1960's VTR machines

[Bobby Clark (synthpopalooza)]

HI ...

I'm new to the forum, but have been very interested in the missing episodes saga of Doctor Who and indeed other television ...

I was curious about something. I saw a movie about the life and death of Bob Crane, the fellow who played the title character in the American TV series "Hogan's Heroes" ... his best buddy back in the 60's bought him a Video Tape Recorder (VTR) to hook up to his TV ...

My question is, how widespread were VTR's and video tape machines back in the 60's and early 70's in the UK, and is there anyway to track down people who might own these, and who might have taped the original Doctor Who (or other missing episode) broadcasts? Perhaps a VTR collector's club or some such?

Just an idea, but I was wondering if anybody had tried tracking down leads such as this before.

[Rob Moss]

Not very widespread, but's it's possible.

Vaguely!

And yes, they have, but if you know anyone who had a machine, it's always worth asking.

[LanceM]

As I recall there was one redundant recovery of Space Pirates episode 2 on a home recorded VTR tape. Redundant since the BBC posess a beautiful 35mm copy of the episode. But sheds light on the possibility if one person was recording troughtons on his VTR machine, then it is unlikely, but possible that someone else had copied other stories from the era on home VTR tapes. Were Shibaden Tape Recorders very widespread in the 1960's as a method of home broadcast recordings ? I was just wondering.

Lance.

[Richard Bignell]

synthpopalooza said:

My question is, how widespread were VTR's and video tape machines back in the 60's and early 70's in the UK.

They were very *very* uncommon! The simple reason was cost.

Back in 1965, a Philips reel-to-reel video recorder would have set you back around £1000. Five years later in 1970, the average UK wage was around £1600, so such a machine would set a person back the best part of a year's earnings. Additionally, the tapes only lasted around 45-60 minutes and were also relatively expensive, so for those people who did have such a machine, the tapes would simply have been used over and over again.

Richard

[Bobby Clark (synthpopalooza)]

Thanks for the info. I've actually found a host of links that might prove useful:

www.totalrewind.org/infodesk/I_links_frame.htm
www.oldtechnology.net
www.labguysworld.com/VTR_Links.htm
www.batc.org.uk
www.lionlmb.org/quad/quadlink.html


Some of these sites have links to private collectors ... maybe one of these people might have recorded some missing TV programmes, as some of these fellows live in the UK or places where Doctor Who may have been shown. Anyway, I hope these links prove useful ...

[Deleted]

richardbignell said:

synthpopalooza said:

My question is, how widespread were VTR's and video tape machines back in the 60's and early 70's in the UK.

They were very *very* uncommon! The simple reason was cost.

Back in 1965, a Philips reel-to-reel video recorder would have set you back around £1000. Five years later in 1970, the average UK wage was around £1600, so such a machine would set a person back the best part of a year's earnings. Additionally, the tapes only lasted around 45-60 minutes and were also relatively expensive, so for those people who did have such a machine, the tapes would simply have been used over and over again.

Richard

This is all true but - despite the cost etc - a fair few machines seem to have been out there and recordings from them do surface from time to time. Even the Space Pirates 2 off-air recording (that someone mentioned above) wasn't known about until the relatively recent past (even though it was found to be pretty unplayable, if I recall rightly), or the fact of it being recorded on a home-made format. Pleasant surprises like this do occur.

For some of the people that had VCRs way back, they must have been regarded as a new and expensive toy, to be discarded when the novelty wore off. But it's just as likely that the machines and tapes were hoarded and thrown into a shed, cupboard or loft and forgotten about as being of little consequence, just as much as it's likely that they were thrown out. So we just don't know exactly what else is waiting to be discovered, which has to be encouraging news!

[Greg H]

frankly, considering the status of dr who as a national favorite in the 60s I find it to be very very likely that some of this would have been recorded by some one somewhere, I would bring up the home audio recordings as an example of its popularity.
The problem being of course that its wholly likely that such home recordings would have degenerated into mush by now, or even been thrown away. And then of course theres the needle in a haystack factor of actually finding people who owned such a recorder.

All this said though this does definitely provide another decent avenue for research, may it yield fruit!!! I suppose time really is of the essence on this one. Why the BBC cant put a short advert on after eastenders appealing for lost material I do not know. That would probably get the ball rolling I reckon.

[Deleted]

It wouldn't do any harm, would it? When I was talking about domestic recordings of missing material possibly existing from the '60s in my other posting though, I was referring to TV generally and not just DW. Just wanted to clarify.

[Richard Bignell]

gh said:

frankly, considering the status of dr who as a national favorite in the 60s I find it to be very very likely that some of this would have been recorded by some one somewhere, I would bring up the home audio recordings as an example of its popularity.

As we know it was. For instance, we know that The Ice Warriors was recorded on just such a format - but then wiped again on a weekly basis. And that's really the major problem about anything continuing to exist in this format. The audio recordings are a slightly different kettle of fish as recording at the slowest possible speed, Graham Strong was able to tape 32 episodes on a single seven-inch reel costing £3.17s.6d, so it was viable to keep them. On the other hand, reel-to-reel video tape only lasted between 45-60 minutes, so they got reused over and over again rather than building up any sort of permenant collection. It's the reason why the gentleman who had kept The Space Pirates #2 decided to use any old magnetic tape he could get his hands on and then cut it down to size using his home-made tape splitter - hence no recoverable image.

The problem being of course that its wholly likely that such home recordings would have degenerated into mush by now

Very true! You only have to look at the state of some of the Shibaden recordings on the DVDs to see how much the image can degrade over time. Just look at the material on the City of Death disc and the problems that were encountered getting a stable image from material recorded in 1979 - over 140 man hours for around 20 minutes worth out of four hours of material!

Richard