Potential recoveries on VHS

[Jeremy Williams]

A few weeks ago i bought 6 VHS's from a charity shop, had no idea what was on them, i have checked through most of them now, and they appear to be material recorded between December 1984 and January 1986, i have so far found 3 potential missing things:-

A late night Thames News bulletin from December 1984/5
An LWT news bulletin from around the same time (if it's any help, a programme called "Street Dreams" was shown after, narrated by DLT!)
A BBC 2 closedown from Thursday 27th December 1984.

But that's not all...the place where i got the tapes from do regular house clearances, and just so happens that they are clearing the house of an 80 year old hoarder who recently died, he had nearly 1000 VHS's, so hopefully i'll get 20 tapes to look at next week to see what's on them, if their is anything significant then i shall obtain the rest of the tapes.

Don't get excited just yet though, for all i know these could be modern recordings of stuff, but hoping he was eccentric enough to of been recording when VHS players first came out, i will keep you updated about my finds.

[RWels]

Sounds - well, like you said, no promises but definately interesting. Did he not have any even older formats like N1500 or audio tapes of shows?


Some things on VHS (whether programs or trailers and continuity) might not be missing, but may still be worth keeping because they are hard to come by today. Like, mmm, this one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa57yG_SbE8 (that one was actually missing (so @ staff I hope it's OK to link to a very short clip like that).)

[Patrick Coles]

the term 'Hoarder' seems derogative these days (I'm not saying you meant it that way of course !) but thanks to some of these 'el cheapo' TV shows where 'experts' who (supposedly) know how we SHOULD really live descend on mere lesser souls and clear out their homes & 'put them right' etc...have rather demonised folk who simply enjoy 'collecting' (true some people in extreme cases DO need help) but maybe that 80 year old guy was simply an enthusiast who enjoyed home taping Television back then - like Train enthusiasts who bothered to buy expensive colour film & captured 'lost' history for us to revisit now etc....yes ?

People who bother to take the trouble to preserve a record of past times in general deserve our thanks not to be just seen as 'oddballs' (as these TV shows often paint them - tho' some TV shows DO portray collectors properly of course)

I'm NOT implying the above poster is taking that attitude I stress (quite the opposite) & I wish him the best of luck in his investigation of this deceased VHS collector's library of tapes of a bygone time (- funny to think of the 80's that way, but it nevertheless is now...)

I checked out an old VHS tape of mine a while back...it had the BBC news report on the capsized Herald of Free Enterprise ferry at Zebrugge on the end with colour film footage of the stricken vessel on it's side....

I had totally forgotten ever taping that...!

[Ray Langstone (was saintsray)]

It was only from about 1982 that the BBC started keeping every News programme.
Local news may differ.

I am not sure about ITN, or the ITV companies, although a great deal of SOME ITV companies local news programming is missing from periods up to the 90's. It very much depends on the company.

[Deleted]

The BFI started recording off-air (to broadcast standard) the main news programmes each day in (I think) 1985. So they'll exist from that time on.