Wipe Out: When the BBC Kept Erasing Its Own History

most did not look into the future...too bad for us! so many US TV shows are gone as well...

 

Note that Blu-ray will do nothing for the old Python shows because they were all shot in 4x3 PAL 625 videotape, so HD won't do it any good. It won't do it any harm, either, but don't expect it to be real HD.

 

There were a lot of filmed inserts on Python, if they still had the original film elements maybe they could have been remastered and re-edited in?

 

Actually, that probably explains why there are hardly any ABC in concert shows from the 70's in circulation.There are however plenty of Midnight special and Don Kirshners Rock concert shows. I always assumed that Dick Clark productions had all the ABC in concert shows in their possession.

 

Ironic isn’t it. Or criminal LOL.

 

'Late Night Horror' series seems to be a victim of this...

Foreign Countries #14: Late Night Horror: The Corpse Can’t Play (1968)

Before my time but the stills from the surviving 'Corpse Can't Play' look interesting. Hope it gets a release

 

I believe that's what happened with the BluRay release.

 

My understanding about what happened with Python is the group got tipped off the first season was going to be wiped so they had (illegal) tape copies made...and then Ron Devillier at KERA, the PBS affiliate in Dallas, heard about the show and put it on the air and the rest is history.

Monty Python; a hit in Dallas, just like JFK.

 

NASA also erased tapes to save money:
Apollo 11 missing tapes - Wikipedia

 

My bet is that there's a 1% chance that they would grab the Python film bits, rescan them, reconform them, and re-color-correct them for the show. It is possible, just very unlikely. The reasons why are 1) after 50 years, it's really hard to track down all the individual elements (sound and picture) for a show like this, and 2) nobody wants to spend the money.

I don't think this is true, but if you have a link about the Blu-ray restoration on Monty Python, I'd love to know more. As I said, it's possible they could do it if they wanted to take weeks and weeks to pull the film bits, and if the 16mm film was stored properly, and if it's accessible, and if they're willing to find the right pieces and scan them. I know some significantly more-important projects where all this stuff was trashed within a year of the show being released.

What I was told is that they did at least go back to the original BBC 2" master videotapes and replayed them one more time in order to capture the best possible digital files within the last 10 years or so. The technology of cleaning up old analog video is a lot better today than it was in the 1980s or 1990s, so at the least, they can make it sharper, clearer, and with better color now. It's still not HD, but it's better than it was. 2" tape is surprising hardy and can hold up pretty well, provided it's been stored well.

 

The restoration did include original film elements in various episodes. Original 16mm and 35mm elements were used where available. The usual unnecessary changes took place, as well, like the elimination of splice jumps and exposure changes during the How Not to be Seen military film parody, and the digital "fixing" of animation mistakes.

Terry Gilliam and Jonathan Wood review some of the newly restored animations:


Changes, additions and elements not included were rationalized and, in some cases, vehemently defended as "necessary" or more true to what the Pythons "intended". The result is that one or two episodes run longer than their original broadcast, and one or two remain censored although uncensored sketches exist (though, in poor quality off-air dubs).

There are discussions at Roobarb's and the Lost Media Wiki forum, as well as Bluray.com that go into more detail.

 

That is very cool! I'm glad they took the time to rescan and drop in those segments in HD. Terry Gilliam strikes me as a very organized guy, so I can see where he would have held on to his animated films.

There's an entire Python sketch where they make fun of the interiors being on videotape, and the exteriors being shot on film, which had me on the floor the first time I saw it. And I still laugh at the moment where Graham Chapman says, "cue telecine!" (Telecine was the film-to-tape process we used prior to film scanning, all the way through the early 2000s.)

 

This was due to the Musicians' Union's policies over recorded music. Radio sessions were only permitted to be broadcast twice, or possibly three times if deemed good enough to make one of the best-of-the-year shows. After that that they tended to be wiped as repeat broadcasts simply weren't permitted. The same rules also applied to commercial stations when they appeared - London's Capital radio also put out a lot of live-in-the-studio sessions that are lost (or more likely not recorded at all).

Similar policies also applied to television performances - hence only four complete episodes of the weekly Top Of The Pops survive from 1964 to 1969.

 

It's why the Beatles BBC recordings are mostly taken from fan bootlegs and 4th-dub tapes rescued from garbage cans.

 

Yeah, the TOTP archive is a shocker. According to this site, less than 50 complete episodes exist from the 12 year period between January 1964 - March 1976.

There's quite a few individual clips floating around, but still. Wow.

 

Now that was really short-sighted and contradictory. NASA wanted to preserve data for their early 1980's Landsat mission, but destroyed invaluable material from earlier missions to do so.

If those Apollo 11 tapes weren't erased, the footage available to us today might be of the quality for the Apollo 16 mission (though I don't know if this is taken from the original Apollo 16 telemetry tapes):