Workers' Playtime - found and available to listen to

[Robert Clark (rcgreybeard)]

Just seen this on The Mausoleum Club board:


An early edition of Workers' Playtime was offered to the Radio Times Treasure Hunt soon after the campaign launched, an off-air recording cut to discs. The discs were duly collected, carefully transferred and restored as much as possible, with the show being ingested into the BBC Archive.



It's all well and good preserving it for posterity, but Radio Circle endeavour to get recovered recordings re-broadcast to reach a wider audience. That was unlikely to happen in this case, but there are alternative routes, and the whole show is now available to listen to on the History of the BBC website: canvas-story.bbcrewind.co.uk/playtime/



The show includes an early appearance (probably the first) of Beryl Reid and Stainless Stephen.

[tom rogers]

Just fantastic to have these available. Kudos to all involved! 👍

[richardwoods]

Way back in the mid 80’s I worked for a transformer company in Louth, Lincs as technical support to the MD. The firm was a very eccentric place to work in all sorts of ways I won’t go into here but the boss had a massive collection of Workers Playtime recordings he used to put on mid afternoon as the older ladies working on the production line enjoyed them. Sadly I heard that the boss passed away a few years ago and unsurprisingly the firm folded not long afterwards. Apparently there is a small company operating in one of the old units still connected with the family I believe, & I’m still in contact with one of the guys who works for them. Will drop him a WhatsApp & see if he thinks any of the recordings may still exist.

[richardwoods]

Message sent 🤞

[richardwoods]

Response from my friend doesn’t sound too hopeful.

“Will ask but think most of the stuff got binned”.

[Dan S]

Nice to get to hear the episode rather than have it locked away!

That page says the BBC only have 7 episodes from the 40's, anyone have a list of the dates?
(I know two of them are 1942.10.29 & 1943.02.16)

Looking on tvbrain.info it says that eleven episodes (ranging 1950-63) exist as domestic recordings.

[richardwoods]

Sept 13, 2023 13:50:11 GMT Dan S said:

Nice to get to hear the episode rather than have it locked away!

That page says the BBC only have 7 episodes from the 40's, anyone have a list of the dates?
(I know two of them are 1942.10.29 & 1943.02.16)

Looking on tvbrain.info it says that eleven episodes (ranging 1950-63) exist as domestic recordings.

As far as I can remember there were a lot of episodes in the collection at the factory, let’s hope they haven’t all been junked.

[Dan S]

I just noticed the end credits are from a different episode (1949.09.02) because it says the episode is from Maryport, Cumberland, with Al Shaw, Thea Wells, Max Wall.
genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/service_home_service/1949-09-02#at-12.30

So they got the wrong disc for the end part. I wonder if that means the same source has other episodes?