Scotch on the Rocks: TV drama locked away for 50 years
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
It's from 1973. Was the final broadcast master on film, or U-Matic / Type C tape or similar? If it was tape, no one has a machine that can play U-Matic or Type C tapes anymore. Well, the BBC Archives probably do. But let's hope the archives had the money to transfer it to something in the 80s or 90s, back when the tape was hopefully still in good shape. (Edit: Type C was introduced in 1976! It would have had to have been quadruplex tape, if it was tape. There are only a handful of working quad players in the world.)
And video tape, well, it was very expensive. And you could reuse it. Most video tape from the 70s got the same treatment parchment did in medieval times. Sometimes erased and reused for scrap paper, even if it had originally been a work by Aristotle.
Generally material was done on film at that time. 1000 ft of 16 mm film -- enough for 1 half-hour episode -- cost about $500. Keep an archival copy of everything broadcast at the time, would literally have cost many millions of pounds a year just to make a copy of the film stock. And they would need to do that, as you can't really rely on standard film stock to be archiveable. It needs to be good stuff. A lot of film that is 50 years old today is now literally falling apart. So the archival department would have needed to be be constantly moving old, fragile film material to current media, just as with video tape. That is labour intensive, and accordingly expensive.
It's not that easy; you can't just put a hard drive or SSD in a safe and expect it will work after 20 or 50 years. If anything it's harder and more expensive today, because you can do that with a reel of tape (it does degrade, but much slower).
The main thing that's changed it that people realized there things are actually useful to keep around. Much of the stuff that was erased or thrown out was done just because people didn't think anyone would care.
Meanwhile, in private life, I am considering how to transfer some rare materials from laserdisc ... later, perhaps, but also unpopular.
But overall, I can forgive some of the older material but even the newer business just seems to vanish!
> Long-standing agreements with UK talent and musicians unions made it difficult too. Most UK television programmes were only ever contracted for one domestic repeat broadcast and so once a programme had been repeated once, there was often considered to be no point in further retaining the transmission master. It’s purpose had been served.
From: https://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2017-12-morecambe-wise-video-f...
They MIGHT be lucky if it they find tapes in the same VCR tape format as the BBC's "Out of the Trees" from 1975. It was a sketch comedy show from Monthy Python's Graham Chapman and at-the-time-writer-for-Dr.-Who Douglas Adams, who would go on to Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fame.
A copy was recently restored and put on Youtube after a tape in the VCR format was discovered. It was a home taping made by Graham Chapman himself, and the only existing copy of a recording. A multi-year effort was made to rebuild a player for the tape from scratch, with the final results put on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saxhV4gzm5c
So, it's potentially possible, the the real issue is that during the early years of the BBC they generally re-used the tapes they had and would record over previously used tapes, which is why so much of BBC history is lost from that period. Famously lots of early Dr. Who episodes are lost to time(lords).
Sort of reminds me of The War Game[0], a BBC pseudo-documentary on a nuclear attack against Britain in the 1960s, that was sort of censored.
The BBC or government said "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.", but got shown to a select few, and then got played at film festivals a year later and won an Oscar for best Documentary in 1967.
"The film was eventually televised in Great Britain on 31 July 1985, during the week before the fortieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the day before a repeat screening of Threads."[0]
I haven't watched Threads, but I'd highly recommend watching this film. It's not gory, it's almost satirical, but also horrifying.
> The War Game is a 1966 British pseudo-documentary film that depicts a nuclear war and its aftermath.[1] Written, directed and produced by Peter Watkins for the BBC, it caused dismay within the BBC and also within government, and was subsequently withdrawn before the provisional screening date of 6 October 1965.[2] The corporation said that "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting. It will, however, be shown to invited audiences..."[3]
The film eventually premiered at the National Film Theatre in London, on 13 April 1966, where it ran until 3 May.[4] It was then shown abroad at several film festivals, including the Venice one where it won the Special Prize. It also won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1967.[5][6]
The film was eventually televised in Great Britain on 31 July 1985, during the week before the fortieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the day before a repeat screening of Threads.[7]
Make sure you are in a good mental headspace.
Threads is VERY harrowing and will leave you reeling for a couple days.
"The blast wave from a thermonuclear explosion has been likened to an enormous door slamming in the depths of hell"
Said over a scene where a family with young children try and take shelter.
Because of the reach. The percentage of the population that routinely read is small, really surprisingly small. The percentage that watch broadcast 'television' content (whether that be OTA or streaming or whatever) is high. As we've seen recently there's a bunch of people out there who have the propensity to do literally whatever they see someone else doing on the screen, tide pod challenge, devious licks, you name it, if they see someone else doing it then they'll do it too.
I'm not a censorious person at heart but you do have to be very cognizant about what's being broadcast to your population because it's surprisingly easy to stir up enough people to cause issues, especially if they're already stressed, and Northern Ireland in the 80s was a desperately poor and grim place.
Just interested to know if you're actually contending here that broadcast media has, in general, less of an immediate and direct reach than literature.
Actually, it's worse than that; the SNP is specifically named (as opposed to the "Alba Freedom Party" or somesuch), and the terrorists have (based on the plot on Wikipedia) some fringe but real connection to the party. I presume that the writers had in mind Sinn Fein's role as the legal, public face of the IRA.
I suppose it depends on your definition of 'bad', but the 1970s, were the bloodiest times of the Troubles; 1972 being the worst. The 80s were comparatively 'less violent'. At least in terms of civilian killed.