Blue Peter : Earliest complete surviving edition?

[Paul Cooksley]

Hi there

Just wondered: What is the earliest, complete surviving edition of Blue Peter?

Does anyone know what the earliest surviving clip is? I don't think there is anything from the 50's is there? If memory serves me correctly, isn't the earliest footage from around 1962??

Also: When do Blue Peters from the 60's start getting very common in the archives?

Cheers if you can help !

[Kev Mulrenan]

catalogue.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/

As Dogpile might say, go fetch!

[Paul Cooksley]

So, it mentions on the internet version on Infax here, that the earlist surviving BP material is 12 Nov 1962...

but I can't see what date the earliest complete edition is from? I know (I think!) that the 2nd earliest complete edition is from 07 Oct 1963...... but what's the first?

[Andrew Martin]

The earliest complete edition is actually 29th July 1963. The second complete edition is indeed 7th October 1963.

There is an audition recording from1962 which includes the auditions for Anita West and Valerie Singleton, but was not a transmitted edition.

The material from 12/11/62 is just a film insert about Florence Nightingale, not a complete edition. The next edition there is material for is 17/12/62, a film insert "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks", then next existing material after that is the aforementioned 29/7/63 edition.

It's possible some of the film inserts that exist in later editions were items originally transmitted in other missing editions... the 23/12/63 edition includes a retrospective on Petra's first year which may include material from missing episodes. The original title sequence exists, as part of some 1963 telerecordings and also as a film insert - so technically that is a bit of 50s film (though a 60s copy of it!).

Complete editions start to get common from quite early on, around the middle of 1965 I think - 1967 is the last year where there are any missing editions at all (Chris Trace's last edition, I think).

[Paul Cooksley]

Thanks for that info, Andrew - very interesting.... so bar the untransmitted audition piece you mention, the earliest surviving Blue Peter Studio material is actually from the complete edition from 29 07 63?

I didn't know Blue Peter had a generic title sequence back then? What did it look like?? !!

[johnstewart]

It was a big 'Onedin Line' style ship with many masts, on the sea.

I think the titles appeared at the top but may have been superimposed on the masts?

[Paul Cooksley]

Oh yes, I do recall seein this...didn't realise it was a generic title sequence though...

So, just out of interest, what is the earliest BP to survive on it's original VT rather than a f/r?

[Andrew Martin]

The earliest existing VT Blue Peter is 20/4/64 - not strictly speaking the original VT, the 2" is actually a 405>625 dub made in 1980, this is now with the NFA while the BBC hold D3 copies.

[Deleted]

Which editions of Blue Peter only exist in black and white, which were originally transmitted in colour?

Also, a couple of years ago, an episode from 1980 was restored from a VHS cassette and a telerecording if I remember correctly after the original master tape was accidentally destroyed. What gaps are there in the archives for editions that you would expect to exist (ie late 70s onwards).

[Paul Cooksley]

Yes, I remember watching that edition of BP, where they marred up the colour from an off air tape with that of a 16mm f/r for an edition from Dec 1980 if my memory serves me correctly..

I remember being astonished that black and white f/r's were being made as late as 1980..do any other BP's from around this time exist as just film recordings?

I thought this process had stopped come mid 70's?

[Andrew Martin]

Not many colour Blue Peters only survive in b/w, I can't remember off hand. B/W telerecordings were routinely made at the same time as the colour VT off-air recordings, purely as a back up and viewing copy as far as I can tell rather than for sales purposes, and BP kept doing this until the 1980s. Sales telerecordings did stop around the mid 70s, but other departments sometimes still made telerecordings after this for internal reasons - eg there are b/w copies of Party Political Broadcasts as late as the early 80s... The last BP b/w telerecording that survives (and may have been the last one made) was from 3/6/85, but they have generally been kept despite colour copies existsing - just as well as in the case of the accidentally wiped edition!

[Paul Cooksley]

Thanks for the info, again Andrew...

Perhaps its just me, but I would love to see that BP from 1985 as a tele-recording!!!! - it holds some sort of weird fascination that a programme this late on should have a b&w film print!!!!

[Robert Manners]

Tele-recordings are our hero, so many programs exist because of them were the original VT has been wiped or destroyed.