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Post by Ed Brown on Jun 13, 2022 17:01:51 GMT
Having had personal experience of approaching the BBC Sound Archive and offering a professional disc recording from the 1940s, and having it turned down, I began to scratch around for other solutions. I am definitely of the opinion that if you have a recording that you believe ought to be preserved for posterity, the best thing you can do is to upload it yourself to the Internet Archive at archive.org as this is a free solution, and makes the recording available to the public. In both cases, all you need to do is create a free account on the website concerned, and upload the recording to your account. A quick and painless solution. There is, after all, plenty of free or cheap software online that can be used to create a WAV file from any audio source that you care to plug into your computer. Both of those sites make the recordings uploaded available to the public automatically, via the usual search engines such as Google, unless you specify otherwise. So the uploaded audio files are automatically shared. This avoids the frustration of donating a recording to an organisation that behaves like a black hole, i.e. you donate material and it is never seen again. I would consider also the following possibilities. The British Library in London has a department dedicated to preserving sound recordings. It is a black hole, because material goes in, gets catalogued, but can almost never be accessed by the public. However, if you have a physical item that you want to preserve, such as an old or fragile disc recording, it is worth considering. But, one snag is that they are very picky, and might reject the recording. They don't accept everything offered. But you can leave a collection to them in your Will, as a specific gift; they seem much more disposed to accept something which can be catalogued as your entire collection -- regardless of whether it's complete: in the sense that it doesn't matter if you don't have all the radio episodes, as long as you're giving them everything you've got. Another option is the Public Record Office. They do accept sound recordings, in some circumstances. For example, the PRO in Liverpool might well accept a collection of recordings featuring Arthur Askey or Tommy Handley, radio comedians who come from Liverpool or have a strong local connection to the city. Each County usually has its own Public Record Office. For instance, I have actually dealt with a couple in Lancashire, where there's also a PRO in Preston as well as Liverpool, and if you have a comedian with a genuine connection to Lancashire they are usually interested. It's a bit of a Black Hole, the Public Record Office, but for physical items such as shellac or vinyl discs, or tape reels, which need careful storage, this is a solution worth considering. Again, it's common to make the donation in your Will, but there's no rule that you have to wait that long. I'd also like to mention some Audio Heritage Preservation organisations. Not that I know a great deal about these organisations, but they generally seem to fall off the radar entirely, so I'm keen to at least mention them. You might not even have heard of them. There are three main ones - IASA : The International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives ARSC : The Association for Recorded Sound Collections BISA : British and Irish Sound Archives, at www.bisa-web.orgTheir policy on accessions seem to vary between them, as do the types of recording in which each has an interest. They all have differing interests, really. But you can at least access their websites and learn something about them. Certainly can't hurt for me to make their existence a bit more widely known. There is also The Radio Circle at www.radiocircle.org.uk (E -mail: contact@radiocircle.org.uk), mentioned above on this thread. Again, their website is worth reading. The advantage, of course, is that they are actually enthusiasts for radio, so are very approachable on the subject of radio recordings. And very knowledgeable.
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Post by Ed Brown on Jun 13, 2022 14:13:48 GMT
The BBC maintained cordial relations with the communists. A quite famous tv show made in East Germany was popular on the BBC in the Sixties, a TV series bought from East Germany and complete with a Communist princess and the world's weirdest fish, that ended up terrifying and obsessing a generation of British children
Devotees of 'The Singing Ringing Tree' tried to come to terms with one of the great traumas of postwar childhood. The BBC saw fit to import a terrifying Communist fairy tale, and the East Germans struggled to work out how a superbly arrogant princess and lots of strange magical animals could promote world revolution!
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Post by Ed Brown on Jun 13, 2022 13:45:07 GMT
My father served with the RAF in West Berlin in the 1970s, and I lived in the city between 1972 and 1974.
At that time, there was no British Forces television service. The only English language tv service was the American Forces network. In order to receive the American service, we had to pass our portable b/w tv to the Americans, so that it could be adjusted to receive an NTSC 525-line signal.
My recollection is that the German civilian tv stations didn't use the NTSC format, so West German civilians in the city could not receive the Armed Forces network on their Japanese or Philips television sets.
It was common knowledge that the East Germans tuned in to the German language stations broadcast in West Berlin and West Germany. It was quite a laugh -- when I was in East Germany, as a tourist, I actually saw that all the houses had their tv aerials pointed west, to pick up the high power West German channels! When I was there, at least, the communists didn't routinely jam the West German stations.
So it was perfectly normal for a tv viewer in East Berlin to watch a West German channel, broadcast either from West Berlin or West Germany.
The Armed Forces network only aired American shows. We had a great time watching MASH, and re-runs of Lost In Space, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. But there were no British shows on the network, so no re-runs of Dr Who, sadly. It was great though -- they showed The Flintstones, The Beverly Hillbillies, Mannix, loads of popular American tv shows. Sadly, not Star Trek. We saw MASH years before it aired in England. The American Forces network got shows the same season they aired in America.
The RAF ran a cinema, at Naafi-platz (officially Theodore Heuss Platz), in the city, which showed 1960s films (in 1972-74), and I remember 'Thunderbirds Are Go' during Saturday morning pictures, and there were classic American movies: I recall 'Gone With the Wind', but also the then-recent musical 'Paint Your Wagon'.
I don't recall the Germans being banned -- the cinema was next to the Naafi, on a public street in the centre of the city, not on one of the military bases. You had to pay in English money at the box office I think, but I can't believe any fuss would have been made if a German kid wanted to watch a film, although it only showed films in English. A lot of West Berliners spoke English, of course, because the Brits and the Americans had been defending the city for a long time by 1972.
I never saw a Dalek film in Berlin, at that cinema, nor on tv -- the American network only showed American films, to my recollection.
Dad became a huge fan of American football, because the American forces personnel were mad-keen on sports, and so sports programmes were a big draw on the tv. As far as I recall, the Americans only broadcast a single channel. Because we had a British tv set, a small portable set with a set-top aerial, we could also get German stations on the PAL-band; the technicians had added extra circuitry to allow us to also pick up the NTSC signal, they hadn't removed the PAL circuitry, so we could watch the local West German channels, but it was a dead loss because they were in German!
That's why I'm sure the Germans were using PAL, because our PAL set could still get them on the unmodified band -- the set had a VHF/UHF switch, and the Americans modified one band, the one they used, but not the other. The German stations were, I think, on the UHF band, and the Armed Forces network was on the VHF band. Remember, it was only a b/w service, just like the English 405-line b/w service, which also used VHF.
The American tv service didn't transmit "to the American zone". West Berlin was a small place, and anything broadcast within the city limits could be picked up anywhere in the city. We lived in the British sector, but tv reception was good, even tho' the transmitter was in the American sector, i.e. on the far side of the city. Actually, as best I can remember the transmitter was kind of centrally sited, so that the RAF personnel could get a decent signal; the Americans were nice people, perfectly happy to have the British tune in to their network.
For radio, we could easily pick up the Cologne transmitter in West Germany, where the BFBS radio station was located, so British BFBS were providing the whole city, plus all of Western Germany, with a radio service in English, news and entertainment: Dad's Army, The Clitheroe Kid, Steptoe and Son, are some shows I remember, plus a news service. Lots of BBC radio was aired, all from Transcription discs. So the Americans got a cod-BBC radio station for their troops, both in the city and across West Germany.
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Post by Ed Brown on Dec 12, 2021 3:46:40 GMT
As you'll recall, when the BBC was running experimental stereo tests, in the Sixties, prior to converting their VHF transmitters for stereo radio, they did some test broadcasts in which one radio channel was transmitted on BBC1 and the other radio channel was transmitted on one of their AM radio stations.
Listeners were instructed - I think by an article in Radio Times - as to how to put the TV set in one corner of the room, tuned to BBC1, and a portable radio set in another corner, tuned to Radio 2 I think it was.
In those days, the Television Service was only on-air for a handful of hours in the daytime, and the only programmes during the hours of daylight were at lunchtime, so there was plenty of space in the telly schedules for the occasional one hour experimental stereo broadcast.
I can hardly believe that any of us are likely to say, "I'm too young to remember it".
It wasn't just overseas that two-channel broadcasting was in occasional use.
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Post by Ed Brown on Dec 11, 2021 23:16:36 GMT
I've updated the list of radio episodes currently banned or censored by the BBC, at the top of this thread.
The original list I was given, dated 8th August 2021, contained 38 items. The latest list now contains 48 items. The list is updated as at 21st November.
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Post by Ed Brown on Oct 21, 2021 23:53:34 GMT
The elephant in the room: or, the what-no-one-ever-tells-you department.
If a broadcast signal from a BBC transmitter could be received in deep space, the signal would not necessarily be understood.
Let's imagine a little green man living at Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to us. If he detects a BBC signal, can he recognise it? In the 1960s, when pulsars were discovered astronomers detected them - and thought that they represented intelligent life - because they were, or were thought to be, obviously artificial.
A pulsar emits a very regular pulse of radio waves, i.e. it emits a very consistent number of pulses a second. The astronomers equated the fact that the pulses were regular, not random, with intelligence. It was only because the signal was regular that they found it, or paid any attention to it.
A tv broadcast is not a regular signal. It might superficially seem to be, because it runs at 25 frames a second, but the actual signal content is not the same from moment to moment. We use modulation of the signal to carry information, but that very modulation is what Pulars lack. So would a tv signal be recognised as indicating intelligence? We already know that a pulse emitted 25 times a second can be sent by a Pulsar, which is a completely natural phenomenon.
Further, could a little green man decode the signal? In fact, you need to know quite a lot about the assumptions made by Marconi/EMI in 1936, when they invented the 405-line VHF system, in order to decode it. The signal seems to be 25 frames a second, but is actually 50 fields a second, interlaced.
Supposing E.T. knows what a second is, if he wants to decode the signal he will have to receive it on a 50 Hz frequency, and then interlace it in pairs of adjacent fields. But does he know how many scanning lines per field are being used? If I know that it's a 405-line signal, I probably couldn't decode it properly, because in practice not all 405 lines were used for the picture!
To hear the sound, E.T. will have to detect also the audio sub-carrier frequency. For a BBC2 transmission, or a post-1969 transmission, he also has to detect a 3rd signal, which is the colour sub-carrier.
To understand the sound, he has to take a quick course in English at the University of Alpha Centauri. Perhaps that is the trickiest step of all?
What-they-never-tell-you, part 2:
Did they remember to tell you that the world spins?
Sadly, that means that the BBC also spins. A UK transmitter is only above the horizon, viewed from a fixed point in space, such as Alpha Centauri, for half the time. Although a Pulsar emits its signal continuously, a BBC transmitter can't, because the BBC invented a concept called 'closedown'. In the 1960s, it only transmitted during limited hours. And as the world turned, too, for half of the time the BBC was out of sight from Alpha Centauri.
Actually, it was always out of sight. You'll have noticed that when you look up into the sky at night, in England, you don't tend to see Alpha Centauri! It's a star that's only visible from the Southern Hemisphere. So E.T. was actually receiving repeats on the ABC in Oz, because he never can see Britain from Alpha Centauri. That's another snag of watching tv in space!
And finally, Cyril...
And finally Esther: You probably don't need to be told that A.Centuri is a star about 4 light years away. That's great for watching tv programmes which aired in 2017, not so great for watching Dr Who in 1964. For that, you'd need to be about 14 times further away.
The inverse square law is a bit of a snag at 4 light years: it drives signal strength way, way down. At 57 light years, you'd need a miracle to detect a signal against a background of random galactic static.
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Post by Ed Brown on Oct 21, 2021 23:04:21 GMT
However - a big 'but' is coming! - unless the master negative survived, the accompanying seperate magnetic sound reel would usually not survive. So in practical terms this is not really a help.
In those cases where there is a surviving master negative, the sep mag often survives with it; but those are the cases in which it doesn't matter whether a print also survives, because it's redundant if the negative exists.
Where only a film print survives, it has an optical soundtrack printed on it, so it isn't accompanied by the sep mag reel.
Typically, the negative and the sep mag were junked together. I'm not sure that there are any cases on 'Dr Who' of an "orphaned" sep mag surviving, which is why Graham Strong's off air recordings are so important.
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Post by Ed Brown on Oct 21, 2021 22:46:52 GMT
I admit the truth of the thread, that no moving images survive from these three serials. Of course, I recently saw an interview with Edward De Souza, who starred in 'Mission to the Unknown', who recommended the following link, courtesy of the University of Central Lancashire: www.youtube.com/watch?v=NW8yk-m5Ig8
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Post by Ed Brown on Oct 21, 2021 22:33:25 GMT
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Post by Ed Brown on Oct 21, 2021 22:30:18 GMT
The PG rating is probably because some of the humour in the show is sexual innuendo. Pretty mild, especially by today's standards; and comparable to what you'd find in a 'Carry On' film.
Certainly doesn't justify a PG rating, but we live in strange times. One current tv channel now rates every programme 'PG', except those it rates as '15' or '18' -- no names, no pack drill, but anyone who is familiar with 'Talking Pictures TV' can probably guess which channel I'm referring to!
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Post by Ed Brown on Oct 21, 2021 22:19:29 GMT
As best I recall, in the early 1990s the BBC released a VHS tape called 'The Cybermen: The Early Years', which had one episode sourced from a particularly poor film print. IIRC it was an episode from 'Wheel in Space'.
I always suspected that it originated from a duplicate negative, because the picture quality was so poor. The contrast was extremely bad, and it looked shocking on even a small tv screen. The quality difference from the other two episodes on the tape was very noticable.
So far as I'm aware, it's the only known occasion when an official release used what was, at the time, pretty widely assumed to be a recording that had survived through the making of a dupe negative.
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Post by Ed Brown on Oct 21, 2021 21:58:30 GMT
JNT was a personal friend of the actor Alan Stratford Johns, who was the principal guest star on 'Four To Doomsday'. It was a bit dull, but IMHO 'Kinda' and 'Warriors of the Deep' are much worse.
'Time Flight' is a fairly strong storyline, benefiting also from the acting of Capt Stapley. And benefiting from the presence of Tony Ainley. Many later Tom Baker serials have so little plot in the 2nd and 3rd episodes that they might as well have been 2-parters -- I'm thinking of 'Invisible Enemy', 'Sunmakers', 'Power of Kroll' - so it's a bit hard on 'Time Flight' to knock it for having a weak final ep!
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Post by Ed Brown on Aug 9, 2021 4:37:34 GMT
Are you not allowed to read poems on the radio? As I understand English copyright law, a poem is treated the same way as a novel. The author has sole ownership, and is the only person who can publish copies of it. If he wants, the author - it is his estate in this case, as he is deceased, but it makes no difference - can licence someone else to publish a copy. In this case, broadcasting a reading of the item would constitute 'publishing' it, i.e. making a copy available to the public. The estate did not authorise the inclusion of the poem in the LFMGCF broadcast. In actual fact, there is an exemption if you only quote a small part of the work. I understand this to be five percent of the text. Anyone can publish part of the work, if the part doesn't amount to more than 5 percent of the full text. Because the item in LFMGCF appears on the face of it to be less than 5 percent of the whole, there seems to be no breach of copyright; but the BBC doesn't care to argue the point... for reasons that are unlikely to become clear again at the moment. So, in law, I commit no breach of copyright in the previous sentence, because although I've quoted a bit of "The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy", the bit I quoted is less than 5 percent of the novel.
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Post by Ed Brown on Aug 9, 2021 3:39:54 GMT
We've now had two enthusiastic reel-to-reel fans on this thread, who each reported personal injury due to handling reel to reel equipment, in one case it was thru cleaning (or just handling) the printed circuit board which had chemical residue on it, and in the other it was from handling reels which had decayed to a sticky-shed state (i.e. vinegar smell) that was releasing acids.
If it helps, I'd just like to mention my own experience. I've always tried to make it a point to wear gloves when cleaning the equipment. Ordinary gardening gloves will protect against any broken glass or jagged surfaces due to a small component explosion, and I imagine will also protect against exposure to chemicals released by an exploded or leaking capacitor or valve, or chemicals released by a decaying tape.
Really, so long as the equipment is inside its case, and the case is closed, ordinary use of a reel to reel machine is not hazardous. And only newly arrived tapes are likely to be in a sticky condition -- I could smell the vinegar on my own tapes, fairly easily, before picking them off a shelf. If any arrive by post, a careful sniff before opening the box should detect any tell tale scent.
I have occasionally succumbed to the need to open the side panels on the machine, because after a few minutes the heat build up inside it can be a problem, and it's best to wear gloves then.
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Post by Ed Brown on Aug 9, 2021 3:00:07 GMT
Cura started in 1947 and ended in 1969 and continually advertised from the mid-1960s on that he'd taken over 250,000 off them - so he obviously wasn't just doing Doctor Who. He did loads from numerous BBC programmes - Z-Cars, Out of the Unknown, R3, Softly Softly, Dixon of Dock Green, Francis Durbrige Presents..., The Money Man etc. Do BBC archives hold any copies of the non-Who telesnaps? My impression from my own brief investigation of the ABC/Thames material held by Canal Plus taught me how very little material of any sort was held by them from the ABC years. It's a sad fact that Canal hold so few of the b/w episodes of 'Callan' and 'Public Eye' - two of the more popular ABC shows - and almost nothing in the way of non-film material, such as production files. Without a surviving production file, chances are slim of things such as telesnaps still existing. It struck me that the BBC's main advantage, in terms of production file survival, is simply that the BBC still exists. Whereas ABC hasn't existed since 1968. And even Thames, as its successor, hasn't been an ITV franchise holder in many years. Everyone involved with archive tv is focused on film or VT recoveries, and no one ever seems interested in the production documents, the sort of stuff that 'Dr Who' researchers and episode reconstructors take for granted because they only have to deal with the BBC.
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