News Huddlines Missing Episodes?

[Charles Norton]

I've recently been told that the unofficial archivist of the 'The News Huddlines' is apparently Chris Emmett. So it might be wise to get in touch with him. Steve Arnold might be worth contacting as well. However, I don't think that there are any online guides.

[Richard Harrison]

Steve Arnold runs the British Comedy and Drama website at www.britishcomedy.org.uk

For those who don't know, Steve has been sourcing and returning material to the BBC for the last 15 years, pretty much as long as his website has been online. Steve is an ideal person to contact if you have any recordings full stop, though I am aware that he has some notes on the Huddlines which might well end up as some sort of programme log in the near future.

[Mark Chilver]

I stumbled across this website a couple of days ago when browsing "The News Huddlines".

I have recordings of (I believe) every edition of the programme from 1986 through to the end of the series in 2001, plus a few from 1984/5 that I didn't date at the time.

They are currently stored on audio cassette and the quality of the recordings varies in terms of volume and "radio noise", but they are a joy to listen to. I hope to start digitalising the collection soon, in order to preserve the recordings.

I post this as information for anyone that is interested.

[Charles Norton]

Delighted to hear about your tapes.

However, just a word of friendly advice. When you do digitise your tapes, copy to wav files and not Mp3. Mp3 is not a good way to archive material and results in a lot of the original 'information' in a recording being lost.

In recent years a lot of people have started digitising their archives and a lot of stuff is being lost in the conversion to Mp3. When a programme comes up for CD release or something, we sometimes find that people have thrown out their original off-airs and replaced them with these horribly compressed Mp3s, which are often unusable.

[Mark Chilver]

Many thanks for that tip. I am only just getting into "technology", and could easily have lost something I value through my lack of knowledge. Very much appreciated!

[Greg H]

If you would like any advice about good software and so forth to use for transfering your recordings feel free to PM me.

[David McKenzie]

Well, I see that this thread is more than 7 years old, but perhaps this is worth a try...

I'm looking for a recording of the Christmas 1978 show of the News Huddlines - I think it's the one that originally aired on 20th December 1978. It's one of the few that's not been seen at the Global British Comedy Collaborative website at www.thegbcc.info/w-cy/News_Huddlines.html.

Does anyone here have a recording of this episode they'd be willing to share, please?

[Stephen Byers]

However Huddwinks is available - series 1 & 2. PM me for whereabouts.

[Stephen Byers]

Some Huddlines are out there ...

www.google.co.uk/search?rlz=1C1CHBD_en-GBGB768GB768&biw=1094&bih=504&ei=TpQLXOH3Ae6l1fAP6OaJ4Ac&q=huddlines

[Stephen Byers]

ONE DAY LEFT TO LISTEN ...

29/12/78

The News Huddlines

Back to the headline-makers of the past: Margaret Thatcher, James Callaghan, Jeremy Thorpe, Peter Parker, Richard Nixon and more!

Roy Hudd and the gang with an end-of-year review of the news highlights of 1978.

With Chris Emmett and Janet Brown.

Music by the Nic Rowley Quintet.

Compiled by Laurie Rowley.

Written by Andy Hamilton, David Renwick, Peter Spence, Keith Rawnsley, Peter Long, Charles Beiber, Peter Hickey and John Hyde.

Producer: John Lloyd

First broadcast on BBC Radio 2 in December 1978.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bqw60t

[Ed Brown]

I'd like to make a sincere appeal on behalf of the Internet Archive at Archive.org

Quite often, in my experience, the BBC Sound Archive will decline to accept old radio shows, even if offered on the original broadcast medium and thus requiring minimal restoration.

BBC archives has a limited budget, and limited storage space. They also have limited staff, and a limited amount of time in a month for restoring old material, leading them to prioritise items needed for broadcasting, e.g. on 4 Extra. Unless a recording is one which is self-financing (i.e. unless they can sell it commercially, to cover the costs of restoration and storage) they will usually refuse to accept it.

One alternative which has proved useful is the Internet Archive. With most archives, including the BBC, any donated material tends to vanish down a black hole, and never sees the light of day again. With the Internet Archive, however, material donated actually remains accessible to the general public, making it unique as a radio archive.

They accept wav files for upload, and it is by far better to give them the original lossless wav file, rather than a low bitrate mp3. Once converted to mp3, the recording is essentially useless for most purposes, as too much of the data has been thrown away. One common trick with old radio material (originally broadcast in mono) is to encode your tape as a wav recording, then throw away one channel, thus reducing the file size by half, then encode the single remaining channel as a FLAC file, thereby reducing the file size by half again. What you then have is an 80MB file per half hour of audio, instead of a 350 MB file.

You then upload the mono FLAC file, which is much more easily treated: easier to upload, easier to store, easier to download, because it is only a quarter the size of the original stereo wav file. But don't do this with a stereo radio show. All BBC radio was in mono prior to 1973, except some highbrow music on Radio 3. Most drama and scripted comedy was broadcast in mono throughout the 1970s, right up to 1978. It was basically the music stations that went into stereo early on, not the Light Ent shows.

Upload your lost 'News Huddlines' recordings to Archive.org, and thereby share them with the world.

Items which the BBC deems to have no commercial value are items they don't want taking up space in the Sound Archive, but are also items they don't bother about if posted online. Rarely if ever do they object to a show being posted if it's not one of the handful of things like 'The Goon Show', or 'Hancocks Half Hour', etc, for which they still have a market on CD.

[David McKenzie]

Wow, Stephen, I completely forgot to check back here following my post (until now), so missed your helpful replies - thank you. I had a look through the YouTube search results, but sadly it doesn't seem to have the episode I'm after. It looks as if it's the one originally broadcast on 20th December 1978 - the week before the one that the BBC had made available on iPlayer at the end of last year.

I'll continue my search, and will really appreciate it if you have any more suggestions!

Cheers,
Dave

[Dan S]

Dec 12, 2018 15:50:10 GMT Ed Brown said:

I'd like to make a sincere appeal on behalf of the Internet Archive at Archive.org

Quite often, in my experience, the BBC Sound Archive will decline to accept old radio shows, even if offered on the original broadcast medium and thus requiring minimal restoration.

I've long thought that the BBC should utilise archive.org in that way. Ideally, it'd be nice if Genome specified what existed in the archives, and for those that didn't exist there'd be an upload facility for people to upload it if they have it. But given that this would be costly to set up, archive.org would be ideal. The BBC could authorise it, specifying such things as nothing after a certain date, nothing that's already been released on cd, that sort of thing. Archive,org could even create a BBC subsection like they've done for Greatful Dead bootlegs, and they could give someone at the BBC admin rights over the section allowing them to take certain files offline (if certain rights issues meant they had to do that), while the page itself would remain to show people that the files had been uploaded. As well as things which they might want returning there'd be a flood of fragments of DJ-based shows which they couldn't give a fig about having returned, but which it would be useful to have all in one place in any case.

[Ed Brown]

I'm sorry David. I checked my sources, but the only really old - i.e. pre 1990 - editions I could come up with for 'News Huddlines' do not include the 1978 edition you enquired about.

For the record, I am holding a lot of mp3 recordings from the 1990s.

But apart from a handful of editions repeated by BBC 7 / R4 Extra, the only old episodes I have access to are :


Directory of F:\The News Huddlines - early episodes

15/11/2013 05:37 25,783,110 Huddlines 1979-06-06 s07e00.mp3
15/11/2013 05:37 13,003,952 Huddlines 1979-11-07 s08e10.mp3
15/11/2013 06:10 54,550,478 Huddlines 1981-01-01 The Best of The News Huddlines 1980.mp3
15/11/2013 06:08 13,212,108 Huddlines 1982-12-31 Colour Supplement.mp3
15/11/2013 05:37 13,170,768 Huddlines 1983-12-29 s15eSP.mp3
15/11/2013 06:04 6,714,828 Huddlines 1986-12-25 Christmas Huddlines.mp3
15/11/2013 05:37 25,782,693 Huddlines 1987-06-11 s21eSP Election Special.mp3
15/11/2013 06:09 33,088,040 Huddlines 1988-12-01.mp3
15/11/2013 06:09 34,193,408 Huddlines 1988-12-27 Christmas Huddlines.mp3
15/11/2013 05:37 14,030,848 Huddlines 1989-12-29 s27eSP Review Of The Eighties.mp3

[Ed Brown]

You might be interested in this item, on YouTube, in which Chris Emmett explores the history of 'The News Huddlines', in a documentary from 1994 entitled "Behind the Huddlines" -

youtu.be/1Un2eBnRChE
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Un2eBnRChE

Chris Emmett presents the history of The News Huddlines, aired on Radio 2 on 24th March 1994. Taking part are Roy Hudd and June Whitfield, supported by interviews with the show's producers: Simon Brett, John Lloyd, and Jonathan James-Moore.

Broadcast to mark the occasion when the show succeeded 'The Navy Lark' as the BBC's longest-running scripted comedy show in history. Eventually, it chalked up 51 series (1975-2001).


And finally Cyril, I present a comprehensive episode guide to The News Huddlines (all 938 broadcasts, 1975-2001):

genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/search/0/938?order=asc&q=%22News+Huddlines%22&svc=9371514#search


Revised link (2023/02/09) -
genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/search/0/50?order=first&q=News+Huddlines