On Mon, Oct 23, 2000 at 10:25:37PM +0100, Robin Szemeti wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Oct 2000, you wrote:
> > On 23/10/2000 at 19:12 +0100, Dave Cross wrote:
> >
> > >This happened with Dr Who. There are still a large nubmer of episodes
> > >>missing following a purge in the 1970s.
> > >
> > >Every so often a missing episode turns up at some far-flung
> > >broadcasting company that bought it years ago.
Most recent was the first episode of "The Crusades", which turned up
in New Zealand and was recently released w/the other existing episode
and linking narraton. Interestingly, due to fan taping, *all* of DW
exists in audio form.
> > This almost happened to Monty Python too, at which point one of them
> > smuggled out some then state-of-the-art VHS-style copies (which were
> > obviously of really poor quality) as a final record once the masters
> > were wiped.
Hm... Unless I'm very mistaken, that did *not* happen to Python, per
se. You may be thinking of some pre-python stuff, the best known
example of which was At Last the 1948 Show, which David Frost's
Rediffusion wiped almost every episode of so they could reuse the
tapes. One (*maybe* two) episode(s) survive(s). I'm not sure how
much of stuff like The Complete and Utter History of Britain and Do
Not Adjust Your Set remain, either.
> hah . .now you really are on my territory ;-)
Cool!
> as an ex-employee of Auntie, and on occasion involved in the 'Dr Who'
> renovation ... the phrase 'you wouldn;t believe it' comes to mind .. only
> last year many spools of original studio material got thrown in the
> skip... thankfully a mad colleague had transferred it all onto D3 and
> stored it under his desk. The results are on sale through BBC worldwide I
> believe ... it was the same guy that restored a doctor who episode that
> the BBC had on 25fps film and some American had on 525line NTSC/60hz
> tape .. by a complicated process we used the black and white images off
> the film and the colour off the video tape to produce a surprisingly good
> coloured version of the film recording. Several episodes are missing,
> some have been re-constructed from bits of archive.. some are just plain
> not there.
Just out of curiosity, is Steve Roberts one of the people referred to
above? He appears to be the notable Auntie Beeb presense in internet
DW fora...
> Several episodes of Python don;t exist, it was pre-VHS days and
> everything was recorded on Ampex 'Quad' format 2" tapes .. and they were
> expensive .. so they got wiped and re-used .. several Pythons went that
> way never to re-surface AFAIK .. We spent much of last year using our
> last remaining VR2000 quad machine to transfer ancient reels onto
> digibeta .. the place was awash with tape for months...
I bow to your greater knowledge (see above), although I don't remember
a time when any sizable number of Python episodes were unavailable...
> One of the last bits of work I did was a restoration of a 1/2" reel to
> reel machine .. 405 line !! . as several people had old tapes of
> off-air stuff that just didn;t exist anywhere else .. we bodged it into a
> TBC to stabilise it .. and then through a Questech charisma to convert it
> to 625 line .. getting stable replay was tricky as the guy who made the
> original recording had been too poor to buy 1/2" tape .. but had split 2"
> quad tape into 1/2" strips ... and added wooden spacers to 1/4" audio
> reels to make suitable spools .... !!!
Ok, I want your *old* job... ;-)
dha
--
David H. Adler - <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - http://www.panix.com/~dha/
'Cos they're EVIL, that's why. And not in a good way.
- Michael Gates
