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Post by Ed Brown on Apr 15, 2023 17:03:22 GMT
Just to briefly update this thread, the recently rediscovered final missing episode of The Navy Lark will air on 4 Extra tomorrow, Sunday April 16th, at 9:30am. It gets three repeats within the following 24 hours. Then it should be available on iPlayer for the following month: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001l39bThis launches a new run of repeats from The Navy Lark, on Sundays, which looks like being a full set of repeats from Series 9. Begins a week tomorrow, Sunday April 23rd, with series 9 episode 1 from July 1967, the episode known as Have Been Towing.
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Post by Ed Brown on Apr 15, 2023 16:19:44 GMT
There have been editions of ' Lux Presents... Hollywood' aired on 4 Extra. Here are some broadcast quality recordings of American old-time radio on the BBC: archive.org/details/USA-Golden-Age-of-Radio... and here are the original Lux shows from the 1930s and '40s - archive.org/details/Lux01CBS insisted on a host who personified the dignity and prestige of Hollywood, and determined that legendary 54 year old producer-director Cecil B. DeMille was the man, signing DeMille for $2,000 a week, then convincing the film studios to get behind the show. On June 1st 1936, announcer Melville Ruick was first heard to say, “LUX…presents Hollywood!” and the premiere broadcast from the Music Box Theater at Hollywood & Vine was underway, with Clark Gable and Marlene Dietrich in The Legionnaire & The Lady, based on the 1930 film Morocco. Lux followed-up in succeeding weeks with William Powell and Myrna Loy recreating their movie roles as Nick & Nora Charles in The Thin Man, and Burlesque starring Al Jolson and his wife, Ruby Keeler. Ratings increased nearly 30% in the month when radio listenership traditionally declined for the summer, and CBS knew they had a winner. And for film noir fans, here is Ed Bishop as Philip Marlowe, in Raymond Chandler's greatest classics, from The Big Sleep to Farewell My Lovely -- archive.org/details/philip-marlowe
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Post by Ed Brown on Apr 13, 2023 12:06:39 GMT
'Junked' probably means that someone in the Glasgow film unit took home the 16mm b/w film, i.e. the telerecording.
If it turns up, it might yet be restored to colour using Chroma Dot Colour Recovery.
But the search would begin in Glasgow, presumably by getting a Scottish newspaper to run an article about the series, and asking in it if anyone still has the 5 film recording reels. A nice task for any forum member who lives in Glasgow!
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Post by Ed Brown on Apr 13, 2023 12:01:07 GMT
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Post by Ed Brown on Apr 13, 2023 11:52:40 GMT
Agree it could be an editing error. Or it could have been made in Australia. You're implying that the 2-inch quad PAL master tape was sent to Australia. Not as impossible as it sounds! Some Pertwee quad tapes did turn up with ABC Australia stickers all over them, indicating that ABC had received the actual Dr Who master videotapes for transmission. But is there any actual evidence from a BBC source that this is what happened for this Dad's Army episode?
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Post by Ed Brown on Apr 13, 2023 10:09:08 GMT
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Post by Ed Brown on Apr 12, 2023 3:27:52 GMT
I just want to quickly *bump* this thread to the top of the list, to remind anyone who is interested in hearing the previously lost episode, The Cornish Exercise, that it will be aired this coming Sunday, April 16th, at 9.30am on 4 Extra.
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Post by Ed Brown on Apr 9, 2023 5:05:13 GMT
The man who recorded Episode 2 of The Space Pirates owned a CV-2000 (bought in the Summer of 1967), and a CV-2100, plus a Colour Shibaden machine. He probably recorded The Evil of the Daleks 1968 repeat (based on the dates on a Doctor Who reel). The Evil of the Daleks was taped over with a repeat of The Forsyte Saga (unfortunately). He later recorded Jon Pertwee stories. You could buy an NTSC Sony b/w model videocorder tcv-2020 in America in 1965. The unit sold for $1,400 including the CVC-2000 camera. It was, essentially, what we would call a camcorder, and it was intended to replace the super 8 cine camera. But that gives some idea of the price of this type of technology in the 1960s. It also emphasises that this technology was developed in Japan, and used the NTSC tv system, and was sold in Japan and North America, where the broadcasters all used NTSC, so could not be bought by anyone for use in England.
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Post by Ed Brown on Apr 9, 2023 4:38:00 GMT
To enable a Umatic to play into a domestic TV it needed an RF board ...these were an optional (expensive) extra ... Translation: The video-out signal from a U-matic recorder must be processed by an RF board, installed as an optional extra inside the U-matic machine's casing. This is an electronic circuit board, which converts the recorded signal present on the U-matic tape to the RF (radio frequency) range, which is what a consumer model television needs to receive at its input, in order to be able to display a picture. U-matic was first sold, by Sony, in the autumn of 1971. It used a cassette format, with three-quarter inch tape, instead of the open reel system in use with other pro systems. The BBC, for instance, used 2-inch Quad tape on an open reel (two inch quadruplex). U-matic tape had a 1 hour recording capacity. Too expensive for the consumer market, Sony sold U-Matic solely to the tv industry (for Electronic News Gathering, or ENG, uses mainly), to businesses, and to educational markets (schools, colleges).
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Post by Ed Brown on Apr 9, 2023 4:04:21 GMT
The last broadcasts of the missing episodes were in the mid 70s, in Nigeria and Zambia. (Last one being The Space Pirates in 1976). At this time, videotape was first becoming available. Is it possible that these episodes exist on domestic video tape recorded at the time? with any luck we'll have the space pirates completed to have season 6 as the most complete season In 1976, the very first VHS video recorder went on sale in England. For the first time, a colour recorder -- all the 1960s models were only able to record in b/w. They were VERY expensive machines. And the tapes were each VERY expensive. But, for the first time, they could record in reasonable picture definition (unlike the 1960s models), and for the first time they were more or less within the reach of many middle class tv viewers in Britain, due to the introduction of Hire Purchase. Because of their high cost, these machines were only marketed in Europe and North America. IIRC they weren't even available in Oz in 1976. No way were any of the Japanese manufacturers selling these in other countries ( translation: these machines were not available in the third world). Even if you could obtain a machine, how could you buy the necessary tapes in your local high street, in the middle of Africa?
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Post by Ed Brown on Apr 9, 2023 3:20:44 GMT
In that case, it will interest you to know that all three of these broadcasts exist online. The Internet Archive automatically records the entire output of 4 Extra, and has been doing so since 2016: archive.org/details/Radio-BBC-Radio-4-Extra?tab=collectionThere's a search box on that page which can be used to find individual broadcasts by title. Here are some details on the 4 Extra website about these 3 editions - www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b51znm/episodes/guide[2021-03-02] Be My Guest - 1977-10-09 - Alfred Marks www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000sr7nvf_m000sr7m_1fc84ba2-0c3b-4b4b-9c53-8e84c65afc06.ism Alfred Marks: Alfred Marks says 'Be My Guest', and invites you to join him in recalling his early visits to London's Variety Theatres and Musical Shows; memories of wartime films; and records he likes to share with his family. Producer Phyllis Robinson. First broadcast on Radio 2, in 1977. Unfortunately, IMHO this is not a goldmine, I vividly recall listening to this broadcast by Alfred Marks, and found it dreadfully dull. There was, IMHO, too much music and too little of Alfred. Also, he only tells a few anecdotes. So this is not an in-depth look at his career either. On the positive side, Be My Guest ran to 450 editions, so must have been popular. So they can't all have been as dull as this one!
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Post by Ed Brown on Apr 9, 2023 3:03:14 GMT
It is not certain that McCartney has any legal copyright in the USA. As a resident of the UK, if he published a song in the UK, without simultaneously also jumping through all the correct hoops in the USA, his song might only have copyright protection in the UK, i.e. in the country of first publication. American copyright law is very complex, partically for non-resident foreigners, especially in the decades prior to the USA finally agreeing to adopt the Berne Copyright Convention rules, which only occured in the late 1970s. There used to be many onerous legal requirements, in the 1960s, including registration of the work with the American copyright office; and you had to publish the work simultaneously in the USA, when you first published it in the UK; and you had to renew that registration periodically thereafter. There were many pitfalls, it was never a formality. Each individual song or vinyl record would have to be considered individually, they cannot be dealt with collectively. The American copyright might exist, but, unlike English copyright, it is not just a matter of publishing the song. Even an English composer, resident in England, can end up with no enforceable UK copyright, if - for example - he publishes a song abroad, without simultaneously publishing it in the UK. There is much more to be considered than the date when the song was composed, and whether the composer died more than 70 years ago. Especially under the torturous American copyright laws. Mark Ayres was meaning the copyright in the words and music not the recordings. And, indeed, all the contents of my post, which you quoted in full, relate solely to the copyright in the words and music, and do not even mention the completely separate issue of broadcast copyright. Further, McCartney has no broadcast copyright, as that belongs to the BBC (i.e. it exclusively belongs to the broadcaster).
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Post by Ed Brown on Apr 9, 2023 2:58:56 GMT
Well, the article you cite is mostly talking rubbish. The radio broadcasts mentioned are not all inaccessible, as many of them have not vanished down some mythical digital black hole. The Pychedelic Spy is on Archive.org, archive.org/details/PsychSpyR4, and in fact is presented there in a couple of places: archive.org/details/ThePsychedelicSpy1Of5I, for one, still have a recording of the 1978 panto, ' Black Cinderella Two Goes East', because it's freely available online. Currently, it's even on YouTube The Mary Whitehouse Experience has been on Archive.org since 2017: archive.org/details/SafetyCatchR4Five minutes work with Google would have told him this. YouTube and Archive.org are obvious places to look for all of this sort of radio material. It seems to me that the author of the article cited was just having a pointless whinge, merely because these programmes are not being sold on CD in WH Smith or Waterstones.
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Post by Ed Brown on Apr 3, 2023 21:13:26 GMT
I belong to some old-time radio groups, which preserve both British and American radio shows. Audio processing by computer software has taken some big strides in recent years.
A record industry engineer has been developing the means to process some pretty duff audio recordings from the 1960s of pop music tracks recorded by well known pop groups, but after the processing these tracks no longer sound duff. Amazing things can now be done to improve the sound quality of an audio track.
In the fullness of time, this type of audio enhancement technology will filter down to our level. The Space Pirates soundtrack could be made to sound a good deal better, just by audio filtering and enhancement of the existing recordings.
But, it is not correct to say we can't now hear the original tv soundtrack. Not on the DVD that accidentally had the wrong sound track. But there is a decent quality Australian tape recording from a tv repeat in Oz, a well known recording, that obviously has the complete soundtrack with the sound effects.
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Post by Ed Brown on Apr 3, 2023 9:10:39 GMT
The chroma dot colour recovery software has been worked on quite extensively, since it was used to restore say the Dad's Army episode, Room at the Bottom, in 2008. The restoration of that film recording, and the b/w film for the Are You Being Served pilot episode, another David Croft production, would be much improved if re-done now, with the latest software version, 15 years later.
Software is improving all the time, at one point - back in the 1990s - we would have been laughed at if we had suggested thst an episode could be restored to colour without finding a 2-inch PAL colour videotape overseas.
In a few years time, it will probably be possible to restore Invasion of the Dinosaurs fully, using just the existing telerecording, by deriving the missing blue signal from an analysis of the surviving red and green, if an algorithm is developed which can 'guess' the missing blue level by understanding that there are only a few limited combinations of R, G and B that can result in a photo naturalistic combination for them.
This is a job for the new Artificial Intelligence programs, which are already in advanced development.
You might like to keep an eye out for the latest advances in computer processing of audio, too. It is already possible to take a piece of text and process it to sound like a certain American actor, whose voice was damaged, just by inputting a short section of audio of his voice before it was damaged.
Fraser Hines currently re-creates Patrick Troughton's voice for Big Finish episodes. Shortly, an expensive piece of computer software will be able to replace Fraser, and re-create Pat's voice, just by taking an audio section from any surviving Dr Who soundtrack.
We have come a long way since 1993's Dimensions in Time, when Pat was re-created, if you can call it that, as a floating disembodied head.
Tim Treolar and Fraser might find their undoubted talents redundant, if Big Finish can afford the cost of the new software. But that cost will be coming down fast.
Very soon, it's only going to be a question of money, of can the BBC afford the available software. It will no longer be impossible to do these things, merely expensive. One day it might become economically viable to do this for Dr Who bluray releases, or for whatever follows bluray. It'll just be a matter of money. When isn't it?
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