Wiping
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wiping or junking is an economic move by radio and television companies in which old audiotapes, videotapes and telerecordings (kinescopes) are erased and reused or destroyed. It was particularly prevalent during the 1960s and 1970s, but the practice is now much rarer, as broadcasters have come to understand the economic and cultural value of keeping archive material.
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[edit] Overview
[edit] BBC
The BBC, the United Kingdom’s public service broadcaster, had, like other broadcasters of the time, no archival policy in place until 1978. There are 3 main reasons why television material was junked in the early years.
[edit] Technological
The BBC’s television collection was originally a live medium and dates back to 1936 - the earliest material consists of pre-war demonstration films. The bulk of programming was either from the studio or from outside broadcasts and the hours of transmission were very limited. Film was a relatively minor contributor to the output. For example, no studio or OB programmes exist for 1936-1939 because the technology did not exist to record them. The earliest use of a recording method for television was not available until 1947, where the image was recorded onto film where, in simple terms, a film camera was pointed at a television screen and the film then processed in the usual way. However, the vast majority of programmes, which were still live, were never recorded. Videotape was not introduced in the UK until 1958, and only slowly at first; it was then an expensive and difficult technology and often a programme was erased. The value of the videotape itself was such that it was considered worthwhile to transfer programmes to film recordings for retention or sale, and then re-use the tape. This re-use of videotape enabled the BBC to reduce the cost of productions at the time.
[edit] Cultural
As TV was a live medium, programmes continued to be recorded ‘as live’ even with the introduction of videotape, because of the technical limitations of early video-tape recording. Drama and Entertainment output was firmly studio based and followed the tradition of live theatre - film was only gradually introduced in the 1960s. For example, the Sunday Night Play (a major event in the 1950s) was performed live in the studio. On Thursday, it was repeated with another live performance - the artists all being invited back to perform it all over again. This was a very different environment to that of today where most equivalent material is now pre-recorded and it is physically possible to preserve it for the future. Live output which was not recorded obviously could not be preserved.
[edit] Rights
All television programmes have copyright and other rights issues associated with them. For some genres of programmes, such as Drama and Entertainment, the actors, writers and musicians involved in a production, all have underlying rights. In the past, these rights were defended rigorously - permission could even be denied by a contributor for the repeat or re-use of a programme. Talent unions were highly suspicious of the threat to new work if programmes were repeated, indeed, before 1955 Equity insisted that any telerecording made (of a repeat performance) could only "be viewed privately" on BBC premises and not transmitted.
If telerecordings were made of a work and that work was then acquired by another party, then the recording had to be destroyed - this happened in 1955 when 20th Century Fox acquired the rights to Anastasia and the 1953 BBC telerecording of the play had to be destroyed. There are even examples from the past of agents demanding that programmes be wiped so that they could never be repeated (nowadays, actors are almost-invariably forced to sign away these rights to the producing company).
High-profile examples of programme losses include many episodes of The Wednesday Play, Doctor Who, Z-Cars, the vast majority of the BBC's Apollo 11 Moon landing studio coverage and all 147 episodes of the 1965-1967 soap opera United!. The first acting appearance of folk musician Bob Dylan, in a 1963 play entitled The Madhouse on Castle Street, was erased in 1968. [1] There is lost material in all genres.
[edit] Finding missing BBC programmes
There are many gaps in some series of BBC programmes – Dixon of Dock Green, Hancock's Half Hour, Doctor Who, Sykes, Out of the Unknown, Z Cars - but since the establishment of an archival policy for television in 1978, BBC television archivists and others have, over the years, used various contacts in the UK and abroad to try to track down any missing programmes. For example all BBC Worldwide (it was called Enterprises in those days) customers who had bought programmes from the BBC in the past - Doctor Who is a prime example of this - were contacted to see if they still had copies which could be dubbed for the archives. The BBC also has close contacts with the National Film and Television Archive, which is part of the British Film Institute and their "Missing Believed Wiped" event which was first held in 1993 and is part of a campaign to locate lost gems of British Television. There is also a network of genuine collectors who, if they find any programmes missing from the BBC archives, will contact the BBC with information or sometimes even the actual programme. Some examples of programmes recovered for the archives are: Steptoe and Son, Dad's Army, Out of the Unknown, Doctor Who, The Likely Lads, Play for Today.
The pilot episode of Are You Being Served? survives only in black and white, and it is not known if the original colour master was lost, or wiped from the BBC archives. It appears in black and white on the 2003 release of the DVDs of the show.
Early episodes of the popular music chart show, Top Of The Pops were wiped by the BBC or not recorded, and only broadcast "live". The last edition that was wiped from the BBC archives dates to September 8, 1977. There are only 4 complete episodes surviving from the 1960s, many otherwise missing episodes survive in fragments.
Most of the episodes of the Sandie Shaw Supplement (A music & "variety" show, hosted and starred the famous singer) recorded in 1967, were promptly wiped after Sandie Shaw asked for the original films to be converted to videocassette. There are only 2 episodes that exist to the present day, and are floating around on internet purchasing sites, such as Ebay.
[edit] ITV
The BBC was not alone in this practice - many ITV television companies in the UK also wiped videotapes and destroyed telerecordings, leaving gaps in their archive holdings. The state of the archives varies greatly between the different companies; Granada Television holds a large number of its older black and white programmes, all the episodes of Coronation Street are believed to have survived (although some from the early 1970s have survived only in the form of black and white telerecordings). Most from the 1960s also only survive as telerecordings. Some early episodes are also believed to be damaged or in poor quality), whereas much of the output of other broadcasters — such as many early episodes of The Avengers (shot in the electronic studio rather than on film) produced by Associated British Corporation — have been destroyed.
[edit] United States
In the United States, the major broadcast networks also engaged in the practice of wiping up until the late 1970s. Many episodes were erased, especially daytime programming, such as daytime soap operas and game shows. The daytime shows, almost all of them having been taped, were erased because it was believed at the time that no one wanted to see them after their first broadcast. The success of cable television networks devoted to reruns of these genres proved that this was not the case, but the damage had been done. Of all the American soaps, Days Of Our Lives and Passions are the only ones with all their episodes in existence.
Almost all of The Tonight Show with Jack Paar and the first ten years hosted by his successor Johnny Carson were taped over by the network, which is why Carson's late 1960s shows looked muddy compared to his competitor Dick Cavett on ABC; NBC was using the Tonight Show tapes repeatedly. Many early sporting events, such as the World Series and some of the early years of the Super Bowl were also lost.
It is believed that virtually the entire archive of the American DuMont Television Network, covering its whole history from 1946 to 1956, was disposed of during the 1970s by a "successor" broadcaster (believed to be ABC, supposedly they "dumped the kinescopes/videotapes into the East River to make room for other tapes at a New York City warehouse"). Only a few Kinescopes still exist.
An example of a casualty of wiping/non-preservation, the CBS daytime version of To Tell the Truth does not have a complete archive. A small number of episodes prior to 1966 still exist, two of which — one from 1963 and one from October 25, 1965 — exist on film. The rest survive on videotape. It is believed a large number of episodes from 1966 to 1968 do exist. Game Show Network has shown most of the surviving black-and-white daytime episodes and at least three in color (two from 1967 with Mark Goodson as guest host and the final episode from September 6, 1968 with Bud Collyer). Another example is The $10,000 Pyramid (renamed several times over the years with higher dollar amounts), which was on two networks (CBS from 1973—1974 and ABC from 1974—1976 and possibly 1977). Of those episodes that survived, about three weeks worth (15 episodes), which were taped at CBS Television City in Hollywood instead of the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City, were spared. Another example is Concentration, which had a very long run (1958—1973 on NBC and 1973—1978 in syndication). Only a handful of episodes exist amongst collectors. The NBC version was believed to be wiped as many early episodes were live, hence only a kinescope would exist from that time, while the syndicated version's fate is unknown. Only one episode is known to be in the hands of collectors.
For a long time, it was thought that a huge majority of episodes of the original version of the Hollywood Squares were wiped/destroyed until a large number of episodes, mostly from the short-lived 1968 NBC prime-time and long-running 1970s syndicated runs but including some daytime episodes, such as a 1977 Storybook Squares episode that aired on Game Show Network, were discovered. GSN aired many of those episodes, and on one or two occasions left the NBC color peacock intact (and even on one other occasion, also kept the NBC "snake" logo intact).
[edit] Recovery
Since the BBC archive was first audited in 1978, a number of episodes thought missing have been returned to them from various sources. An appeal to broadcasters in other countries who had shown missing programmes (notably Australia, New Zealand, Canada and African nations such as Nigeria) produced "missing" episodes from the archives of those television companies. Episodes have also been returned to broadcasters by private film collectors who had acquired 16mm copies from various sources. Two episodes of the first series of The Avengers (an Associated British Corporation production) which were thought to be missing were recovered from the UCLA film archive in the United States. The BBC sitcom Steptoe and Son now has all of its episodes existing in the archives, after copies of episodes thought to be lost were recovered from early home video recordings made by the writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson at the time, and only recovered in the late 1990s. A few audios of Til Death Us Do Part have been recovered, as well as an extract of the pilot episode and two episodes from the Third Series.
Off-air home audio recordings of various television programmes have also been recovered, at least preserving the soundtracks to otherwise missing shows, and some of these — particularly from Doctor Who — have been released on CD by the BBC following restoration and the addition of narration to describe purely visual elements. Tele-snaps, a commercial service of off-screen shots of programmes often purchased by actors and television directors to keep a record of their work in the days before videocassette recorders, have also been recovered for many missing programmes.
On the morning of September 11, 2006, the Game Show Network (aka GSN) aired an extremely rare surviving episode of the ABC version of Password from December 7, 1971. A second studio master episode is believed to have survived as well. An additional small number of episodes survive amongst videotape traders, including the final episode from 1975. UCLA also has a small number of episodes in their archives. Both this version's and most of the CBS daytime version's episodes are considered lost and/or destroyed. Most of the CBS nighttime version and final daytime year (the latter of which was produced in color) survive. In the case of the color episodes, they were edited for syndication. The ABC version was supposedly wiped to record Richard Dawson's Family Feud. There are many other game shows, as well as other kinds of shows (eg. soap operas, sitcoms, etc.) which are probably lost forever.
[edit] See also
- Doctor Who missing episodes
- The Likely Lads (1 found)
- Dad's Army (2 found)
- Hancock's Half Hour
- Not Only... But Also
- Do Not Adjust Your Set
- At Last the 1948 Show
- Secrets
- Hollywood Squares
[edit] References
- Fiddy, Dick. Missing, Believed Wiped — Searching for the Lost Treasures of British Television. London: British Film Institute. 2001. ISBN 0-85170-866-8.
