Morecambe & Wise programme recovery

[dave walsh]

Thanks very much for that Steve. New to me Will certainly look for it. I take your point Tanuki. In the meantime C St 1986 is available for free and runs in sequence [as long as you don't forget to watch/record that is].

Dickens wrote soaps [in weekly parts].
I think it was New York or maybe Boston Harbour where anguished crowds gathered to shout to the incoming ship with new "episodes".... "Is Little Nell dead?"
Well I don't like The Navy Lark much!

Craig the amazing Antikythera [supernavigator] underwater discovery is exactly what I was referring to in post 3

Dave

[Dave Moll]

Originally Posted by dave walsh

Well I don't like The Navy Lark much!

What's not to like in a programme starring both Jon Pertwee and Ronnie Barker?

Anyway, my enduring memories of it are clustered round a transistor radio in the waiting room of the local railway station listening to it on a Sunday afternoon. This was because I was a pupil at the time of a boarding school at which transistor radios were deemed to be contraband and confiscated on sight, and the railway station wasn't as diligently patrolled by the guards (I mean teachers) as the school premises.

[Brigham]

It always amused me when particular SORTS of radio were 'banned'. Transistor radios were specifically excluded from Morecambe beach. It always put me in mind of someone sitting at a desk deciding on the 'sound quality' of the possible 'nuisance'.

[Dave Moll]

Yes, I decided to circumvent the rules one term by taking a battery valve radio to school with me. Needless to say, the goalposts were immediately moved to ban all portable radios, and I got it back at the end of term.

I celebrate soaps as an enduring visceral and embracing reflection of the Zeitgeist.

Cor what! (gets dictionary out...) I was never allowed to watch ITV when young, it was "the other channel" as mum said.

[paulsherwin]

Originally Posted by Nuvistor

How much of modern productions are saved for posterity, think of all those reality TV shows that are made, will they be available in 30 years time?
I am in two minds, for me most are rubbish and not worth the time to watch them, but many do enjoy them and will be nostalgia in 2050.
So what do we save and what do we leave on the “ cutting room floor”?

Generally speaking, practically everything is saved now. There are a number of reasons for this but the most important is that it is seen as having a commercial value. Even 20 year old ITV gameshows have a value.

Until the 80s TV was considered to be a transient medium, particularly within the BBC. Most management had a theatrical or music hall background and TV broadcasts were thought of in the same way as theatrical performances. 1970s drama productions like "I Claudius" are unbelievably stagey by modern standards, like a broadcast of a stage performance. 'Repeats' were very much frowned on by all sides and the only reason to retain recordings was to sell them to foreign broadcasters, which is why so much surviving material is on 16mm B&W telecine.

With ITV productions, many recordings were lost as a consequence of franchise changes.

And I think a lot are best left as happy memories, reality can be a bit upsetting.

[dave walsh]

Good summary Paul. Lack of finance was probaly a major factor with the Beeb, especially 2" Video Tape but using audio tape originals of the Goon Show as stud wall filling?-more than careless! I think there was intellectual class and political bias as well. The few David Mercer Plays remaining from the Wednesday Play series are amazing but his views weren't welcome [even there] and most of the 16mm film recordings seem to have been deliberately destroyed, according to various biogs I've read. Most things do seem to be saved now but when the BBC moved out of Oxford Road they advertised for early 90's material that had not been preserved despite a statutory requirement to log the days output. I was amazed by this. It would not have been expensive to keep those [then] multi track audio tapes and I assumed they had learned to do better. I presume they over-recorded daily or [more likely] just dumped them when the system was digitised.

Each to his own I suppose Dave [Moll famed magazine archivist]. Yes I used to listen to it then but I was never keen or now when I've tried again courtesy of 4xtra! It seems a bit too arch and pantomime-ish for me and ironically given the setting, all the "jokes" are "signalled" ahead. The Clithero Kid was a similar but much more engaging series. This isn't northern bias and I concede your own extreme northness of location!

As for Ronnie Barker-never took to him either [heresy]. National treasures are often deeply buried! Jon Pertwee? Good as Wurzel Gummidge, too light for The Doctor imho. On the Buses is on after C Street 1986. Really popular, crude, tasteless, unfunny! There's very little I would ever destroy but....

"If you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out?"
John Lennon "Revolution"


Dave W

[cheerfulcharlie]

10 years ago now since the 'colour recovery' break through..Which all depended on if the technician at the time had switched the burst off while making the b&w print.

BBC seems to loose interest after a quick bit of publicity and probably will with M&W?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjK-b4x9ZmQ

[paulsherwin]

The Beeb management's enthusiasm for programme recovery is determined be two things: whether the recovery can be used for publicity purposes, and whether the recovered programmes will generate income. There are lots of engineers and enthusiasts who value these programmes and see recovery almost as a public duty, but they don't have the money to finance the work involved (which is often substantial).

[cheerfulcharlie]

Originally Posted by paulsherwin

The Beeb management's enthusiasm for programme recovery is determined be two things: whether the recovery can be used for publicity purposes, and whether the recovered programmes will generate income. There are lots of engineers and enthusiasts who value these programmes and see recovery almost as a public duty, but they don't have the money to finance the work involved (which is often substantial).

Yes I suspect that if CR had been possible with NTSC the Americans would have grabbed the baton and run with it.

[Scimitar]

Originally Posted by dave walsh

As for Ronnie Barker-never took to him either [heresy]. National treasures are often deeply buried! Jon Pertwee? Good as Wurzel Gummidge, too light for The Doctor imho. On the Buses is on after C Street 1986. Really popular, crude, tasteless, unfunny! There's very little I would ever destroy but....

But then you need a sense of humour to appreciate them. Soap operas are for depressives who lack that sense of humour. ;-)

[Welsh Anorak]

Having seen the clip I was wondering where the sound came from, as I assume it was mag strip on the original (optical was for projectors). It's amazing what can be done, and I'm sure it gave some dubious characters food for thought when disposing of their hard drives! I'm surprised at the state of the film - celluloid, yes, but I've some rolls of 16mm that haven't been kept well by any stretch of the imagination, but are quite reasonable. I assume they used very poor stock? After all, they were only designed to be shown once.
We forget how cheap and small storage has become - how many hours of acceptable quality programmes can now be stored on a memory stick or an external HDD? I just looked at a website that hadn't been updated since 2010 - it's all still there, if of little value now. Younger people express surprise that, say, an episode of a popular programme from the Sixties just isn't available to watch on demand!
Things change, not always for the worse.

[cheerfulcharlie]

Originally Posted by Welsh Anorak

Having seen the clip I was wondering where the sound came from, as I assume it was mag strip on the original (optical was for projectors). It's amazing what can be done, and I'm sure it gave some dubious characters food for thought when disposing of their hard drives! I'm surprised at the state of the film - celluloid, yes, but I've some rolls of 16mm that haven't been kept well by any stretch of the imagination, but are quite reasonable. I assume they used very poor stock? After all, they were only designed to be shown once.
We forget how cheap and small storage has become - how many hours of acceptable quality programmes can now be stored on a memory stick or an external HDD? I just looked at a website that hadn't been updated since 2010 - it's all still there, if of little value now. Younger people express surprise that, say, an episode of a popular programme from the Sixties just isn't available to watch on demand!
Things change, not always for the worse.

Apparently.. the print had been half way around the world before ending up in its dank and sweaty resting place in Nigeria. Nobody was interested in it and consequently it probably had not been opened occasionally and allowed to breath some fresh air for years.It was while it was in Australia that someone had recorded the soundtrack off the TV...the conservationists were pleased about this as it meant they had exactly the right track to go with it as obviously prints were often bespoke to different territories.

[dave walsh]

This sort of thing is not quite the Rosetta Stone but it's pretty close. The next thing might be recovering memory from the walls, as in the Famous Stone Tape [Jane Asher] Drama. There's a definite lack of sound on there but that's due to the production values of the day with little background music

If you are talking about East Enders I heartily agree Scimitar but you can't equate most Soaps with depression even if it has that effect on you.
Round The Horne and Hancock are great. but I've obviously mentioned your three particular favourites there. As for Bread and Mrs Browns Boys oh dear, another race to the bottom. I never liked The Office but then Extras [same Ricky G] is hilarious. Funniest at the moment Young Sheldon, the Big Bang Theory Prequel. Despite it's current Hamlet style storyline with bodies all over the place Coronation Street is still very funny and full of one liners. Viewing the 1986 vintage episodes on ITV3 shows that the humour still stands up very well which is not always the case
by any means.

Dave

[Scimitar]

It just shows how it takes all sorts. Maybe you are a much younger member? I find the likes of Mr Gervais and his offerings to be cringeworthy, peurile and ridiculous as I do most of so called alternate (to) comedy. Mrs Brown's boys is downmarket and unnecessarily crude I agree, but it does have a few clever moments.

[dave walsh]

Younger? Now I am laughing Im a baby boomer not a millenial so I witnessed the sixties very concious all the while that a lot of programming might be slipping away for ever. Fortunately miracles happen as we are seeing and lots of things did get preserved one way or another. I managed to record audio directly from the TV making sure the chassis wasn't live using an inverted o/p transformer for isolation [that tip was in Practical Television]. I thought I would never see a lot of material again which might account for an obsessive interest. Now we have You Tube and 4xtra etc etc

Dave

[G6Tanuki]

I guess we all have telly programs that bring back memories from our earlier days. I never got on with Morecambe&Wise - they always seemed boring, horribly stuffy and middle-class - but I remember fondly the likes of Z-Cars and the associated ''Softly-Softly'' cop-dramas on the Beeb, then there was the ITV series "Please Sir!" based in a school [John Alderton and Deryck Guyler being the prime actors] and "Mind your language" involving an "English as a foreign language" course at an adult-education college.

I also vaguely remember a sort-of-soap on the Beeb called "The Newcomers".

Then there was "The Troubleshooters" - based around an oil company which aired on the Beeb in the late-60s. Sadly most of the episodes have been lost.

By the mid-1970s we had "The Professionals" and "The Sweeney" which were much more fun!

[emeritus]

AFAIK the BBC and ITV used top quality Kodak or Ilford stock, at any rate, for their cameras. When I was a student involved in 16mm filming in the late 1960's we used to cadge short ends from the local studios and re-spool them onto 100' spools for our camera. The professionals used 16mm cameras that took film on 400' darkroom loading magazines. 400' at sound speed lasted about 10 mins. Practice was that, when shooting was completed, they would (in a darkroom) cut the film and only send the exposed length for processing (it was charged by the foot). The reminder was put in a can for possible re-use and they usually had some to spare for us.

From memory, in the late 1960's, 16mm negative stock cost about £2 per 100' (about 2 1/2 mins at 25FPS television sound speed) with processing about the same, so the cost of telecine-ing a programme was not negligible: to put things in context, my father's basic wage at that time was around £10 per 5 1/2 day week, less than £2/day. In the 1960's the BBC used to record some of their 405 line programmes at 16 2/3 FPS, giving 4 mins per 100'. I have a commercial VHS cassette of three 1960's Pinky & Perky episodes that were evidently recorded from 405 line TV using this system: every other frame consists of two interlaced fields from adjacent frames. You only notice it when stepping frame-by-frame.

[Grubhead]

I was reading somewhere that if a BBC TV show was sent to another country, even if the show was in colour and the TV company in the country was using B&W TV, then it was possible to convert it back into colour from a B&W recording.
Apparently the B&W recording preserves the colour information! So you just need a computer to convert it back into colour!
It has been done already, since other countries were not as eager to trash TV shows like the BBC was.
Top of The Pops from the 1960's to 1976 was wiped in large numbers. However due to the recent scandal, it wouldn't make a lot of difference. Because they couldn't show most of them anyway!
I have a book in PDF format that lists most of the entertainment shows on UK TV.
It's remarkable how many shows have been lost.