Lost BSB archives article and appeal

[Ant Harvison]

Hi,



Thought I'd share this with you - might be of interest.



I've just uploaded an article on missing episode website WIPED about the sorry state of the BSB archives and the work being done to recover lost shows.



Here's the blurb, with the link to the feature beneath:



FOR A BRIEF but brilliant moment at the dawn of the 1990s, a new broadcaster emerged with the promise of high quality, high brow and high fidelity programming beamed down direct from the skies.



BSB offered UK viewers original content across five homegrown channels, providing an important TV platform for future household names such as Alistair MacGowan, Chris Morris, Armando Iannucci, Steve Coogan and Chris Evans.



Sadly, as TV historian Ian Greaves has discovered, precious little remains of the BSB archives. Together with the assistance of classic TV research organisation Kaleidoscope, Ian is slowly piecing together the fate of BSB material, seeking to recover as much of it as possible.



WIPED recently caught up with Ian to talk about his project. You can read the feature here: The Happening – Recovering The Lost BSB Archives Missing Episodes News and Features



If you have any recordings of BSB material then Ian would like to hear from you. You can email him at: bsb@kaleidoscopepublishing.co.uk



-Hope this doesn't appear like spamming. This campaign needs all the support it can get in reclaiming many important shows from the BSB era.

[Moor Larkin]

It must have been sometime in the mid-Nineties that I somehow ended up involved in some kind of marketing survey about TV. Every month or so I would get sent a big questionnaire about various TV shows. It began to feel quite embarrassing because most of the shows they were asking me about, I was ticking the "not watched"/"not interested" boxes.......



Anyhow, more interestingly, along the way, they sent me about three or four video-tapes that apparently contained *pilots* for various shows that were being made - or HAD been made obviously............... I never ever watched them because at the time I just had other things to do.....



They would ask me a whole lot of questions about what I thought of these shows..... I used to just make neutral comments to the questions they asked me. Eventually I tired of the whole thing and requested to be withdrawn from the survey.



I still have the video's, and have still never got round to watching them............



I wonder what the shows are, and who is in them.........

[taffy1967]

Back in 1990 I worked for Granada TV as a salesman and for the few months that BSB (which was digital TV remember) was transmitted before SKY took over, I was selling, or actually hiring out the boxes with the little white squarials.



Anyway I got my parents to invest in the BSB system (with my staff discount) due to them showing what existed of the Dr Who archives and I still remember spending a complete weekend recording and frantically changing tapes when they took the brave move to dedicate a whole weekend to Dr Who (mostly black & white apart from 'The Three Doctors') on the Galaxy channel.



I've still got most of it on several video tapes, or at least the interviews and stuff. So would they be interested in them?



I've still got the BSB TV Guide which features the Dr Who weekend safe somewhere too.

[Gerald Lovell]

name='taffy1967']Back in 1990 I worked for Granada TV as a salesman and for the few months that BSB (which was digital TV remember) was transmitted before SKY took over, I was selling, or actually hiring out the boxes with the little white squarials.



Anyway I got my parents to invest in the BSB system (with my staff discount) due to them showing what existed of the Dr Who archives and I still remember spending a complete weekend recording and frantically changing tapes when they took the brave move to dedicate a whole weekend to Dr Who (mostly black & white apart from 'The Three Doctors') on the Galaxy channel.



I've still got most of it on several video tapes, or at least the interviews and stuff. So would they be interested in them?



I've still got the BSB TV Guide which features the Dr Who weekend safe somewhere too.

I've got the BSB TV Guide and the DOCTOR WHO WEEKEND taped too, taffy! I remember how cross I was when they showed "The Edge of Destruction" and "The Brink of Disaster" the wrong way round! But they made up for it by showing them again at the end of the weekend, at about 1 am on the Monday morning - and I had work that day too!!

[taffy1967]

What memories and I can remember crawling into work on the Monday feeling like I'd been to the Glastonbury festival or something, I was completely exhausted and nerve racked from not wanting to miss recording a second of it.



I think the only blooper I did was to stop recording when JNT announced that first Peter Cushing Dalek movie was next, even though it was after the advert break.



I also seem to remember a short sound fault after 'The Three Doctors' ended.



For years my Mother hated the Dr Who theme tune and she blamed that BSB Dr Who weekend, because I completely dominated the TV and VCR for 2 whole days.

[Mr Cosmo]

Somewhere I still have the original programme guides, and there is a picture of me and my young children posing with our 'squarial'. I possibly have some tapes, but I have nothing to play them on anymore. I know I taped some stuff because a friend of a friend was on BSB and I was the only person he knew who was able to see his broadcasts, so I taped them for him and he used them as part of his showreel.

Such a shame BSB disappeared as fast as it arrived.

[taffy1967]

Yes I loved BSB and even though I had to then start selling/hiring out Sky boxes, I didn't bother getting a Sky system at home until 2006.