Simon - the account below gives some great insight into A-R archive and GTS by one of the main people at GTS - John Johnson. Johnson was all about preservation not destruction.
Fascinating first-hand account below of what happened to the A-R archive in 1968. This has been transcribed from an original booklet produced for a Kaleidescope event back in 2005.
John Johnson worked for Global Television Services which he describes as 'a subsidiary' of Rediffussion. He was key to salvaging the A-R archive and is paid tribute to by Kaleidescope. Given that he was so determined to save the archive, is it reasonable to then think he would destroy the remainder of archive that the BFI refused to take - or was it kept and stored elsewhere?
www.kaleidoscopepublishing.co.uk/news.htmlDRAMATIC RESCUE OF REDIFFUSION HISTORY by John Johnson (Global Television Services/ Rediffusion)
In mid-1967 the results of the new ITA contracts had been announced. Rediffusion and ABC TV were to merge to form Thames. Childrens, Current Affairs and Picture Library were to go to the new company. Television House, the head office and studios of RTV, together with all the equipment and furniture, was to be sold off and the rest junked. Part of Programme Department was to remain, and my new job was to salvage all the production records and Library material to enable Global Television, a Rediffusion subsidiary, to continue to sell RTV programmes overseas. What wasn't needed would also be junked. I made a tour of my new empire, starting with the hut on the roof of Television House. This used to be called Adastral House, the old head-quarters of the Air Ministry, and in my days in radio, this hut, which was part of the Met Office, became famous whenever we had a heat wave, rare in those days, as many bulletins would lead with the news that the temperature on the Air Ministry roof today reached 90 degrees in the shade’.
The famous hut was now the RTV Film Library, and as I walked in, I passed a pile of rusty old film cans by the door, and idly asked: what are these? “Oh,” said Maurice the Supervising Librarian, “they’re going to be junked”. I picked up the top can and read the label: ‘C Night of ITV aYou can’t junk that,” I exclaimed, that’s historyl”
Although a lot of the programme admin and films would not be wanted for sales, they certainly could not be junked, as ordered by the Board: this was a goldmine of television history. I went back to the Board, and explained that the BBC had enormous sound and film archives and RTV should preserve its old programmes, otherwise, it would -. never have a history. After outlining my plans, the Board agreed. ‘Very well, then,” said Chairman, ‘you are authorised to preserve our old programmes provided,” he added quickly, provided it doesn’t cost us anything.
The production paperwork was very important, as you cant sell programmes unless you also pay the residuals to writers and artists who had made them, and that meant preserving all the paperwork, yards F of it, that supports every production. The first question was: what records did we have left? Lots of old files, dating back thirteen years, had been stored in the basement, where a main drain had overflowed and destroyed r many early documents. Not a pretty sightl The second problem was that every production department, contracts, copyright, music, pub licity, billings, script services, and the production office with the all important P as B, all had their own sets of production files, much of which was duplicated. A team of temps was brought in to weed and amalgamate all these departmental files into one Master Production File for every series and episode, and stored in over twenty filing cabinets, , together with new supporting mat erial, such as catalogues, and the master index of the dates of all 1W programmes, starting with Day One. Today we would just put the whole lot on one hard disc.
In June 1968, when the RTV contract came to an end, I moved the Master Files and Library from TVH to a warehouse in Chiswick. I quietly kept all the files and films, irrespective of sales potential, and fortunately nobody noticed that the cost got charged against income from overseas sales. My first assistant, all those years ago, was a young officer’ fresh out of the Army, who has just retired as Controller of Programme Acquisitions. June Valentine, the woman who brought you Seinfeld, Friends, ER, Sex and the City, and the married version, Desperate Housewives, brought a lot of big audiences to C4
I actually made use of the files myself for a series called Those Wonderful TV Times, which I devised and wrote for fl’V network to celebrate its 2 P’ anniversary. That was the first panel game about old television programmes, and went straight to No 4 in the chart.
Some years later, after sales had more or less died off, I had to find a home for all this. I contacted the Television Officer at the BFI, who was not keen. ‘We would like your some of your plays with big stars (such as Judi Dench and Peter Sellers) and the Pinters and Potters, but not the quizzes”.
I protested this. I explained that I wanted to preserve a representative selection of all the Wl’V output over the years, not just the highbrow plays, but also mass audience material, such as quizzes like Double Your Money. (Over the years I have never seen any Pinter or Potter material on television, but sequences from Double Your Money have often been aired.) I wanted to preserve a wide range of RTV output. No social studies, for example, could be carried out on audience reaction unless programmes were available from both ends of the viewing spectrum. Nor could anyone study the evolution of television itself without a wide range of material. Television, like nature, evolves and is constantly splitting and mutating. Would Z Cars be Z Cars without its ancestors Dixon (30 mins) and No Hiding Place (1 hr)? Monty Python without Do Not Adjust? Or Millionaire without Double Your Money?
I didn’t want to keep all 237 episodes of No Hiding Place and all the other long running series, just the first and final episodes, and a few with major cast changes. But the BFI had their policy. Deadlock. I threatened to destroy all the material, including Pinter and Potter, unless we kept my representative selection.
In fact BFI probably faced a situation they may not have encountered before. Printed books are subject to compulsory deposit: by law all publishers have to deposit one copy of every publication with the national libraries for preservation — and as a researcher, I know how valuable these are. Unfortunately compulsory deposit does not apply to films. Thus, to select a film for preservation, costs the BFI money for a new print (distribution prints are too battered for archiving). Hence the limited budget tended to be spend on classical features, at the expense of B Westerns. Naturally, the BFI applied these criteria to the RTV films.
Once I had made it clear, however, that I would provide all these hundreds of reels of films free, and they would not cost the BFI a penny, we soon reached agreement over my reasonable selection’. Possibly the idea of acquiring a television collection comparable to that of the BBC at the time, also appealed to them, and a full range of material has been preserved.
Ban’ie McDonald, the Librarian at the fl’A, agreed to take all the Master Production Files and the Programme Index. Some duplicate programme papers were passed to Gillian Hartnoll, the BFI Librarian at the time.
The Film Library was moved to the National Film Archive. The collection includes some programme, like documentaries and This Week inserts that were actually shot on film, but the majority of the material was originally shot on video and later transferred to telerecordings. Younger members of the industry might well ask why we didn’t sell tape copies, as we do now. Britain was the first country with a regular television service, and we started with 405 lines, whilst all later television services, apart from Eire, used a higher line standard. So tapes weren’t interchangeable, and had to be transferred to telerecordings. These were made, to put it crudely, by pointing a film camera at an EBU Grade 1 monitor and shooting the pictures, although the later equipment, the Marconi 16 mm fast pull down machine, produced good quality negatives. Usually the material supplied to N FA included the negs, sep mag sound, and a comopt print. Some major series might also have a sep M&E. On the handover, many prints were however left overseas as the contracts still had a year or more to run, and since the main deposit, Kaleidoscope has rescued some prints, as has the BFI’s Missing Believed Wiped’ campaign Some incomplete short series, (Do Not Adjust Your Set) have been added to, and partially reconstructed with the aid of the production files.
Obviously RTV programmes transmitted before videotape was invented, were simply lost for all time, (as was the first television series I presented and produced in 1953: when Controller asked me to repeat the series, we had to go back in the studio and do the whole production all over againi). In addition to the films, we also held the Videotape Library, which included many recordings of productions that were never sold overseas, and this too was offered to the BFI, but declined. Thus many early Schools programmes were also lost. Nowadays, the BFI records all the BBC output on tape.)
The two collections (films and files) include some exceptions. Some files exist for which no film is held, and H conversely, we had film galore of Opening Night, but no file.
The film collection includes one colour production, UK television - was black and white for the whole of the life of RTV, but towards the end of its contract, the company began to prepare for colour, and one of the Half Hour Stories was shot in colour to gain some experience, although it had to be transmitted in• monochrome. That was probably the first IT’! programme made in colour.
Towards the end of the life of the l’FC (formerly the ITA) the Library, ‘ including all the Master ProductionFiles, was transferred to the BFI, and stored in the t at Aston Clinton. For convenience, the k BFI holds in London a list of RTV programmes, although somewhere over the last thirty years, the filing system has got changed.
Originally, the majority of the files consisted of RTV productions, with a last small separate section consisting of files of purchased programmes, mainly I Somehow, these Separate groups have been combined, and in additionfiles for production made by other ITV companies have been places in the collection, with the result that some 1W, American and even Australian series are now credited as RTV productions, which they are certainly not. We would have loved to have made The Avengers, but we didn’t (ABC did). And were also blamed for Thgboat Annie. Yes, we made a few dud series, but never one as bad as that!
These errors have been transposed into the BFI titles list. The original television 4 companies, RTV, AT’!, OW and ABCwere strong rivals, and to merge 4 their programme titles would be to lose their identities, and make life very difficult for researchers trying - to clear sequences. It would be like lumping all features made by MOM, RKO, Warners and UA under MOM.
From this material, the Programme Index, the Master Production Files, the Catalogues, the Film Library,- (and other sources which provide background) a fairly comprehensive picture may be built up of the output ;: of Britain’s first commercial television company, that started life fifty years ago this September.
The BBC has plans to put some , of its most popular programme sequences on line, and will follow that with material from its Written Archives within a year or two. “It’s on the radar,” I was told, Rediffusion - Television would be a good candidate 4 for the first ITV archives to go public.
Pinter and Potter were perhaps the most famous playwrights to grace Rediffusion productions, but plenty of actors who went on to find both jarge- and small-rreen fame appeared in a number of AR/RTV productions too. Here’s just a columns.worth…
Alan Data: Telensthn Playhouse: The Juke’ bof (17.04.59) and “Incident” 22.01.60) and Play 0177w Week “The Square RInC (02.06.59)
Scan Country: Women In Love “The Return
(24.09.58) and Play Of The Week The Square
Ring” (02.06.59)
Michael Crawford: Play Of The Wee “Ftenzy”
(22.10.58) and three episodes of The Chequered
Flag (13.09.60 - 27.09.60)Antony Hopkins
in two cducationai programmes: Ways W
Words: I (26.01.67) and “Decision”
(09.03.67).
Judi Dench: Play Of The Wee Tasnily On
Trial” (2 1.04.59). The Terrible Choice five epi sodes (20.01.60 - 24.02.60). Play Of The Week
Marching Song” (03.02.64) and Playhouse 0n
Approver (22.01.68)
Adam Faith: No Hiding Place: Wheels Of Fury
(30.09.59) and Seuen Deadly Sins: In The Night
Iwrathl (13.06.66)
Staan George: Tele Playhouse “Adam Apple” (18.01.63). December Child 124.12.63)
Suian Hampebire: Television Playhouse “The
Reading Room” (25.04.63) and “31 Backyards”
(16.05.63)
Donald Pleasencc: One (16.04.56), Hotel Im penaL “ibe Murderer In 512” (27.05.58), Tel evision Playhouse Fate And Mister Browne (08.08.58) and “Mr E3rowne Comes Home (10.07.59), SM S “Episode’ (10.03.60). Seven Deadly Virtues: “The Good And Faithful Serv ant” IfaithI (04.04.67)
Peter Sellers: Telev Pl qhouse: “Snowball” and “The Birdwatcher’ both 27.12.56)
Manic Smith: Play Of The Wee/c The Big
Knife” (30.12.58). Home And Beauty: (04.10.66)
and Playhouse “On Approval’ (22.0 1.68)
Patrick Stewart: Finding Out: Water (2) (27. 09 .67)
American telefilms, but including some British film series.
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