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Post by Ed Brown on Apr 2, 2023 14:40:32 GMT
The final missing episode of The Navy Lark, The Cornish Exercise, which was recently found by Keith Wickham on a friend's reel, will air on 4 Extra on Sunday 16th April at 9:30am, its first transmission since the original broadcast on 12th January 1962. The crew of HMS Troutbridge are sent on a secret West Country training exercise. Written by Lawrie Wyman. Producer Alastair Scott Johnston. The Navy Lark - s04e18 - The Cornish Exercise : www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001l39b
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Post by Ed Brown on Mar 30, 2023 22:30:50 GMT
I'd like to offer in evidence the fact that, recently, such a machine did turn up, and its owner did indeed have a taped episode of Dr Who. But lo and behold! It turned out to be (sadly) the one surviving episode of The Space Pirates. But nonetheless it was an episode from - predictably - Season 6. You've got a strange notion of "recently", Ed. That was 25 years ago! Well, Richard, bless you for pointing this out. Undeniably true. Cripes, I blinked, and suddenly it's 25 years later! How the hell did that happen??!?
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Post by Ed Brown on Mar 30, 2023 22:28:23 GMT
Technically that's not entirely true, several recordings exist from 1967 from other programs - this topic, of course, isn't exclusively DW at all. The same astronomically small odds apply to season 5 which was shown late 1967. In fact I believe there is a Dick Emery episode from June 1967 and Life with Cooper from March 30 (assuming that these are not repeats); so even season 4 is just as possible as winning the lottery twice in a row (without buying a ticket). Wish I understood how a 1967 broadcast could be recorded with a product that only went on sale in 1968?
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Post by Ed Brown on Mar 30, 2023 2:20:32 GMT
Remember that we’ve just had two HHHs coloured for one of the satellite/cable channels; Yesterday or Gold. We need half that effort for IotD1 and then Peter Crocker or one of his colleagues to blend that with the colour recovered version. I'd like to jump back in, at this point, and mention that those who do the restorations on Dr Who have already had the experience of re-colouring one episode and blending it with a chroma dot recovery. Isn't that exactly what was done with Planet of the Daleks? IIRC, the episode had already been (expensively) recoloured by hand, by a specialist outside contractor, when it was discovered that it was possible to reconstruct the original colour using the embedded chroma dots on the telerecording. And the two sources were then blended together to achieve the final restoration. It may have been the first attempt at restoring an episode to colour, but it was a beautiful job, entirely indistinguishable from the original 2-inch PAL VT.
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Post by Ed Brown on Mar 30, 2023 1:55:36 GMT
Possibly none of you will ever have seen one of these, the Sony CV-2100ACE videotape recorder which went on sale to the public in 1968: www.michaelmauricerepairs.co.uk/mms-blog.shtmlBut here's one still in working order. I'd like to offer a few thoughts on this item. Most important, the date: 1968. People often talk loosely of the chance that Joe Public might be sitting on one of these, together with a tape of a missing episode of Dr Who. But the reality is that the 1960s were almost over before these machines went on sale to the public, and Season 6 - where there are very few missing episodes - is the only season which might have benefited from one of them. I'd like to offer in evidence the fact that, recently, such a machine did turn up, and its owner did indeed have a taped episode of Dr Who. But lo and behold! It turned out to be (sadly) the one surviving episode of The Space Pirates. But nonetheless it was an episode from - predictably - Season 6. The odds having diddled us once already, the sad truth is that the odds are very much against any tape found in the future being one of the small number of Season 6 episodes that currently don't exist. Unfortunate that these machines were not on the market in 1966, when they might have done us some good. No one was selling these in the third world in 1968. They didn't even have Christianity, let alone electricity! At the time, this machine was just about the most expensive piece of consumer electronics ever. Almost no man in the street could afford one, even in Britain. Sony were only selling them in Europe and North America due to the huge price tag.
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Post by Ed Brown on Mar 29, 2023 2:15:24 GMT
Considering that Yesterday, or Gold, could afford to recolour a couple of Hancocks I’d hope that IotD 1 could be done and combined with the Colour Recovery version we have. That's not correct, of course. The television episodes of Hancock's Half Hour were made in the 1950s, long before the introduction of colour by the BBC in 1967. The BBC held telerecordings of the Hancock episodes in b/w, but the episodes had been made and aired in b/w. Unlike Invasion of the Dinosaurs, the episodes had never been in colour. So the Hancock episodes weren't being re-coloured. There were no colour episodes from surviving colour videotapes of other parts of the serial to compare, for reference; probably there were no colour stills photos either, to use for comparison; and no friendly chroma dots lurking on the b/w film negative. Is it wrong to say that the market for the Hancock tv series is greater than for Dr Who? Would BBC Worldwide in fact expect a colour Hancock DVD to outsell a colour Pertwee DVD? You can colour-in two half-hour Hancock episodes much more cheaply than colouring in, say, six Hartnell or Troughton episodes: to colourise a typical Sixties Who serial typically involves doing three times as many episodes as those 2 Hancock's Half Hour episodes. At the most favourable, it involves 4 Who episodes, or in other words double the amount of film that colouring two Hancock episodes involves. Is Dr Who to be a victim of the fact that a tv comedy is complete in itself at only 25 minutes, but a complete Hartnell or Troughton serial typically runs 6 x 25 minutes?
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Post by Ed Brown on Mar 29, 2023 1:45:08 GMT
Considering that Yesterday, or Gold, could afford to recolour a couple of Hancocks I’d hope that IotD 1 could be done and combined with the Colour Recovery version we have. I would like to ask for clarification. Some time ago, it was deemed reasonable to pay for Episode 1 of Mind of Evil to be recoloured manually, as no chroma dot telerecording was available, when the DVD release of the story was being prepared. Why was it considered unreasonable to do the same with Episode 1 of Invasion of the Dinosaurs, an episode which had a head start over Mind of Evil, in that a partially coloured version already existed (thanks to the chroma dot process), whereas only a purely b/w print had been available for colouring Episode 1 of Mind of Evil? What was the over-riding factor that made it economically unviable to restore that single episode of Invasion of the Dinosaurs? In the case of Dinosaurs, the other 5 episodes were already in colour so no expense was involved. On Mind of Evil, all the other 5 episodes were b/w too, and thus all six episodes needed to be colourised. This suggests that the restoration of Mind of Evil cost six times as much, because all 6 episodes needed colour restoration, whereas only one episode of Dinosaurs needed colour restoration. The economics don't seem to make sense. Dinosaurs ought to have cost only one-sixth of what the Mind of Evil restoration cost, even if the one episode of Dinosaurs had to be coloured from scratch (i.e. even if it had been fully b/w, which it wasn't). Obviously I'm missing the point. For BBC Worldwide, it's nearly always about money. Why wasn't it in this case?
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Post by Ed Brown on Mar 29, 2023 0:11:43 GMT
Sadly, not a complete recording. The first minute is missing: the opening titles are completely replaced, from another episode, and rather obviously too.
A partial surviving off-air recording (v poor) indicates that the following half minute of the original broadcast, including a Jewish joke, is also missing.
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Post by Ed Brown on Mar 28, 2023 23:34:30 GMT
I’ve got some off air Burkiss Ways on compact cassette recorded in the early 1980s. I have no way of digitising them. The only one I recall an issue with is a spoof of the Masque of the Red Death which has a jump where something seems to be missing, but that’s how it was broadcast. There is a Burkiss CD release, which I suspect will be more complete. The problem, never clarified at the time, is that Radio 2 had an unhelpful policy of shoving out repeats in the 1980s by broadcasting Transcription Service vinyl edits, instead of airing the complete episode from the original broadcast tape. Likely enough, the 'jump' you noticed is due to a poor quality edit on a vinyl disc, due to the slack practices of the old Transcription Service. I've heard such unprofessional cuts on their vinyl edits of The Navy Lark for instance. I had a running battle with BBC management at the time, over this policy in regard to The Navy Lark, where their Sunday afternoon repeats at 5pm, in the half hour prior to Ch...Cheerful Ch...Charlie Ch...Chester, fluctuated between airing the complete tape some weeks, and in other weeks airing a hissy and cut vinyl edit. The correspondence on this topic got a bit heated at times! I later heard various off-air tapes that indicated they also did this with the 1980s repeats of The Clitheroe Kid.
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Post by Ed Brown on Mar 28, 2023 22:42:10 GMT
This project is complicated by long term cuts and 'bans' which apply back to 2017 and way beyond: Episode 6 - Never broadcast on 7/4 Extra (but this episode was issued on CD with the rest of series 1). There is a mystery as to whether a parody of a Harold MacMillan speech belongs to the episode. Reason for 'ban': They can't be bothered to create a suitable time slot for this episode which is much shorter than all the rest. Episode 28 - A sketch from the original broadcast which suggested that Reginald Bosanquet didn't mind the occasional tipple* was cut for all subsequent repeats. Reason for cut: Team Bosanquet complained. Episode 41 - Never broadcast on 7/4 Extra Reason for 'ban': As the words 'Burkiss Way' and 'Easter Special' suggest, this was a Christmas Special, and as such does not fit in with series runs if, like the BBC, you can't particularly be bothered. Episode 47 - All of many sections lampooning the BBC's grovelling approach to royalty in the original broadcast were cut for all subsequent repeats. The episode continued to be broadcast in its cut form despite being regularly played in full in 'Celebrate the Burkiss Way'. Reason for cut: The BBC's grovelling approach to royalty - followed by not being sufficiently interested in the programme to bother re-instating it. Episode 8 - Not repeated since 2013. Reason for 'ban': As for episode 41, there's a seasonal theme and 4 Extra don't want to schedule it in its natural 'series 2' place if it doesn't coincide with Christmas week, and they are not sufficiently interested to schedule it that week in isolation. * /understatement Thank you for these details, I'm afraid my knowledge of Burkiss is appalling! Great show, but I'd no idea about all these problems. No one in the Burkiss group ever tells me anything!
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Post by Ed Brown on Mar 28, 2023 22:04:13 GMT
I am happy to report that rarest of all events: the finding of a lost radio broadcast! Radio 4 Extra has just aired the final missing episode of The Betty Witherspoon Show, a 1974 comedy sketch series starring Ted Ray and Kenneth Williams. This is the lost 2nd episode, not heard since 27th April 1974. All ten episodes of that show are now held in the BBC Archive. Get it here: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001jt0dBecause I was asleep at the switch, I missed the actual live broadcast 3 weeks ago. So hurry hurry, because this one will only be available on the iPlayer for the next 7 days. You'd think they'd make a big noise over this, but you'd be unlucky -- looking at their website, you'd be hard pressed to tell that this episode has been recently found after being lost for 5 decades, as there is absolutely no mention of the fact that this is a previously lost recording. Watch this space for news of the broadcasting of the final missing episode of The Navy Lark, which it is believed the station will shortly be airing for the first time since 1963!
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Post by Ed Brown on Mar 26, 2023 15:52:53 GMT
Our approach to The Burkiss Way is this - 1. We start from the assumption that the recordings in this source are uncut: archive.org/details/TheBurkissWayThis source gives us on-screen confirmation of the duration of each recording, which we accept as uncut unless proved otherwise (e.g. by one of the other sources). This source is dated July 2017, which pre-dates the latest cuts. This is important, because many online sources lack information as to the date the files were posted online, or just lack any dateable information at all. 2. We compare any available 320 kbps recordings with source #1, to see whether the durations match. 3. We store the best available uncut recording online, so that everyone in the Burkiss preservation group can easily consult the files. These are stored at: archive.org/details/the-burkiss-wayWhat I am enquiring for is whether any member of the Missing Episodes forum has any offline recordings of Burkiss at 320 kbps, from the uncut repeats in 2017-2020, which they'd be willing to share by posting them on a free account at Archive.org ? Additional: Incidentally, Stephen, I'd welcome a url link for the 'Mouse' site (Annonamouse?), so I can check it out. Apparantly, the two pilot shows (from Radio 3) are rated as missing episodes, as BBC Archives don't have them, hence they are never included in the Burkiss repeats. There are some poor off-airs about. Anyone know of decent quality surviving recordings? Likewise, in respect of the missing episode from Series 1 of Burkiss, where in fact I've only ever come across half an episode, even as a poor quality off air. Any complete recording would be glad news, even if dodgy in quality, since at present there seems to be no known surviving recording! This of course is The Burkiss Way series 1 episode 6 (commonly known as Win Awards the Burkiss Way). Only 17 minutes of it is known to survive (so far as I'm aware). Another victim on the list of the missing!
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Post by Ed Brown on Mar 26, 2023 6:14:16 GMT
General Request for Help the Burkiss Way
The problem in accessing early repeats of The Betty Witherspoon Show is only a small part of the problem.
A bigger problem is the difficulty of finding current repeats of any show at 320 kbps. There seem to be plenty of available recordings for recent years, but only at 128 kbps.
I've been asked to try to locate The Burkiss Way in 320 kbps quality, as part of a project to preserve that particular show. Can anyone provide recordings, for any episodes in the show's run, at 320 kbps?
The specific reason for seeking out this particular show is that many editions in the 2022-23 repeats now have cuts. I do not have earlier repeats of this show myself, although someone obviously thought I might have.
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Post by Ed Brown on Mar 25, 2023 0:37:45 GMT
Betty Witherspoon Show
I investigated further, and can definitely confirm that so far as the Betty Witherspoon edition of 15th June 1974 is concerned, because the group investigating cuts only have access to recordings from BBC 7 going back to 2008, the earliest repeat of that edition which they can access is the repeat of 16th September 2012, which was found to be identical to the latest repeat.
If you want the group to act on your report, and compare those repeats against an earlier repeat (e.g. from 2004), you would have to supply a recording of the 2004 repeat.
If you can upload it to a web service, such as a free account at the Internet Archive, please post a link to that recording on this thread. Thank you.
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Post by Ed Brown on Mar 24, 2023 2:47:32 GMT
'Put That Light Out!' was based on an idea by Harold Snoad (who suggested a lighthouse episode) and he even got a credit for it, but according to this, it was directed by David Croft. dadsarmy.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Episodes Ah, but... It's a bit dodgy to rely on a fan-source for this sort of info. I'd want to see a BBC source. But even if David did direct the episode (which isn't certain, as the show doesn't normally include a director's screen credit), because of the special circumstances (he was not only directing most of the episodes, he was also co-writing all of them AND was producing the show) it's unlikely he also had the time to personally edit all of the footage. This could simply be an error by the film editor, under the pressure of time.
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