Dick Barton

[bertiedog]

On the news today, the famous 1940's/1950's BBC radio series "Dick Barton Special Agent" , long thought lost or never recorded, despite being the most popular radio show made after the war!!.....has been found almost complete in the ABC Australian companies archive, disk recordings of all the series, with a cast especially for the Australian recordings, to match replacement recording of the first live series. They duplicated everything, same script, sounds, music, producer and director, but not the original cast.

 

These were suspected to exist, but dear old BBC simply never chased it up despite pleas from people dating to the 1950's. The ABC were unsure of what they had till a stock take of the archive, and are arranging to return the recordings for the BBC to issue on CD's and later broadcast them in the UK.

 

Other recordings have been found from the Goon Show with Michael Bentine, and Much Binding in the Marsh, long thought lost almost completely.

It is staggering that the BBC should have lost these recordings, all trace vanished and the staff who knew where they were have long passed away. But it questions the BBC policy of treating the work as worthless after broadcast, paid for by the tax payer, but then junked or lost..

 

Stephen.

[chrisf]

The policy is coming back to bite. Look at Radio 7 which relies almost totally on repeats.

 

An awful lot of stuff is missing, including the episodes of Hancock's Half Hour starring Harry Secombe becaause Hancock went AWOL I think it's fair to say that lessons have been learned.

 

Chris

[Jenny Emily]

It's the same for television - stuff was wiped because short sighted people at the BBC thought no-one would ever want it again. Doctor Who is missing around a hundred episodes, with huge searches globally having plugged around forty previously missing episodes. Apparently after the edict went out in the 70s to stop wiping the master disks, some ignorant fool managed to wipe the complete Galaxy 4 even when another part of the BBC was negotiating a sale of the rights to show it.

[Sailor Charon]

Then again, radio 7 skipped quite a few episodes of even quite recent series like the News Quiz or I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. They'd have two or three from a given series (from the 1990s) but not the others...

[Xerces Fobe2]

Guess they got Snowy on the case

 

Xerces Fobe

[bertiedog]

It was more understanable with TV, Equity insisted on no repeats beyound 7 years, and before that high repeat fees, which discouraged storage of material on expensive recording tape,(not actually expensive when compared to the programme costs, a £250,000 show would take £700 of tape).

 

But Radio transcription disks were made for lots of radio output, and were stored at the BBC till the 1970's, then quietly were junked. Pleas were made for years to search overseas for the records, but it is now blindly obvious that nobody at the BBC did anything to trace the whereabouts of the missing recordings, and they covered it up with statements about the recordings that are now shown to be worthless..

 

ABC are as much at fault, to sit on the recordings for so long, 64 years!, and during a period when things like Journey into Space were recovered involving Australian recordings is just plain astonishing.

 

The Dick Barton recordings were known to exist from the 1950's, but the whereabouts were unknown. It was on record at the BBC that Commonwealth Transcription disk where made for all 1000+ episodes, all paid for by the tax payer!! and then assumed junked by the Radio Station involved.

 

Let's hope ABC and the New Zealand broadcasters come up with the missing Goon shows, two with Michael Bentine are already on the web, one source might be the American Forces Network archive as they had all the shows on double edited down disk versions for broadcast in Germany in the 1950's.

 

What shook me was the admission by the BBC that almost all the afternoon play output of 40 years is totally missing from the archive, what a waste......It should be made law to store or loose the copyright, that might concentrate the mind of the BBC on not losing things or simply not doing what they are paid handsomely to do, broadcast and store programmes for future generations. no wonder they are the most expensive broadcaster in the world, they simply have too much money to play with, and then do not spend it wisely, and treat output with contempt once broadcast, after all it was paid for by somebody else not them.

[bertiedog]

The policy is coming back to bite. Look at Radio 7 which relies almost totally on repeats.

 

An awful lot of stuff is missing, including the episodes of Hancock's Half Hour starring Harry Secombe becaause Hancock went AWOL I think it's fair to say that lessons have been learned.

 

Chris

 

I believe at least one Hancock with Harry Secombe has been found, and is on a US OTR, (Old Time Radio), website in the US, but not in the UK for copyright reasons with the BBC. The same applies to the two Micheal Bentine Goon Shows that have been traced in Australia, no quality copies available as yet, but Youtube have/had them.

OTR is in a happier state in the US, the sponsors of the show often stored copies, they paid hard cash to make them so did not throw them away!

Recently the original Marx Brothers 1930's Radio shows that the BBC recreated a few years ago have been found intact, stored for 75 years in a radio station in California, who did not know what was on the disks!!

ABC have Much Binding in the Marsh with Richard Murdock and Kenneth Horne, rumoured to be 300 episodes on transcription disc, and "Up the Pole" and other Jon Pertwee comedies, but not full series.

Stephen

[pete_mcfarlane]

I've heard it said that the problem with the BBC was that many of it's senior people came from the theatre and viewed TV broadcasts as like a theatre performance - essentially one offs never to be seen again (except possibly for a "repeat" a few days later, which was actually a second live performance). Most early TV was performed live and never recorded in the first place as the technology to do this didn't start to become reliable until the mid-1950s. This attitude seems to have carried over in the 1960s and 70s - TV shows were made, shown once and then never shown again.

 

Early US TV fared much better simply because it was pre-filmed to be shown at different times in umpteen time zones by different TV stations. So "Lost in Space" survives intact but "Doctor Who" doesn't......

 

There are also numerous lost early films - "London after Midnight" with Lon Chaney is the most famous example.

 

The missing TV show I'd most like to see is a Doctor Who story called "Web of Fear" set in the Underground tunnels. Only one episode survives and it's extremely creepy.

[bluebottle]

On the news today, the famous 1940's/1950's BBC radio series "Dick Barton Special Agent" , long thought lost or never recorded, despite being the most popular radio show made after the war!!.....has been found almost complete in the ABC Australian companies archive, disk recordings of all the series, with a cast especially for the Australian recordings, to match replacement recording of the first live series. They duplicated everything, same script, sounds, music, producer and director, but not the original cast.

 

Stephen.

Please tell me they translated it into Strine! I'd love to hear that!

[Jim Martin]

 

It should be made law to store or loose the copyright, that might concentrate the mind of the BBC on not losing things or simply not doing what they are paid handsomely to do, broadcast and store programmes for future generations. no wonder they are the most expensive broadcaster in the world, they simply have too much money to play with, and then do not spend it wisely, and treat output with contempt once broadcast, after all it was paid for by somebody else not them.

 

It seems rather unfair to be using the present tense for all this when the incidents you're talking about happened 50 years ago.

 

Jim

[bertiedog]

It seems rather unfair to be using the present tense for all this when the incidents you're talking about happened 50 years ago.

 

Jim

 

There are items from as little as 10 years ago missing, and all output is still not recorded, so it is not just about 50 years ago, and if it is, and the problems date from before then, what has the BBC been doing about it for the last 50 years? In other countries like the US series were stored more carefully as they had been paid for, not financed from taxes by civil servants who's responsibility seems only to spend fortunes on rubbish like Eldorado and reality trash shows. Looking after and treasuring cultural heritage should be a higher concern to the BBC, and yes it would include archiving rubbish shows as well as decent output.

Well into the period of policy to store programmes properly they lost items, like Dads Army, and many drama series are not in the archive, as advice was given that to hold for potential re-use would have been too costly at Equity's repeat rates..

[bertiedog]

There are also numerous lost early films - "London after Midnight" with Lon Chaney is the most famous example.

 

I have actually seen London after Midnight on an edited16mm copy in the mid 1960's, so I am always surprised when it is quoted now as completely lost, the BBC showed it in the late 1950's ( from a Radio Times listing), so copies must be around somewhere. It does get mixed up with Tod Browning's later sound remake, same story, but Chaney had died. Perhaps sadder is the missing, bar a few moments,"The Miracle Man" again with Lon Chaney.

 

Things do turn up, only weeks ago a store of Vitaphone shorts has been found in the States, and a batch of Vitaphone sound disks, fortunately containing sound for surviving Vitaphone films that had lost the disc to go with them.

 

Lon Chaney;s "Unknown" was found in Belgium, and Metropolis has been restored to it's full length and as the director Lang intended..... and most of Golddiggers of Broadway has now been traced.. an Oscar winning top grossing full colour film that went missing.

 

On the down side Cecil B DeMille's "Madame Satan" has been restored....a musical of overblown proportions done in his usual lack of taste!! So bad there is a fascination watching it just to see how bad his films could be.. he was good at epics, but musicals?. It features a party for hundreds of guests on a giant airship, which crashes in a storm, with the guests all parachuting to safety......nuff said?

[BR60103]

Canadian folk singer John Allen Cameron did a TV series for several years that featured a lot of great material. I heard that about 10 years ago the network that made them was wiping the tapes and John Allen started trying to buy up whatever was left. This was a Canadian private network.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has a large archive but I understand that the last person who was maintaining the odd recording devices needed for playback (wire recorders, 1/2'" tape) was about to retire. Haven't heard much since.

My wife was offered a stack of of transcription discs of My Music and My Word but never went around to pick them up... :(

[Ohmisterporter]

This may jog a few memories.

 

 

Geoff.

[Sc59401]

The missing TV show I'd most like to see is a Doctor Who story called "Web of Fear" set in the Underground tunnels. Only one episode survives and it's extremely creepy.

I'd love to see that series again. I remember being inspired to make Underground tunnels out of cardboard boxes when it was first broadcast. I think it more or less coincided with my first trip on the wonderful old Glasgow system.

[bertiedog]

The disposal of the radio transcription discs has always been a bone of contention, they were destroyed before disposal according to the BBC, to protect copyright material being misused, but quantities are around undamaged in private hands, and near unplayable because of lack of the specialist slow speed turntables. People were often not able to admit having them for fear of being accused of miss-appropriate possession, both of BBC property and then there is the copyright issue as well. The BBC have run amnesty periods when return was allowed without questions being asked, but the quantities that come forward are low, suggesting that staff who may have removed the material have long since died and the disks thrown away a second time.

Anyone who ran a private organisation that treated it's work with such low esteem would have long gone out of business, but, hey, it's only tax payers cash, who cares? .

,

[Steven B]

Don't forget that not so long ago the medium used to save radio and television programmes was very expensive. The Beeb had to decide what got kept and what was written over?

 

Do you keep every photo you've ever taken? No, you choose the best ones. Why? Because until digital camera's came along film and processing was expensive and you needed space to store the images.

 

Keeping everything ever produced would also be expensive - I'm sure they'd be plenty of people grumbling if license payers cash was spent keeping irrelevant broadcasts safe for decades. I certainly wouldn't like to job of deciding what gets kept and what was reused.

 

Didn't Bob Monkhouse have a masive archive of recordings, TV and radio? The extent of which was only discovered after his death and containing some real gems.

 

Happy modelling

 

Steven B.

[Ceptic]

Re :- Deleted / wiped historic BBC TV.

 

Back in 1952 , whilst at a Convent boarding school, I remember seeing some B/W 35mm. filmed programmes on 'Childrens' Hour' (The tv set being loaned to the school for King George VI's funeral). The 30min. series of documentaries were called "London Transport Cinegazette", and each one featured various aspects of the system's operation.

In 1986, I wrote to the BBC, asking whether they still had tape recordings of the series, in their archives ?. Their reply contained the following...

"We have referred your enquiry to our Film Library.......However, I regret to say, that these films are no longer held in our library".

What a loss ?!!. I'm sure that, if they'd survived, the sales of DVD copies would have been a big money-spinner.

The same goes for other programmes recorded on 35mm., e.g. 'Newsreel' and 'Children's Newsreel', although snippets of these do crop up on the BBC Archive website.

 

Regards

[bertiedog]

The cost on the face of it for TV recordings in those days in the 1960's would have been massive, an accountants nightmare, till you realise it was a tiny fraction of the cost of the programme compared to wages, and even the lighting bill, as others have said they simply could not see the relevance of keeping the recordings, and we are not talking about Ampex video tape for radio, but audio transcription records that were made, and then simply junked,

 

The cost of storage would have been minuscule.for these. Bob Monkhouse did indeed have a large collection, but many where lost when a court case was taken out by the Film industry about his rights to copyrighted materials.that he had purchased on the open market. Recovered films were destroyed at the time, although some went to the BFI. He had a separate collection of Radio material, and some is back in the archive collection, still pending copyright issues on most.

 

What annoys me is that the BBC were offered reliable slow speed audio tape recording as early as 1947/48 but decided that they should not work with commercial companies to develop the systems, which Ferrograph went ahead with anyway. My father was involved with the development of the ideas and constantly tried to get the BBC senior staff interested, but they simply would not budge till pushed very hard. The fact is they had the money to do the archiving, but refused to do it.

 

It was smaller departments like sound effects and music that showed the way, in particular the Goon Show needed audio tape to do the editing Spike Milligan pioneered for the show.

Stephen.

[pete_mcfarlane]

I have actually seen London after Midnight on an edited16mm copy in the mid 1960's, so I am always surprised when it is quoted now as completely lost, the BBC showed it in the late 1950's ( from a Radio Times listing), so copies must be around somewhere.

Wikipedia (the source of all dubious knowledge) says that the last known copy was destroyed in a fire at MGM in 1967. I'd guess the BBC's copy would have been destroyed when the rights to show it expired. It would be nice if the 16mm copy turns up though.

 

Was it any good?

[shortliner]

rubbish like Eldorado and reality trash shows. Looking after and treasuring cultural heritage should be a higher concern to the BBC, and yes it would include archiving rubbish shows as well as decent output.

 

 

Oh, Lawd! Please tell me that they HAVE wiped Eldorado!

[bertiedog]

Wikipedia (the source of all dubious knowledge) says that the last known copy was destroyed in a fire at MGM in 1967. I'd guess the BBC's copy would have been destroyed when the rights to show it expired. It would be nice if the 16mm copy turns up though.

 

Was it any good?

Err.....no it was not a "good" film, but Lon Chaney's make up as the Vampire, (played by Bela Lugosi in the remake), was as usual with him , quite incredible, a Vampire in a Top Hat with a fixed wicked leering grin!!. I barely remember the full length version shown late night on the BBC it was in the 1950's after all.

The 16mm film was very truncated, plot not clear at all in the 16mm version, done rather like an 8mm Castle version of a film. It left out the ending explanation that the Vampire was the Police Inspector, as in the original story "The Hypnotist", which Tod Browning himself re-wrote for both the films. In the sound remake the Vampire is not the Inspector, but an actor employed to play the Vampire, with Bela Lugosi playing to type!

 

Copyright has age lapsed on this image,

scan of original publicity print

Stephen.

[bertiedog]

For those of you who don't remember Lon Chaney, he was the top grossing Hollywood actor of the 1917 to 1930 period, famous for his amazing makeups and deformities his characters had in various movies, he only made one sound film, suffering from throat cancer he died before making Dracula, the part going to Bela Lugosi. His friend and producer Tod Browning had intended to re-make all the silent films with him in sound, but it was never to be......Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff took over his style of horror and drama acting, but never bettered him.

Shows the transformation he could achieve with greasepaint, he did his own make-up.

Both out of copyright images due to age lapse.

[pete_mcfarlane]

Err.....no it was not a "good" film, but Lon Chaney's make up as the Vampire, (played by Bela Lugosi in the remake), was as usual with him , quite incredible, a Vampire in a Top Hat with a fixed wicked leering grin!!.

He was an astonishingly good at makeup - when I was a child my father had an ancient and huge book called "The Movies" or something similar, with a spread showing all of his best make-up jobs.

 

I've seen the Lugosi remake ("Mark of the Vampire"). Lugosi plays a ham actor playing a vampire

 

 

 

[Pacific231G]

Re :- Deleted / wiped historic BBC TV.

 

Back in 1952 , whilst at a Convent boarding school, I remember seeing some B/W 35mm. filmed programmes on 'Childrens' Hour' (The tv set being loaned to the school for King George VI's funeral). The 30min. series of documentaries were called "London Transport Cinegazette", and each one featured various aspects of the system's operation.

In 1986, I wrote to the BBC, asking whether they still had tape recordings of the series, in their archives ?. Their reply contained the following...

"We have referred your enquiry to our Film Library.......However, I regret to say, that these films are no longer held in our library".

What a loss ?!!. I'm sure that, if they'd survived, the sales of DVD copies would have been a big money-spinner.

The same goes for other programmes recorded on 35mm., e.g. 'Newsreel' and 'Children's Newsreel', although snippets of these do crop up on the BBC Archive website.

 

Regards

Those particular films probably wouldn't have been BBC owned and they wouldn't have had any rights to keep copies. The films would have been supplied by the LPTB and returned to them after transmission so it might be worth contacting the LT museum to see if they still have them in an archive. In the early 1950s the only way to take a copy of a studio programme was to "telerecord" it by filming a television screen (it's more complex than that but that's the basic principle) Telerecordings were useful for keeping anything of historical value like state occasions but the quality wouldn't have been considered good enough for routine repeat transmissions. I've used telerecordings in programmes but it's a bt like using something taken from a VHS tape. In its early days videotape was hideously expensive (the heads had to be returned to Ampex for refurbishing after a fairly small number of hours) so considered as a short term storage medium not really for archiving.