Lost television broadcast


Lost television broadcasts are composed of mostly early television programs and series that for various reasons cannot be accounted for in personal collections or studio archives.

Reasons for loss

A significant amount of early television programming is not lost but rather was never recorded in the first place. Early broadcasting in all genres was live and sometimes performed repeatedly. Due to there being no means to record the broadcast, or because the content itself was thought to have little monetary or historical value it wasn't deemed necessary to save it. In the United Kingdom, much early programming was lost due to contractual demands by the actors' union to limit the rescreening of recorded performances.
Apart from Phonovision experiments by John Logie Baird, and some 280 rolls of 35mm film containing a number of Paul Nipkow television station broadcasts, no recordings of transmissions from 1939 or earlier are known to exist.
In 1947, Kinescope films became a viable method of recording broadcasts, but programs were only sporadically filmed or preserved. Tele-snaps of British television broadcasts also began in 1947 but are necessarily incomplete. Magnetic videotape technologies became a viable method to record and distribute material in 1956. Televised programming was still considered disposable. What was recorded was routinely destroyed by wiping and reusing the tapes until the rise of the in the 1970s.
The ability for home viewers to record programming was extremely limited; although a home viewer could record the video of a broadcast by kinescope recording onto 8 mm film throughout television history or record the audio of a broadcast onto audiotape beginning in the 1950s, one could generally not capture both on the same medium until super-8 debuted in the 1960s. Attempting to film a television broadcast using the kinescope process required positioning the camera directly in front of the screen, blocking the view of other people trying to watch. This would have been very disruptive to the television viewing experience and as such home movies of this kind are exceptionally rare. Audio recordings, which do not require obstructing the view of the screen are more common and numerous copies of otherwise lost television broadcasts exist. The growing availability of home video recording from the late 1970s was also a benefit for television producers and archivers as video tape was now economical enough for a home viewer to afford and enabled television networks the ability to save much of their programming as well.

Significant lost broadcasts

Australia

Like most other countries, only a small portion of the early decades of Australian TV programming has survived. Many economic, technical, social and regulatory forces combined to prevent large-scale preservation of Australian programs from this period, and also contributed to the later destruction of most of what was recorded at the time. There was, and is, no regulatory requirement to lodge copies of programs with an archive authority such as the National Library of Australia.
In the first decade of Australian TV, 1956–1966, Australia produced very little original local content, compared to most other English-speaking nations. From the introduction of TV in Australia in 1956 to around 1964, the vast majority of locally produced original programming was made by the government-funded Australian Broadcasting Commission. By June 1964, the ABC had produced 185 of the 212 plays, all 31 operas, and 90 of the 95 ballets shown on Australian TV in that period. Some of this was recorded, but little of that material has survived.
Nearly all of the relatively small amount of original content produced by the two commercial networks operating in the same period was broadcast live, and was rarely recorded. One of the best-known and most often seen surviving recordings from this period is the footage that purports to be the recording of the inaugural broadcast of TCN-9 Sydney on 16 September 1956, but this is in fact a fabrication – the actual broadcast was not recorded at the time, so the station restaged it some days later, for archival and promotional purposes.
In this early period, the technology then available to pre-record television programs, or to record live broadcasts 'off-air', was relatively primitive. Although Australia introduced TV rather later than comparable nations like the UK and the USA, the use of videotape did not become widespread in the Australian industry until the early 1960s, so only a small number of episodes from the earliest period have survived. Nearly all of that material is in kinescope format.
Although many important ABC programs from these early days were captured as telecine recordings, most of this material was later lost or destroyed. In a 1999 newspaper article on the subject, author Bob Ellis recounted the story of a large collection of historic telecine recordings of early ABC drama productions, and other programs, including some of the first Australian TV Shakespeare productions, and the pioneering popular music show Six O'Clock Rock. Learning that the ABC planned to dispose of these recordings, Bruce Beresford, arranged for a friend to pose as a silver nitrate dealer, and the anonymous collector purchased the films for a nominal cost. Subsequently, the collector occasionally rented some of the films out to schools for a small fee, but unfortunately, the daughter of one of the actors involved recognised her father from a Shakespeare production, and told him about it. Assuming that the ABC still owned the print and was making money out of these recordings without compensating the actors, Weingott lodged an official complaint. Commonwealth police descended on the illegal collector, but he was warned that they were coming, and in a panic he destroyed almost all the material he possessed.
Well into the 1970s, it was still common for news, current affairs, sports coverage, game shows, talk/panel shows, 'infotainment' programs and variety shows to be broadcast live, and these were usually not recorded. In this early period, recording and editing TV shows on videotape was expensive and time-consuming, and because of the comparatively lower cost, and the high level of skill available to Australian TV networks in live broadcasting, and the lack of any market for such recordings, pre-recording or archiving of most day-to-day TV content was considered unnecessary and uneconomical. Although some news and other programming from this period has survived, most of what is still extant is material that was captured on film.
Another factor, common to all countries, was that before domestic video technology was introduced in the 1970s, there was generally no economic motive for Australian TV to make or keep recordings of most TV shows, except in the case of pre-produced 'mainstream' documentary, comedy or drama programs that could be sold to other stations in Australia, or to broadcasters in other countries. Likewise, virtually no private recordings exist of Australian TV material produced before domestic video was introduced, because viewers simply had no practical means to record programs off-air.
Before reliable, high-quality inter-city cable and satellite links were established, some Australian programs of the 1960s were routinely videotaped, usually for distribution to affiliate stations in other states – like the popular In Melbourne Tonight with Graham Kennedy – but the vast majority of these program tapes were later erased, or simply destroyed.
Even after videotape was well-established in Australian TV production, the practice of erasing and reusing tapes was common in both commercial TV and the ABC, and this continued well into the 1970s. Only a very small portion surviving of the many thousands of hours of videotaped programming made during the 1960s and early 1970s survives. The majority of ABC-TV's mainstream 'original' content was produced 'in-house'; consequently these programs all suffered considerable losses due to the Corporation's policy of 'recycling' videotape – a practice further exacerbated by budget cuts in the 1970s. In one notorious case, a controversial installment of the 1970s ABC comedy series The Off Show was lost because the show's producer vehemently objected to its religious satire, and deliberately erased the master tape the night before it was due to be broadcast.
Notable losses include:
All the episodes from the first 12 months' of the ABC's music magazine series GTK are now lost. The majority of the material recorded for the post-1970 episodes was rediscovered in ABC archives and storerooms in the early 2000s, when the ABC closed and sold off its Gore Hill, Sydney studio complex. This due to most of GTK program segments being recorded on film and then transferred to video for broadcast. Although many broadcast masters were wiped, many more were rescued and hidden by the program's later producer, Bernie Cannon, and nearly all the post-1970 filmed segments, including the archive of live-in-studio performances by local bands, have survived.
Other shows suddenly missing from the archives include most of the first three years' of Countdown, nearly all of the hundreds of 15-minute episodes of the ABC's popular soap Bellbird, two thirds of all the taped 166 episodes from the ABC's Certain Women, and a large proportion of the Ten Network's hugely popular Young Talent Time from the 1971–1976 era. Much of the early years of Nine's then-Saturday Morning children's program Hey Hey it's Saturday was unrecorded, and many episodes recorded in the early 1970s have since been erased.
Some programs or segments of programs from the mid 1970s onwards have been retrieved from people's home taping shows off-air.
No footage is known to exist of the Melbourne version of Tell the Truth.
General lack of repeats of 1950s and 1960s Australian series makes it difficult to know what is extant and what is lost. For example, there is no information available as whether any episodes still exist of Take That, sometimes considered to the first Australian television sitcom. Information on archival status is also lacking for other 1950s-era series like The Isador Goodman Show, It Pays to Be Funny, Sweet and Low, among others.
Some of the best-known 'survivors' of this period are comedy or drama series commissioned and broadcast by the ABC's commercial rivals. Frequently, these were outsourced productions made by private companies, such as Skippy, and most notably the many drama series made by Melbourne-based Crawford Productions, which at its peak in the 1970s had major primetime series running concurrently on all three Australian commercial networks. Crawfords retained the rights to its productions, and was able to earn money from reruns, so most of its production output was preserved. Crawford is now unique in Australian TV history because it still owns and markets a comprehensive archive of all its major productions from the 1960s and beyond, including Homicide, Division 4, Matlock Police, and The Sullivans.
The National Film and Sound Archive holdings of 1950s era shows include several episodes of the 1957 discussion series Leave it to the Girls, most of the 1958–1959 soap opera Autumn Affair, and a number of episodes of the comedy game show The Pressure Pak Show. These shows, produced by ATN-7 in Sydney, probably survive because they were pre-recorded for the purpose of interstate broadcast.

Belgium

Recovery efforts

The public appeal campaign the BBC Archive Treasure Hunt for the search for lost BBC productions has ended. The BBC still does accept materials and they can be contacted through the "Donating to the BBC Collection" page of the history on the BBC website.
On 20 April 2006 it was announced on Blue Peter that a life-sized Dalek would be given to anyone who found and returned one of the missing episodes of Doctor Who.
Many lost films and TV broadcast were found to have been preserved in the personal archives of comedian Bob Monkhouse after his death.
In December 2012, the Radio Times announced it was launching a hunt for more Doctor Who episodes in aid of the show's 50th anniversary, by publishing their own list of missing episodes and setting up a specific address which the public can email if they have any information on lost episodes.