Things you don't hear or see on TV anymore

Actually I've just found a clip of someone flicking through Sky at the time and I was wrong, UK Living, owned by Flextech, did caption BBC News not Sky News. So maybe their policy did change

To point out to Whataday Flextech had dealings with the BBC over UK Living and UK gold hence the reason for that deal coming out.

I'm sure the final Les Dennis series in 2002 was on Saturday nights. Though that was long after ITV had got rid of the lottery banner.

I thought programmes stopped getting wiped in the mid-1970s?

All the dates I'm looking at appear to suggest it moved to a Saturday long before 2002 - as early as 1996 apparently which surprises me as I thought it stayed in the Friday night slot longer than that.




The story goes that in the case of ATV, the stock/tapes decayed and became unusable as they weren't looking after them properly. Though of course like most broadcasters of the time they would wipe other stuff that they thought had no further use.

The BBC were still wiping stuff as late as 1993 - this was primarily childrens programming IIRC and included the programme Rentaghost - the fact it was being aired on UK Gold at the time saved it from joining however many Dr Who episodes are still missing.

I'm sure that even today not every programme made or shown is kept or exists

Every programme commissioned for transmission on BBC One/Two/Three/Four/CBBC/CBeebies has a tape (or now digital file) delivered to BBC Archives for retention. Whether they are retained in definitely is then a decision for BBC I&A. Most shows delivered on tape are, but when tape formats die there is then a discussion about whether every episode of every show needs to be retransferred to a new format, and whether some older players are retained to cope with ad hoc requests of stuff that hasn't been transferred.

(Do we need every episode of Kilroy transferred from 1" or D3 to DigiBeta and data tape?)

BBC News may have different policies for the News Channel.

Makes you wonder in the logic of making that decision really. Why would they wipe episodes of Rentaghost as if they're of no further use when UK Gold were actually showing them at the time? Seems to make no sense- if UK Gold were showing them, surely that should have said to them that the programme did have value?

The story goes, according to a Missing Episodes forum post, was that somebody was promoted to the head of Archiving in 1991 who didn't share the same vision as his predecessor and so gave the order to wipe things without consulting the children's department first.

As said, Rentaghost was wiped (later recovered from UK Gold), apparently a chunk of early Play School, Jackanory, Vision On and other things went as well.

This is interesting and speaks a bit about the 1990s purge, about two thirds down:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120305163939/http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/?page_id=781

Yes, and it's not just deliberate 'wiping' of course tapes do and did go missing. The main difference these days is that on file programmes are easier to store and backup.... but they're also a lot easier to delete, lose or corrupt.

That said, the BBC do have a system - 'Redux', that 'records' all of it's output and that goes back to 2006(?) so any output that is wiped is available somewhere (in transmission quality) so nothing is totally lost these days

I do remember a feature on Points of View in the early 90s about the archive and Anne Robinson said something along the lines of "only around three of our POV programmes are kept each year", which even then I found hard to believe.

One wonders if that comment was to stop a slew of letters coming in from people who had comments read out, lost their tape (home taping) of it being broadcast, and wanted a copy of it from the BBC.