Clitheroe Kid - recovered episodes and website

[Stephen Byers]

There was great excitement on Wiped News at the recovery of over 100 'lost' episodes of the Kid.

wipednews.com/missing-episodes-list/the-clitheroe-kid-radio-series/the-clitheroe-kid-bbc-radio-series-recovered-episodes/

Now all has gone quiet.

Sadly Stephen Poppitt's website at www.theclitheroekid.org.uk/ appears to have gone.

Archive.org gives for the last capture on July 8 2015 as

"Web hosting expired/disabled

The web hosting package for this domain has expired or been disabled."

Since then though it appears that www.jimmyclitheroe.co.uk/ has been taken over by a radio streaming service of dubious origins.

Luckily Mar 31 2015 seems to give a copy of the real Jimmy Clitheroe website - thank God for Archive.org ....

web.archive.org/web/20150331183849/http://www.theclitheroekid.org.uk/

But what has happened to the two researchers - Stephen Poppitt and Derek Boyes - finders and keepers of the vast collection of recovered recordings?

All appear to have disappeared into the ether.

[Stephen Byers]

Sadly the Wordpress blog site about Jimmy Clitheroe has also gone from

thecoalhole.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/the-man-who-never-grew-up-jimmy-clitheroe/

[Alan Turrell]

Loads of Clitheroe kid shows here Stephen.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC6fs7dyZyo

[Stephen Byers]

Yeah - but it was the biographical history that was on the website too that was interesting. Luckily someone is going to webwhack the latest relevant version of the website on the Wayback Machine (Archive.org).

There are episodes of the Kid all over the web on OTR sites, Archive.org, YouTube (as you say), etc. However they are just repeating all the same ones - many poor recordings. What we need is interest from the Beeb / Network / Kaleidoscope to release the rare newly discovered episodes.

And its about time the Beeb aka Radio 4 Extra started to rebroadcast the few episodes that it does have.

[Ed Brown]

I can report that Stephen Poppitt's website about Jimmy Clitheroe has not disappeared, but simply moved (due, I'm told, to a problem with the previous hosting company), and can be found at -

myweb.tiscali.co.uk/bridip/clitheroe/

Additionally, a collection of Jimmy Clitheroe related recordings, including some recent BBC broadcasts of editions from 1959, has surfaced at -

www.mediafire.com/?kwahhoo42apwc

And two hundred Jimmy Clitheroe recordings are on YouTube, in the name of user Dermot A Maher, at -

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgqlYvQ8158&list=PLu3s2MPj6MskjcGdWB0ghe6-xaF09ZyWm

For YouTube, I recommend this add-on extension for Firefox (You Tube Video and Audio Downloader 0.5.5) -

addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-video-and-audio-dow/?src=api

[Ed Brown]

TalkTalk's web hosting has now closed, and all the hosted sites have had to move.

The Jimmy Clitheroe website is one which I've noticed has recently moved, in consequence of TalkTalk's closure, and the new address is -

ClitheroeKid.ihostfull.com

The BBC are continuing to air newly discovered episodes from Transcription Services discs, rumoured to be originating from the archives of BBC Enterprises overseas sales operation in Bristol. The latest new episode, last heard in 1960, airs today on Radio 4 Extra.

The Jimmy Clitheroe website carries an interesting report on these recoveries on its news page at clitheroekid.ihostfull.com/news.htm

[freddyv]

Stephen's new hosting site is clitheroekid.ihostfull.com/ as of late July 2018.
All the familiar details are there and if you have any stuff you feel can help the herculean task of cataloguing Jimmy's career there is an email link there to:[e-mail]

[Ed Brown]

At that News page link mentioned in my last post, above, the Jimmy Clitheroe site is reporting that 229 episodes of the show are believed to survive, including 175 held by the BBC (some tapes, plus rather more as TS disc edits), alongside 54 off air recordings. The inside source credited for the BBC details is Keith Wickham.

This indicates 61 missing episodes (of the 290 originally aired half-hours).

Re-reading that 'Wiped' article (I kept a copy of the original as reference), reading it a bit more carefully, and reading between the lines, I'm not convinced, now, that it ever claimed anything other than that 100 recordings had been obtained. It seems very careful to avoid saying how many of those, if any, were missing episodes. I suspect that very few were -- that most were better quality than what had been known before, but not actually missing.