost 23 years ago, I think someone at the BBC should contact them and ask them what other lost, complete TOTP shows they might still have. (I naturally offered to go thru their archives myself, on the hunt for missing material but was, naturally informed I could not do so without BBC permission.)
Re The background to the BBC's original VT recordings of TOTP - It was the release of Pepper that forced the Corporation to think differently about how pop music of the time should be judged. I viewed paperwork, from July 1967, which noted how the show's producer, Johnnie Stewart wanted to start saving the "songs only" from each week's broadcast but then, in the region of a week or so later, he changed his mind insisting he wanted the "complete shows taped and archived." (Episodes prior to that were, as we well know, routinely wiped within weeks / months of broadcast.)
I understand the first episode he wanted preserving was the one aired on July 13 1967 (Beatles/ Turtles/ Pink Floyd / Small Faces / Aretha Franklin etc.) What then happened to them is a long story... so here's an edited version... a big re-branding of the TOTP series began not long afterwards. (However, the show's famous second logo was not copyrighted until 1968.)
Plans to export the series (or just clips) overseas (to countries such as Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Italy etc. and even to America) began more predominantly. (Prior to this, it was just the odd, here and there sales, i.e., Manfred Mann Semi Detached... which was sold to stations in Italy and France and The Kinks' Sunny Afternoon, which was sent to America for airing on a local cable station in Texas and for inclusion in the rarely seen pop music compilation, Record On Film.)
Regrettably, complete (and multiple master clips from) shows (as we know) were sent out but rarely returned (ZDF Disco i.e.)... Acting as show reels, 16mm tele-recordings of several TOTP shows were dispatched to the States, but sales never materialised. They were in B&W, most US stations wanted colour... Are they still there, we wonder, languishing on the shelves of one of the major libraries?
And then, of course, the great archive move (and clear-out) of 1971/ 1972, when the BBC moved their archives to Windmill Road... and a representative from a top European broadcaster, knowing there was still a market for them, requested (and even collected) copies of what the BBC had left from TOTP (as well as JBJ etc.) in their vaults. In 1988, I spoke to the man who collected these films / tapes and he told me straight, "The BBC said just take them. We don't want them anymore." (The survival of Dave Dee etc. performing 'Zabadak' from TOTP in October 1967, I believe came from that haul.)
This is why so very little of TOTP (or JBJ) from the 1960s remain in the BBC's archives today... As far as they were concerned, theses B&W shows, from the previous decade, were worthless, taking up a lot of space and highly unlikely ever to be screened again. Proof of what little Sixties B&W footage remained in the BBC archives at that time can be found in the Ten Years of Pop Music 1964 - 1974, Top Of The Pops Special, broadcast on BBC1 on 27 December 1973. The Corporation did not set up a proper archiving policy until 1978. Such a pity they left it so late.
Thanks must go to the BBC engineer, Bob Pratt (for saving from destruction, in the 60s/70s, the musical items he did), Chris Perry and Phil Morris, for their superb archive recoveries and to Peter Checksfield for giving me this platform on this brilliant forum. His book, Channelling The Beat really is a superb read...
Keith Badman,
London, England
