Comedy Progs Archive Status

[Lurch]

Can anyone with the Kaleidoscope Comedy guide give the archive status of the following:

Bachelor Father
Beggar My Neighbour
The Bed-Sit Girl
Citizen James
Charlie Drake in…
Faces of Jim
Gnomes of Dulwich
Benny Hill Sitcoms
The Rag Trade (BBC)
Brothers in Law (Richard Briers)
Arthur Askey Sitcoms
Best of Friends
The Dustbinmen
Down the Gate (Reg Varney)
Norman Wisdom Sitcoms

Grateful for any help. Thanks

[David Brunt]

If you've got that many queries, why not buy the book....

www.kalpublish.org.uk/books/comedy.htm

[Lurch]

Well I've been trying to order a copy from Amazon since March but they have been unable to find a copy as yet.

[Lurch]

In any case I only want to know how many episodes survive, no other detail required.

[dubs]

Bachelor Father - 1st ep on PAL, eps 2 and 5 on TR16, series 2 - all on TR16.

Beggar My Neighbour - comedy playhouse - junked.

series 1 - ep 1 on TR16.
series 2 - eps 1-4 on TR16.
series 3 - junked

The Bet-Sit Girl - all junked.

Citizen James - series 1 - all on TR16, series 2 - none listed but 2 plus reported recovered by 13/12/02, series 3 - one reported recovered by 13/12/02.

Charlie Drake In..nothing under this title listed.

The Seven Faces Of Jim - all on TR16.

Six More Faces Of Jim - junked.

More Faces Of Jim - junked

The Gnomes Of Dulwich - junked.

The Rag Trade - series 1 - all on TR16.
series 2 - all on TR35/16 bar 2.
series 3 - junked.
xmas night with the stars - junked.

The LWT version (1977/8) all exists.

Brothers In Law - ep 2 on TR35.

Best Of Freinds - junked.

The Dustbinmen - all exist on tape bar The All Star Comedy Carnival slot from 25/12/69.

Down The Gate - junked.

Cant help with the "sitcoms" by name unless have specific titles - I know that all of Wisdoms ATV stuff has gone, barring returns from the Quad archive.

HTH,

S.

[Lurch]

Thanks very much for that information, dubs - much appreciated.

[AndyMcKinney]

dubs said:

The Dustbinmen - all exist on tape bar The All Star Comedy Carnival slot from 25/12/69.

That can't be right, can it? The three episodes I have from Granada Plus are all sourced from B/W film recordings, and two of those three B/W episodes say "colour" at the end. Even if all of the episodes survive, they don't all exist in their original format (either B/W VT or colour VT).

I think I read on a message board that maybe only one colour episode was screened on Plus. Of course, they're known for only leasing limited runs of things...

[Tim D]

Guest-AndyMcKinney said:

That can't be right, can it? The three episodes I have from Granada Plus are all sourced from B/W film recordings, and two of those three B/W episodes say "colour" at the end. Even if all of the episodes survive, they don't all exist in their original format (either B/W VT or colour VT).
quote]

I too have never understood the reasons that Granada Plus only screened one episode in colour and the rest in B/W.
According to Granada Visual's database all episodes of The Dustbinmen are logged as existing in colour (including specials) with the exception of the City '68 appearance.

CITY '68 (THERE'S A HOLE IN YOUR DUSTBIN, DELILAH) TX 30/9/68

Although it has been mentioned here before that online databases tend to be a lot less reliable than in-house databases.

I'd have thought if these really do exist in colour, Granada Plus would have wanted to get colour copies for transmission. I can only assume that the episodes we saw were from Granada International telerecordings that may for some reason have been easier to access?

I'm just glad they ran them in the first place. It would have been nice to see more of them though

It would be really nice to see some kind of celebration of Jack Rosenthal's career. Maybe this is one for the NFT?
I watched "Red Letter Day - Ready When You Are Mr McGill?" again the other day and it's great viewing

[Tim D]

While we're on the subject of comedy shows and their archive status, I suppose Rediffusion's "Mr Aitch" with Harry H Corbett has gone the way of all Rediffusion flesh?
Can anyone confirm, purely out of interest.

[Simon Mclean]

[quote author=dubs link=board=general&thread=1087736764&start=4#0
Down The Gate - junked.
[/quote]

Didn't Reg Varney tape all the episodes of this, though? I've heard they all survive on a domestic format (complete with ads!) courtesy of him. Is this true?

[H Hartley]

Crikey!
down the gate junked

[David Buck]

Guest-Simon said:

Didn't Reg Varney tape all the episodes of this, though? I've heard they all survive on a domestic format (complete with ads!) courtesy of him. Is this true?

As reported by Kaleidoscope in Primetime vol. 2 issue 1 - it was either all of series one or all of series two ( can't check at the moment ) but not both, on off-air u-matic

[Steve Boyce]

As a supplementary query, does anyone know if any of the BBC comedies about the Paradocks survive? They were shown in the late 60's but never repeated afaik. Great shame if they're gone forever. (I recently discovered that the same writer wrote Peter Yates's film "the one-way pendulum" with Eric Sykes, which is quite a similar type of thing)

Thanks - Steve

[Laurence Piper]

It was series 2 of Down The Gate (two in all) that Reg Varney had recorded on Philips domestic format. I presume these still survive but it was reported in the issue of Primetime published by Kal a few years ago.

Those early Dustbinmen eps (including the pilot) would have been on b/w vt originally though (as opposed to colour) as they were '68 - '69. It would be interesting to know exactly how much of Granada's archive IS actually intact; no seems to know, not even Granada.

[dubs not bothered logging in]

1) N.F. Simpson
2) Chris Perry has reported that Granada are feeding him plenty of archive details in the run-up to the new guides.