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Post by Stuart Douglas on Apr 27, 2005 15:29:01 GMT
Does anyone know who the names of the member sof the public (rather than the stars) who took part in the missing 1981 episodes of the Adventure Game?
Stuart
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Post by Steve Tyler on May 29, 2005 14:39:32 GMT
I don't but I can see where you are going with this and I think it's a very clever idea. Are there any fan sites and have you tried asking a fanatic?
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Post by SeventiesNights on Oct 30, 2005 12:20:49 GMT
The easiest way to ascertian this would be to have a look at the programme documentation. If you contact RAPIC which looks after this stuff for the BBC and ask them for the PasB form or the PasC for the episodes in quesiton that will have all contributors listed.
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Post by Colin Smith on Oct 31, 2005 14:03:43 GMT
Does anyone know who the names of the member sof the public (rather than the stars) who took part in the missing 1981 episodes of the Adventure Game? Stuart Derek Gale was the person from the second episode of that series, and Tessa Hamp was from the fifth episode. I actually have a second generation "off air" of the Derek Gale (with Madeline Smith and David Yip) episode. I sent a copy back to the BBC a couple of years back, around the same time a friend of mine sent back a copy of the Paul Darrow/Lesley Judd episode from the first series. So, there would appear to be just 2 episodes (one apiece from the first 2 series) with no current record of any kind.
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Post by SeventiesNights on Nov 2, 2005 1:49:35 GMT
Well the BBC have no sign of the Madeline Smith one in the archive: it appears they've lost it again! I'd love to see that one, it contains the "tea" moment!
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Post by Grumbledook on Nov 2, 2005 11:38:48 GMT
Well the BBC have no sign of the Madeline Smith one in the archive: it appears they've lost it again! I'd love to see that one, it contains the "tea" moment! Maybe they're still listing it as missing in the hopes of obtaining a better copy?
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Post by Colin Smith on Nov 2, 2005 12:24:19 GMT
Well the BBC have no sign of the Madeline Smith one in the archive: it appears they've lost it again! I'd love to see that one, it contains the "tea" moment! Oh brilliant! Do you know if the Paul Darrow/Lesley Judd one is listed by the BBC as being "resident" ? I know that a friend of mine definitely returned that one about a week or so before I posted out the tape with my episode. (It was actually on his advice that I Emailed the Beeb and got the contact address). Is it known at all if any of the other 2 missing episodes exist on "off air copies" ? It seems a bit of a shame the two "best" episodes (or at least the most entertaining ones) no longer exist at all. More annoyingly these two are the only two which I no longer have on the off airs "bequeathed" to me from a former flat mate many moons ago!
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Post by Ian on Nov 3, 2005 19:04:15 GMT
does anyone know why they went missing ? i though the junkings stopped in the early 70s !
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Post by andrew martin on Nov 7, 2005 13:12:55 GMT
Junking went on on a large scale until the mid to late 70s when an archivist was appointed and an archive policy was instituted. This did not and does not mean that no material will ever be junked again, just that much more careful consideration is given to what is kept. In the early 90s, there was another round of junking of VT before the start of the mass project to transfer all the BBC's 2" VT to digital formats, and this included some children's and quiz-type shows where it was considered unnecessary to keep every single episode. Soon after, by the mid-90s, even that kind of junking pretty much stopped, as it became clear that with the increase in channels and outlets such as home video, it was mucha harder to decide what it was safe to get rid of because it was of no further use, and not intrinsically vital to representing the history of television.
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Post by BillyH on Nov 9, 2005 12:54:38 GMT
It continued up until the 90s? Wow. And there I was surprised that they were still junking in the 80s.
Any examples of the programmes junked?
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Post by andrew martin on Nov 9, 2005 13:44:48 GMT
Some episodes of "Play School" and "Jackanory" spring to mind, can't remember anything else specifically. Mostly series that there are hundreds of examples of, where it's unlikely they'd be missed! Some episodes of "Rentaghost" were wiped, although subsequently recovered from Worldwide (when it was pointed out UK Gold were showing them, so there was obviously a use for them!). Soon after that the policy got a lot more cautious.
We can never say that no more programmes will ever be wiped - the BBC's output is far in excess of any other UK broadcaster and space will always be limited. I don't htink posterity would be too hard on us if not every episode of "Cash in the Attic" was retained, say (though there are no plans to wipe any at the moment!). The real tragedy of wiping up to the 70s is the random nature: too many shows that should be kept complete were not, too many that should have at least a sample kept have none. It's really hard to see how the vast space for keeping 2" tapes (the size of a large portable typewriter) could have been justified, beside any of the other reasons for their wiping; the junking of film recordings is harder to justify - impossible even...!
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Post by Laurence Piper on Nov 9, 2005 14:09:48 GMT
Seems to me though that if any more material was to be wiped in the future sometime, the decision to do so should NOT rest with the BBC (the scenario is a bit like the police investigating a complaint about their conduct themselves!) It's clear that they still have too much power in their hands in this respect (and the BFI are little better either as they only pursue a selective and elitist preservation agenda).
No one can say what is / isn't of value now or in the near future. The BBC presumes a lot by taking the decision itself. One thing is sure though - they haven't learned from past mistakes (if they had then it would now be unthinkable to even entertain the possibility of it happening again in future, no matter how small an amount - hasn't enough of the past been lost already?!?). Posterity doesn't come into it (sadly). It's all about potential re-screening value and sales. Our descendents won't thank us for the rag bag of incomplete treasures left to them that are the TV archives.
TV Archiving is far too important to be left in the hands of TV archivists.
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Post by williamM on Nov 9, 2005 16:05:11 GMT
quite right, archives are wasted on the archivists
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Post by Grumbledook on Nov 9, 2005 16:35:58 GMT
It would seem that with the proliferation of digital technology that perhaps the marginal cost of archiving material would be much less and therefore the BBC and other networks would be much more likely to hold onto material. I recently heard an interview with singer Don Dokken in which he mentioned that he rents a climate-controlled storage vault in which he keeps all his master tapes, and he said that all his tapes from 1996 onward take up a fraction of the space of the pre-1996 material (obviously when he broke into the business open reel tape was still the media of choice for audiophiles). So if nothing else, it's going to take up a lot less room, although that doesn't solve the problem of what to save of material predating the mid-1990's.
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Post by andrew martin on Nov 9, 2005 17:10:33 GMT
Seems to me though that if any more material was to be wiped in the future sometime, the decision to do so should NOT rest with the BBC (the scenario is a bit like the police investigating a complaint about their conduct themselves!) It's clear that they still have too much power in their hands in this respect (and the BFI are little better either as they only pursue a selective and elitist preservation agenda). No one can say what is / isn't of value now or in the near future. The BBC presumes a lot by taking the decision itself. One thing is sure though - they haven't learned from past mistakes (if they had then it would now be unthinkable to even entertain the possibility of it happening again in future, no matter how small an amount - hasn't enough of the past been lost already?!?). Posterity doesn't come into it (sadly). It's all about potential re-screening value and sales. Our descendents won't thank us for the rag bag of incomplete treasures left to them that are the TV archives. TV Archiving is far too important to be left in the hands of TV archivists. With respect, TV archiving is best left in the hands of TV archivisits because the lessons of the past have been learnt. And if not 'TV archivists' then who? It's like saying librarians aren't fit to look after the British Library. These decisions aren't made in abstract, people are answerable to the Board of Governors ultimately, and there is much discussion within the tv community about archiving policy. Everyone is fully informed about the outlets for archived material, and while those may not be as great at present as we all might like, that's not to say the mistake of assuming there will never be any other outlets in the future will be made again. I'm not saying it's a perfect system, but it's pretty good, all things considered. I've perhaps painted too doom-laden a picture of what might happen in the future - the point I was trying to make is that you really don't need every single episode of a lot of series to know what it was like, to gauge its contribution to the nation's culture. With a lot of daytime tv, frankly, it would be akin to archiving the entire transmissions of the test card. I suspect if a lot of people here were to actually do this for a living they might have a different opinion of what is important - if only that viewing things in the abstract, having the idea that all television is equally valuable (and indeed *all* valuable intrinsically) is an unrealisitic and I would argue, invalid assertion. No-one is about to wipe any more drama, or sitcoms, or any of the other major genres. Minor genres will at least have representative episodes - but as mentioned above, *don't* for heaven's sake imagine that there's any danger of any more wiping of unique transmission tapes now or in any foreseeable future. We do now realise that would be shooting ourselves in the foot, to say the least... There is, incidentally, also the fact that so much material is produced independently these days, and the companies making programmes all keep their own material (ie copies, not the transmission masters). On the point by Grumbledook about archiving formats - for the moment the main transmission medium (ie master tapes, whether used to download to servers, or directly) which are also the archive medium, at the BBC at least, is digibeta - which while much smaller than the old 2" quad tapes are still not insubstantial. There is also the problem of course that more channels mean more programmes, even allowing for the repetition on some digital channels! (And one individual musician's archive of his output is going to be a lot easier to find storage for, regardless of tape size, than a national broadcaster!)
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