'A staple part of the BBC's school summer holiday schedules' according to Wikipedia. But was it? As ever, the reality is more nuanced than the internet would have us believe...
Ask anyone of a certain age what television series they remember watching during the school summer holidays of the 1970s, and you’ll get one of two answers: a) ‘I didn’t sit indoors watching television during the holidays’ or b) ‘Robinson Crusoe’.
The Franco London Productions TV film series The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe had first aired on BBC1 in the autumn of 1965 and is perhaps best remembered for its theme and incidental music by Gian Piero Reverberi – once heard, never forgotten (the music score had been appended to the original German version at the insistence of the BBC when the serial was dubbed into English). In the title role, actor Robert Hoffman made for a somewhat ‘mittel-European’ Crusoe, with his blonde, Aryan good looks: his English voice was dubbed by Lee Payant.
I saw this original broadcast, which occupied a 5pm slot on Tuesday evenings from 12 October 1965 until 4 January 1966. It formed part of an early evening schedule that included the forgotten magazine series Tom-Tom, and The Magic Roundabout (which made its TV debut the same week as Crusoe). Towards the end of the run, the BBC’s brand-new storytelling series Jackanory was slotted in before Crusoe at 4.45pm, and with this, the corporation’s children’s output had found a successful line-up from which it would not deviate for a couple of generations.
A repeat run of Robinson Crusoe began in February 1967 and another in June 1969. The serial still occupied the same teatime slot, but when it returned, in 1972, it was in the recently introduced summer morning programme schedule. Preceded by The Flashing Blade (another classic enshrined in the memory for its summer morning associations), the repeat run kicked off on Wednesday 23 August at 10am, following an episode of Mr. Benn. The episodes were stripped across weekday mornings at this same time, ending on Friday 8 September. Although I was well aware of the new morning schedule and had been following the Tintin adventure The Crab With the Golden Claws a few weeks earlier, I took no notice of these summer Crusoes. But I wasn’t done with the series just yet.
The following year it was back, restored to its early evening slot. Scheduled at 5.15, it made for a black and white hiatus between Blue Peter at 4.50 and Hector’s House at 5.40, both of which were broadcasting in colour (although this made no difference to me, watching on a monochrome set). The serial was now eight years old, and watching this 1973 repeat run felt very nostalgic: it got a name check most weeks in my diary. In retrospect, it seems unusual that the BBC chose to show a black and white serial in an evening schedule of colour programmes, and unsurprisingly this was to be its last sighting in this slot.
The summer morning repeats continued in 1975, with a run on BBC1 Scotland during July, and the national service in August. By now, the series had become a staple of morning scheduling alongside other oldies like Whirlybirds (1957) and Camp Runamuck (1965), and rolled around again on Saturday 5 March 1977 at 9.35am – the morning’s programmes having kicked off with The Mister Men at 9.00am, and film cartoon series Jeannie at 9.15. A final repeat run, again on Saturdays, and this time at 10am, followed in April 1982, before the series was shelved, never to be seen on air again.
Of its eight runs on BBC television, Robinson Crusoe was seen four times in early evening slots, and four times in the mornings. Only two of these morning broadcasts fell during the school summer holidays – yet it is for these summer holiday morning screenings that the serial is best remembered: Wikipedia’s entry on the series describes it as a ‘staple’ of the BBC’s school summer holday schedules.
The same Wikipedia page also gives a name check to Tim Beddows who rescued the English-dubbed Crusoe prints from obscurity, some fifteen years after the serial’s last appearance on television. The BBC no longer held film prints in its archive, but Tim was determined to release the English dub on his recently founded Network label (at the time focused solely on the VHS video format), and after a lot of research, finally traced a complete set of prints to a film vault in Paris. The story was told in a BBC Radio 4 programme, Rescued Again, broadcast on 20 January 2011, and presented by the writer and film historian Glenn Mitchell.
Tim did more than merely release the serial: he bought the UK rights, and sales of the VHS tape (and, latterly DVD) were earning him a significant annual royalty. Following his passing in 2022 and the subsequent collapse of the Network label, the series ownership is now a grey area. The rights were certainly offered for sale during the liquidation process, but what, if anything became of this is unknown, as is the status of the physical materials – the film prints that Tim rescued from France and the digital copies owned by Network. Within the last decade, the films were sent to a London storage facility along with a lot of other Network-owned material, and hundreds of items from Tim’s personal film archive. When the Network label collapsed, the vault was left with an unpaid bill and refused to release the material. At time of writing, Robinson Crusoe is, therefore, ‘lost’ again, and the fate of those rescued film prints remains uncertain.
Network’s DVD of Robinson Crusoe, though deleted, is still readily available at reasonable prices from various online sources. Or you can, of course, resort to YouTube... for added atmosphere, try watching an episode a day at 10am...
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