A great shame, and thank you for acknowledging the loss.
You introduced me to Manhunt and The Guardians, both which I love, so in your own small way have been an archivist of these lost treasures by occasionally eulogising these forgotten shows.
Hopefully another company will come along and take up the reins, so that future generations can still witness a time when British television actually made honest, articulate and intelligent work.
When I worked in film archiving, we were told by the NFTVA conservators that there were more 1 inch tape recordings than there were useable hours left on the machines that could play them - which was sobering.
The machines were astronomically expensive when they were manufactured, so not many of them around and they were given away to archives when they were obsolete.
Some regional film archives are packed with regional production - I left about 15 years ago, so don't know the state of play, but just keeping things in storage is very expensive and transferring everything to digital was not considered fail proof and is a lot of work.
I remember a local newspaper story from the 1990's from down south somewhere about sewer workers running out of a sewer in fright because they had seen "ghosts" of Roman soldiers walking towards them up to their chests in the sewerage water. They described what the soldiers were wearing etc. This was all hilarious stuff for the newspaper but a local historian thought he had heard this story before and sure enough in the newspaper archives from the late 1800's, soon after the sewer had been built, he read an almost identical description of these "ghosts" but back then of course the workers had no idea they were Roman soldiers but anyway the descriptions matched. He dug further and found the sewer had been built with a Roman road as its base and had then all been covered over and built on and he noted that if a Roman soldier of average height for the time had his feet on that road his chest would indeed come up to the usual waterline in the sewer. This story shows us that "ghosts" are no more than slippages of people from one part of the electro-magnetic-spin (matter is made of these three concepts) pattern to another or more correctly slippages of the electro-magnetic parts of that matter so that these "ghosts" we can see usually have no ability to move matter in this part of pattern. On the other hand ghosts of young girls especially have been known to move make-up etc but not be seen as I heard myself one night staying in a hotel in Aberdeenshire. I heard footsteps in the corridor outside the room and no-one was there and in the room my girlfriend felt someone touching her. When we were leaving we asked in reception and were told the story of a young girl sitting in that room waiting for her father to return from the war or something and he never came back and how women's make-up often got strewn around that room and on one occasion small footprints were seen in the spilt powder. All I am saying is that one day soon we won't need those programme tapes as because of the nature of reality we will be able to watch these programmes again on the very day they were broadcast for the first time, their signals are not "out there" light years away in space they are still "right here" because in reality there are no dimensions only the appearance of them and one day we will be able to "go down" into the electro-magnetic-spin pattern making machine to help people living there. Why is it that all round the world we have stories of "elves", "brownies" etc etc etc helping people and these elves and brownies etc did the work so much faster and with more skill than the people being helped could? Were these people all deluded or were they recounting real events that we will be a part of in the future?
See the SIGMA3 document for details of how such a reality might have arisen from the middle of pattern i.e. that reality always existed ephemerally coming and going as do an infinity of others but if at some point in its "Brigadoon" type existence one of its parts could comprehend the whole then that ephemeral psuedo reality would be crystalised into a true everlasting reality, the wooden boy would have turned himself into a real boy. While I am speaking of this in the concepts of today this reality was almost certainly "crystalised" in the past using the concepts of spirit, angels and God, after all all that is needed for a reality to exist is that it be self consistent and the easiest way to be self-consistent is that the God of earth belives in the God of heaven and vice versa. That is what I meant when I said in the SIGMA3 thing that if you can think of any other self-consistent reality then there is no difference between that and any other and all are "equally" valid except that clearly God is at the heart of them all so the explanation that puts God at the top is the only truly correct one but God allows us to have other realities as we are silly children with one proviso and that is that we acknowledge it is him at the heart of them all. One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
I hope for a future where thousands of people work in a kind of European Restoration industry, searching out pre-Rainbow documents, film, photography, literature, etc. and recreating life as it was - the opposite of 1984's Records Department; going into the memory hole and undoing the censorship, the uncreation, the falsification we're living through. I can imagine Woes as the maverick genius who pioneers the whole project, raising public awareness of what was lost, going to King Morgoth for funds, and then recruiting idealistic young men and women for the great work.
On a related note, I have heard that they are going to be remaking Colditz. With an emphasis on the racism of the British officers toward a black prisoner. I wish I was joking.
That's a shame. I've heard of some of these productions, mostly through the Fortean Times.
I think I have a few Network dvds in my collection though I'm American .
A great shame, and thank you for acknowledging the loss.
You introduced me to Manhunt and The Guardians, both which I love, so in your own small way have been an archivist of these lost treasures by occasionally eulogising these forgotten shows.
Hopefully another company will come along and take up the reins, so that future generations can still witness a time when British television actually made honest, articulate and intelligent work.
I am an older gen X guy with British family ties and grew up with alot of these programs. It is sad to see what has happened.
Great essay, Woes.
When I worked in film archiving, we were told by the NFTVA conservators that there were more 1 inch tape recordings than there were useable hours left on the machines that could play them - which was sobering.
The machines were astronomically expensive when they were manufactured, so not many of them around and they were given away to archives when they were obsolete.
Some regional film archives are packed with regional production - I left about 15 years ago, so don't know the state of play, but just keeping things in storage is very expensive and transferring everything to digital was not considered fail proof and is a lot of work.
Phil
I remember a local newspaper story from the 1990's from down south somewhere about sewer workers running out of a sewer in fright because they had seen "ghosts" of Roman soldiers walking towards them up to their chests in the sewerage water. They described what the soldiers were wearing etc. This was all hilarious stuff for the newspaper but a local historian thought he had heard this story before and sure enough in the newspaper archives from the late 1800's, soon after the sewer had been built, he read an almost identical description of these "ghosts" but back then of course the workers had no idea they were Roman soldiers but anyway the descriptions matched. He dug further and found the sewer had been built with a Roman road as its base and had then all been covered over and built on and he noted that if a Roman soldier of average height for the time had his feet on that road his chest would indeed come up to the usual waterline in the sewer. This story shows us that "ghosts" are no more than slippages of people from one part of the electro-magnetic-spin (matter is made of these three concepts) pattern to another or more correctly slippages of the electro-magnetic parts of that matter so that these "ghosts" we can see usually have no ability to move matter in this part of pattern. On the other hand ghosts of young girls especially have been known to move make-up etc but not be seen as I heard myself one night staying in a hotel in Aberdeenshire. I heard footsteps in the corridor outside the room and no-one was there and in the room my girlfriend felt someone touching her. When we were leaving we asked in reception and were told the story of a young girl sitting in that room waiting for her father to return from the war or something and he never came back and how women's make-up often got strewn around that room and on one occasion small footprints were seen in the spilt powder. All I am saying is that one day soon we won't need those programme tapes as because of the nature of reality we will be able to watch these programmes again on the very day they were broadcast for the first time, their signals are not "out there" light years away in space they are still "right here" because in reality there are no dimensions only the appearance of them and one day we will be able to "go down" into the electro-magnetic-spin pattern making machine to help people living there. Why is it that all round the world we have stories of "elves", "brownies" etc etc etc helping people and these elves and brownies etc did the work so much faster and with more skill than the people being helped could? Were these people all deluded or were they recounting real events that we will be a part of in the future?
See the SIGMA3 document for details of how such a reality might have arisen from the middle of pattern i.e. that reality always existed ephemerally coming and going as do an infinity of others but if at some point in its "Brigadoon" type existence one of its parts could comprehend the whole then that ephemeral psuedo reality would be crystalised into a true everlasting reality, the wooden boy would have turned himself into a real boy. While I am speaking of this in the concepts of today this reality was almost certainly "crystalised" in the past using the concepts of spirit, angels and God, after all all that is needed for a reality to exist is that it be self consistent and the easiest way to be self-consistent is that the God of earth belives in the God of heaven and vice versa. That is what I meant when I said in the SIGMA3 thing that if you can think of any other self-consistent reality then there is no difference between that and any other and all are "equally" valid except that clearly God is at the heart of them all so the explanation that puts God at the top is the only truly correct one but God allows us to have other realities as we are silly children with one proviso and that is that we acknowledge it is him at the heart of them all. One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181201013810/http://bodgeitandscarper.org/
Some more background https://royaldutchshellplc.com/2008/01/06/crackpot-or-genius-has-a-shell-boffin-stumbled-on-a-scientific-breakthrough/
I hope for a future where thousands of people work in a kind of European Restoration industry, searching out pre-Rainbow documents, film, photography, literature, etc. and recreating life as it was - the opposite of 1984's Records Department; going into the memory hole and undoing the censorship, the uncreation, the falsification we're living through. I can imagine Woes as the maverick genius who pioneers the whole project, raising public awareness of what was lost, going to King Morgoth for funds, and then recruiting idealistic young men and women for the great work.
On a related note, I have heard that they are going to be remaking Colditz. With an emphasis on the racism of the British officers toward a black prisoner. I wish I was joking.