Information AboutWiping |
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Wiping or '''junking''' is an economic move by Radio and Television companies in which old Audiotape s, Videotape s and Telerecording s are wiped (deleted) 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. OVERVIEW BBC The BBC , the United Kingdom’s national public service had, like other broadcasters of the time, no archival policy in place until the mid 1970’s. There are 3 main reasons why television material was junked in the early years. 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 broadcasting 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 until 1947 , and the method was film recording where, in simple terms, a film camera was pointed at a television screen and the image recorded on film. However, the vast majority of programmes, which were still live, were never recorded. Videotape was not introduced until the late 1950 s. This would in time revolutionise TV production techniques but in the early days it was an expensive and difficult technology and often a programme was over-recorded to tape the next week’s episode. 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 that time. Cultural As TV was a live medium, programmes continued to be recorded ‘as live’ even with the introduction of videotape. Drama and Entertainment output was firmly studio based and followed the tradition of live Theatre - film was only gradually introduced in the 1960 s. 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 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. 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. There are even examples from the past of agents demanding that programmes be wiped so that they could never be repeated. High-profiles 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 . {Link without Title} Finding Missing BBC Programmes There are many gaps in some series of BBC programmes – '' Dixon Of Dock Green '', '' Hancock '', '' Doctor Who '', '' Sykes '', '' Out Of The Unknown '', '' Z Cars '' - but since the establishment of an archival policy for television in the 1970s, 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 ''. ITV The BBC was not alone in this practice - many ITV television companies in the UK also wiped videotapes and destroyed Telerecording s, 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. Many from the 1960s also only survive as telerecordings), whereas much of the output of other broadcasters – such as many early episodes of '' The Avengers '' produced by Associated British Corporation – have been destroyed. United States In the United States , the major broadcast networks also performed wiping up until the late 1970s. Many episodes were erased, especially daytime programming, such as daytime Soap Opera s and Game Show s. 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. 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. 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 Africa n 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 . 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 Actor s and Television Director s to keep a record of their work in the days before Videocassette Recorder s, have also been recovered for many missing programmes. SEE ALSO
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