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Video Revival
Oct. 15th, 2008 04:05 pmThroughout the 80s, my parents used to tape a heap of daytime schools and children's programmes for me, and this resulted in a mountain of VHS tapes that had been sitting largely forgotten at the back of the video cupboard for a couple of decades. It's also a habit that somehow spread to me, as I then continued taping virtually everything I or any of my siblings happened to watch in the 90s and storing it away with the rest of the repository. A few weeks ago, my parents decided to do something about them before they were lost forever, so they got a VHS to DVD convertor and started rescuing them. And among the things that my parents brought with them to Boston last week were four DVDs, the result of their digging efforts so far.
After receiving those I've started on my half of the plan, packaging the DVD videos up neatly into episodes and releasing them to roam free on the Internet so that they can be viewed again. I've set up a Youtube account for this by the name of http://uk.youtube.com/user/TributeToThePast (named because there are at least a couple of people on my Friends list who would have called it a huge missed opportunity if I hadn't) and have put up a few of the rarer ones - these amount to a few episodes of Video Maths (a once hi-tech maths programme aided by the BBC Micro), Chockablock, The Flumps and the UK attempt at turning Cluedo into a panel quiz, complete with Richard Wilson as the Reverend Green. As more videos are converted I hope to keep putting the really unique stuff up there.
I skipped through the four DVDs so far and noted down names of programmes and episode titles as they went past - there isn't anything totally earth-shattering here from my point of view, but there are definitely a couple of things that Youtube doesn't have (Bertha, Pigeon Street and the Rainbow pantomime will probably be next on my list). The contents seem to be split across 80s British and 90s American programmes on each one - I would have expected the tapes to have either one or the other without mixing them as much, but I don't know the process involved in getting them into this state in the first place.
If there's anything that you'd particularly like to see again, mention it in the comments and I'll put it up for you. (I, personally, can't wait for Wondermaths to turn up and for me to prove that it did exist and I'm not just making a sci-fi/maths serial up.)
Now that I look at it, these might also be quite telling indicators of what turned me into the... fine, upstanding citizen that I am today.
( The list so far )
After receiving those I've started on my half of the plan, packaging the DVD videos up neatly into episodes and releasing them to roam free on the Internet so that they can be viewed again. I've set up a Youtube account for this by the name of http://uk.youtube.com/user/TributeToThePast (named because there are at least a couple of people on my Friends list who would have called it a huge missed opportunity if I hadn't) and have put up a few of the rarer ones - these amount to a few episodes of Video Maths (a once hi-tech maths programme aided by the BBC Micro), Chockablock, The Flumps and the UK attempt at turning Cluedo into a panel quiz, complete with Richard Wilson as the Reverend Green. As more videos are converted I hope to keep putting the really unique stuff up there.
I skipped through the four DVDs so far and noted down names of programmes and episode titles as they went past - there isn't anything totally earth-shattering here from my point of view, but there are definitely a couple of things that Youtube doesn't have (Bertha, Pigeon Street and the Rainbow pantomime will probably be next on my list). The contents seem to be split across 80s British and 90s American programmes on each one - I would have expected the tapes to have either one or the other without mixing them as much, but I don't know the process involved in getting them into this state in the first place.
If there's anything that you'd particularly like to see again, mention it in the comments and I'll put it up for you. (I, personally, can't wait for Wondermaths to turn up and for me to prove that it did exist and I'm not just making a sci-fi/maths serial up.)
Now that I look at it, these might also be quite telling indicators of what turned me into the... fine, upstanding citizen that I am today.
( The list so far )
