Stevenage was still relatively the same until the late 1980s just seemed to go down hill from the 90s onwards. Was such a lovely place and so many shops and department stores .
Brilliant footage, he’s a good look alike for Jon Pertwee from certain angles, nice fellow. The car looks awesome, it would be fantastic to see it return to the show in some way even for one episode. 😊
Top of the Pops Erased Media: Queen - Seven Seas Of Rhye (1974) First Version (Found) David Bowie - Starman (1972) (Found) The Beatles - Paperback Writer (1966) (Found, no original audio) The Beatles - Rain (1966) (Still lost :( why) And if you know more examples write in comments.
I made this short video just after we were in lockdown a few years ago ,it was bliss driving with hardly any traffic,now the traffic has doubled everywhere ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ymu5v1StxkE.html Ps I worked at Taylor instruments,and my dad worked at Kodak
I was born in '71 and grew up in Stevenage. It looked like a much more pleasant and enjoyable place to be than during when I was a teen onwards. I live stateside now but still in contact with Barclay friends. I hear its really gone to the dogs though.
The TV station's policy of reusing the same recording tapes to record so many different TV programs as a cost-saving measure during the 60s was definitely regrettable. So many episodes of TOTP were easily lost bcoz of that.
0:07 - That is Swingate House, I myself worked in that building in 2019 before it’s demolition in 2022. Also known as the building that collapsed during demolition.
I just stumbled upon this after following Doctor Who since i was younger back in 05" I love how you how much effort you put into creating this video.. not only effort but the well worded way you went about everything Hope you keep it up!! - 3 years in the making but i hope you are still going!!
I was born in Stevenage in 1960 and we lived there till 1969.., very happy times. Went to school at St Nicholas in Six Hills Way.. Dread to see the place now..😬 - Excellent job of upscaling, really good..
Not many people living in stevenage would remember this. Most of the people from 70’s have moved out a longtime ago. It was our town and as a teenager we had the best era in this town, brings tears to my eyes just thinking of the good time that we had. Mid 70’s joined the working world and literally everyone had a job and the weekends used to be wonderful. The old culture and values have disappeared and now we are left with a town with million problems. It was a town to be proud of.
I hope David scored a quid for his trouble. To Beatboys collectors, the footage would have been worth its proverbial (Carry that) weight in gold(en slumbers)
Shame on BBC for destroying a piece of music history with The Beatles and Tom Jones performing on TOTP. Would love to see Elton's "Rocket Man" performance, now 50 years old. Thankful viewers have been able to help reconstruct those lost performances. But at the time, TPTB didn't think of the cultural impact many of these shows (and the performers) would have on future generations. However, as one poster mentioned, the Beat Club and other German music shows were preserved in pristine quality in Germany. Those performances can be seen on their official YT channel.
give them a listen, maybe you'll have some gems, if u have any certain programs like maybe BBC sessions recordings or live recordings that were aired, it could help to ask on a forum or two dedicated to that band or artist and see if you have anything rare, u could have ur own moment like this who knows.....
Wondering now how many other rare TV & radio gems that are just lying about in shoe boxes etc. in attics and cellars around the World - maybe you could make a whole TV series about such discoveries and get them transferred to modern media formats, while these 8 mm films and VHS, Betamax and audio tapes can still be played?
The essential thing to remember - as well as video tape and film being relatively expensive then - is that once something had been shown once or maybe twice there was really no market for it. In 1966 the UK had just two national TV channels (which were on air for only about 8 hours per day), there was no internet, no home video recorders and TV content was almost never shown in cinemas because the movies business and the TV business were still things apart and saw themselves as at war with each other. The BBC - like ITV - was mainly about providing entertainment programmes - and odd as it may sound now there was a bit of a national outcry if very many things were repeated. TV was still a comparatively young industry and building comprehensive archives of everything it made was not very high up its agenda, just because - well, what for? Who would want it and how would they watch it? So, unless a show was sold for showing abroad, once it had been aired once or maybe twice, then it was largely considered disposable. That applied equally to Coronation Street and to The Beatles on TOTP. I was 13 in 1966 and I would love to have owned a copy of this - but I had no camera, no projector and - at that stage - not even a cassette recorder to grab the soundtrack - and it was the same for almost everyone. It's very hard to convey to young people today the degree of fame which the Beatles had (FAR FAR more than it's even possible for anyone to have today) - just because we lived in a world of so few media channels and the Beatles were on all of them every day in some way or another. In the same way, today's media world is also so different that I can see why the decision to discard so much of this stuff could seem incomprehensible.
But they kept Pinky & Perky & The Black & White Minstrel Shows from the same era. Stop making excuses for management incompetence and poor foresight, obviously any footage shot was going to be priceless in the future.
Wow, whatever those shows were sound quite lame by comparison. I had have to go again with the what were they thinking line of thought. I appreciate the OP's context about the time period, but it's quite a hard to believe shame that they couldn't get their heads around the notion of preservation sooner. It took the fools at BBC til 1978 to realize they should stop wiping their tapes. So much culture lost.
@nicadair7700 Yes they kept quite a bit here and there.Particularly of the Royals opening/presenting this or that.Its quite common to have video(and more likely filmed series ,some of it in high quality 16mm colour before colour TV was out to broadcast it) and stuff.But yes their choices of what to keep/wipe seem very odd now.
The Beatles also mimed to their classic "B" Side "Rain" on that broadcast. What were the producers of Top of The Pops thinking? What a dereliction of duty! I'm glad that Germany's "Beat Club" preserved their footage.
The Australian band Easybeats had their performance on Top of The Pops preserved on a film reel copy, which was discovered only a few years back. They performed roughly the same time as the Beatles. If a band not as big as the literal Beatles had their performance saved, surely there’s a copy of the Beatles performance hiding somewhere in someone’s collection?
I can understand a membe of the public having recorded with Limmited quality, but not the BBC, with all their expensive top quality recording equippment. It looks like Edwardian film stock.
