The further back in television history you go, the greater are the gaps in
the archival record of transmitted material. This is actually true of most areas
of cultural activity - it takes a certain time before the demand for an archive
grows loud enough to be met. In television, the ability to create archives of
output was further hindered by technical and financial factors.
The earliest material was live and unrecordable until the introduction of telerecording in
the late 1940s, but this was sparingly used and most of what remains from the
1950s is that which was originally shot on film. The introduction of videotape
at the end of that decade brought a switch from primarily live to primarily
recorded production, but this didn't immediately create a comprehensive archival
record because the high cost of tape meant that it was considered preferable to
wipe and re-use it. What's more, re-use and rights restrictions meant that drama
and entertainment programmes were most likely to be discarded. All the same,
some of these discarded programmes did survive - at overseas television stations
or archives, in the possession of those involved in the production, or in the
hands of private collectors.
Since 1993, the BFI, in association with the
BBC, ITV, and the classic TV
fans' organisation Kaleidoscope, have been running a campaign called
Missing, Believed Wiped to locate and recover television programmes known to be missing
from the public and broadcasting archives. The campaign has had a number of
notable successes over the years: the two lost series of Steptoe and Son (BBC, 1962-74)
restored by the BFI from copies kept by writers Galton and Simpson; the BBC's
recovery of two missing Dad's Army (1968-77) episodes from a collector; a lost
Dennis Potter play uncovered at LWT. But the
collection uncovered at the Library of Congress in 2010 surpasses everything else in scale, quality and vintage,
comprising as it does more than 60 classic dramas originally transmitted on BBC
or ITV from 1957 to 1969 - well over 100 hours of material.
These titles formed part of a collection of over 20,000 items donated to the
Library of Congress by US National Educational Television (the forerunner of the
Public Broadcasting Service which replaced it at the end of the 1960s), through
its flagship channel WNET/Thirteen, New York. Then, as now, British productions
of literary classics were seen as quality television, and frequently imported
for transmission by WNET. Fortunately, they were also retained and handed over
to the Library of Congress, where they remained uncatalogued until a researcher
looking for productions of Shakespeare found some of them and noted the presence
of others. Later, browsing the Kaleidoscope website, he noticed that many titles
he remembered were listed as missing and the process of identifying the
collection was underway.
Most of the rediscovered programmes are television versions of stage
productions or literary adaptations, though there are also some contemporary
dramas, such the two Wednesday Plays from 1965: 'Auto Stop', starring David
Hemmings, and 'The Bond', with Hannah Gordon. The 1967 National Theatre
production of Much Ado About Nothing (BBC), with a cast including Derek Jacobi
and Maggie Smith, leads the Shakespeare element, which also includes Don
Taylor's 1962 A Winter's Tale (BBC), and a 17-year-old Jane Asher in Romeo and
Juliet (ITV, 1962). Works by Chekhov and Ibsen are also prominent and French
writing, both classic and modern, features significantly, including Sean Connery
in Jean Anouilh's Colombe (1960) and Leonard Rossiter and John Le Mesurier in Jules Romains's satire Doctor
Knock (Theatre 625, 1966).
The anthology series of stories by Georges Simenon, Thirteen Against Fate (BBC, 1966), is
recovered almost complete, while all eight parts of Granada's 1963 series The
Victorians, produced by Philip Mackie, were also found. Another Mackie production
for Granada, The Changeling (1965) features well-known 1960s TV faces
Nerys Hughes and Patrick Troughton before the roles which made them famous, while
Troughton also appears, alongside Jack Smethurst, Gretchen Franklin and a cast
of almost 100, in the ambitious 1960 BBC production of The Insect Play. Possibly
the most interesting single item, though, is the 1965 remake of Nigel Kneale's
controversial 1954 TV screenplay of George Orwell's 1984.
Although examples of classic drama from this period did already exist in the
archives, the discovery of this collection highlights the sort of output that
was relatively common fare on British television - even on commercial TV - in
the 1950s and 60s, but is now very rare: seemingly confined to BBC Four or
Sky Arts. Apart from Shakespeare, most of the dramatists featured in the collection
have virtually disappeared from the screen, as has more contemporary stage work.
Even the original dramas in the LOC find (there were more than two Wednesday
Plays in the WNET collection, though the others weren't missing) seem a relic
of past television output. As a whole, these rediscoveries reveal a great deal
about the early development of television drama, and return to us an exceptional
record of great productions and performances.
Steve Bryant
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