VHS is Fifty

Part Two: ‘I’ve Got the Knobs on My Side’.

By the time our household acquired its first video recorder, I already owned a couple of VHS tapes, onto which a fellow enthusiast had copied rare recordings of Thunderbirds episodes. The quality was somewhat lacking, the tapes having been copied from three-year-old recordings on the U-Matic format, but that hardly mattered: for the first time ever, I had taken control of the television set. 

The very first off-air recording I made myself was an episode of Steptoe and Son, shown on Friday 14 November on BBC2. Divided We Stand was classic Steptoe – it’s the episode where Harold divides up the Steptoe residence into ‘two self contained apartments’. Who can forget the moment where the pair argue over the television set? Harold: ‘I have the law of contract on my side’. Albert: ‘I’ve got the knobs on my side’. Having taped the episode at 9pm, I played it again two hours later for the benefit of my brother, who had been out earlier. Nobody used the expression back then, but we’d just experienced the phenomenon of ‘time shifting’. Like Albert Steptoe, we now, metaphorically, had ‘the knobs on our side’.

What I most looked forward to with VHS was being able to record vintage series from the 1960s, most notably anything from the ITC stable and all the Gerry Anderson titles. Unfortunately, ITV’s repeat rights to the ITC shows had come to an end, and would not be renewed for another four years. Gerry Anderson’s puppet adventures weren’t subject to the same restrictions, but none of them was currently being repeated. Now that I had the means to capture them on tape, there weren’t any of those old shows out there to record…

It was, therefore, bitterly ironic that, on Saturday 15 November, a mere three days after I’d taken delivery of the VHS machine, our local ITV station chose to show an episode of Stingray – unscheduled! The episode had been pulled off the shelf at ATV in Birmingham as a partial replacement for that morning’s edition of Tiswas, which had been affected by industrial action. But in the end, VHS came to the rescue, as I learned from a fellow collector that a mutual friend had managed to record the unscheduled episode.

Press ad for the Ferguson Videostar and portable camcorder, circa 1979

One thing I was determined not to do was to record every episode of every series I watched; although I decided it was fair enough to retain odd examples of individual series. On Sunday 16 November, I taped that night’s episode of Shoestring as it went out (the recording still exists), and a month later, at the request of a friend, I set the timer to record the Christmas episode, accidentally recording most of the BBC’s Christmas 1980 trailer at the same time. Such serendipitous recordings are now of greater value than the programmes themselves: YouTube is full of vintage ‘continuity’ caught on old video tapes.

I was soon amassing VHS tapes at a prodigious rate, filling them with Laurel and Hardy shorts (being shown regularly on BBC2), odd episodes of Bilko, and any random repeats of vintage sitcoms that happened to turn up. Finally, in late summer of 1981, came a repeat run of Thunderbirds, which began broadcasting in the Midlands area on Sunday 30 August at 1.00pm. This was the first of a run of Gerry Anderson repeats that would extend over the next few years, affording the opportunity for fans with VCRs to finally own their own copies of the series.

In the summer of 1982, as an alternative to the ongoing World Cup coverage, ITV dusted off a handful of classic old series, including several from the ITC stable, affording my first ever opportunity to commit episodes to tape. On Saturday 26 June, The Persuaders! episode Greensleeves was shown in a prime time slot of 7.10pm. Sunday saw the first ever colour episode of The Saint, The Queen’s Ransom; then finally, on Friday 2 July, at 11.55pm came The Prisoner, represented by the atypical episode The Girl Who Was Death. The episodes were all shown with their original 1960s end of part captions. Alongside all these, viewers were also treated (if that’s the right word) to episodes of venerable sitcoms including On the Buses, Doctor in Charge and Oh No, It’s Selwyn Froggitt.

By now, my collection of VHS tapes had reached one hundred and was still climbing, meaning that I’d spent close on a thousand pounds on tapes in the space of two years (equivalent to over £4,000 at 2026 prices). Still more repeats were on the way, which would put a severe dent in my wallet over the coming years. In 1983, the Prisoner Appreciation Society Six of One was finally rewarded with a repeat run of all seventeen episodes on Channel 4, the first time the series had been nationally networked in the UK. 

The following year, ITV began a repeat run of The Champions, broadcasting the episodes at lunchtimes, which is where the VHS machine really came into its own. Further ITC repeats followed, with The Baron, Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) and Man in a Suitcase occupying the same timeslot over the coming years. Keeping copies of all these was costing me a lot in VHS tapes, not to mention storage space. In addition to these titles, I was also recording Star Trek (making its final appearance in the ‘BBC edits’ that had been in use since 1969) and The Avengers, which had been broadcasting on Channel 4 since its launch in November 1982. The dearth of vintage programming had turned into a deluge.

One might well ask why I kept all those recordings when surely it was enough to simply watch an episode and tape over it with next week’s? That was, of course, the logical thing to do, but I was by no means certain that any of those old programmes would be broadcast again. My earlier resolve to retain just 'representative episodes' went out of the window. As a collector, it was nice to have one’s own copies of such series available to watch again at any time, so I hung onto them. Only when DVD began to render those old copies obsolete did I begin, slowly, to discard the tapes, a process which sped up considerably when I realised that many of them were beginning to succumb to mould, after being stored in unsuitable environments. As it turned out, none of those old ITC recordings would prove to be of anything more than academic interest in the future.

The reign of VHS lasted just over a quarter of a century, and the format’s death knell was sounded by the arrival, in the late 90s, of DVD. Initially, one could not record on the new discs, so VHS was granted a temporary stay of execution. Betamax, meanwhile, had found its niche in professional video and audio studios, and with the capability of storing digital recordings, would stay around for a lot longer. As audiences grew accustomed to new formats, including mp4 files and the ability to watch material online, the market for VHS dwindled. A few manufacturers, including Panasonic, offered VCR/DVD combos which were an ideal way of archiving material from the older format onto the new – although the baffling range of different recordable discs was hard to navigate, and many such recordings have proved to be unreadable on later machines.

Japan’s Funai, selling its equipment under the Sanyo brand, was the last company to offer VHS playback capability, and finally ceased production of its machines in 2016, by which time the tapes themselves had become quite hard to find. At time of writing there is said to be a VHS revival under way, but it’s very much a niche market and is highly unlikely to gain the kind of popularity that the revived vinyl record format has enjoyed.

What is the legacy of VHS? Perhaps its most important achievement was in opening up a new market in home entertainment. Before the days of home video, if you wanted to watch a feature film at home, you had to own 16mm or 8mm film equipment, and the choice of titles was very limited. VHS showed content owners that there was a proven domestic market for movies and even vintage TV series like Doctor Who both as rental and ‘sell-through’ releases, so that by the time DVD arrived on the scene, there was a huge audience ready to make the upgrade. The early days of sell-through and rental VHS were an unregulated 'wild west', with no obligation on the industry to certify releases, meaning that even the most graphic content was on sale to anybody. The mass media hysteria that was whipped up regarding so called 'video nasties' ushered in the era of BBFC certification, adding a costly new level to the production process as every release had to be viewed and granted a certificate in the same way as any theatrical film release. No matter if the series you wanted to release was some harmless kids' cartoon – you still needed a BBFC certificate, and still do.

Another legacy from the VCR era is piracy. Today, the place to find illegal, unlicensed copies of television series and films is the internet, with YouTube users as the prime candidates for bootlegging. Back in the 1980s, one could get hold of pretty well everything from the latest Star Wars epic right down to obscure 1950s TV series that were still being shown on the other side of the world. Many of today's YouTube uploads have their origin in off-air video recordings – gifts to posterity courtesy of VHS and Betamax.

VHS and its rival formats may have gone the way of 8mm film, but during its era it was meat and drink to a generation of collectors, many of whom, like myself, had probably never dreamed that such a thing could ever exist. It paved the way for a whole industry exploiting content from film and television studios, and pointed towards a future where such material would be widely available and as easily accessible as turning on one's TV or computer.

VHS is Fifty

Part One: 'Yes, we've got a video!'

Charlie Endell was well ahead of the curve. ‘Film cassettes!’ he proudly announced in a 1972 episode of the LWT series Budgie, ‘what in future years you will bung on television sets. The coming thing… the cinema of the future’. Endell, ever the entrepreneur, had done a deal with his American counterpart to supply pornographic material on ‘film cassettes’ for rental through his Soho sex boutique. Presumably he was talking about video cassettes. But how could he have known about them back in 1972? And what, exactly, were the ‘film cassettes’ he’d been promised?

That Budgie episode marks the very first reference to home video in any British TV series. Writers Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall would likely have been aware of the launch, in 1971, of the U-Matic video cassette system, marketed by Sony, Panasonic and JVC and originally aimed at the domestic market. Of course, they may have been thinking of something else entirely – there was already a system known as EVR which recorded video signals onto an 8.75mm physical film format, and was announced to the world by CBS back in 1967. There were even plans to release vintage movies from Twentieth Century Fox and other libraries, including, intriguingly, the BBC. As we know, nothing came of these endeavours, and by the early 70s the big Japanese manufacturers were pushing ahead with magnetic tape-based systems. As a semi-professional format, U-Matic wasn't really suited for home use, but competing systems using smaller cassettes were already in development by the early 70s.

Sony were first off the starting grid with their Betamax format, which launched in Japan on May 10 1975, and arrived in the USA later the same year. Aware of what was happening, Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry made early efforts to force the industry to agree on a standardised format for the coming wave of domestic video recorders. Sony attempted to steal a march on its rivals by persuading MITI to accept Betamax as the preferred format, but JVC, who were developing their own ‘Video Home System’ convinced other manufacturers to adopt their format, thereby denying Sony the chance to monopolise the market. Matsushita (known in most territories as Panasonic) came on board, and others followed.

VHS finally arrived on the Japanese market in September 1976, and would make its debut here in Britain two years later. The so-called ‘format war’ had been declared, but from the outset VHS had major advantages against Sony’s competing system. Betamax tapes originally allowed for only an hour’s worth of recording. Advocates of the system claimed it gave improved picture quality compared to VHS, on account of its faster recording speed of 1.5 inches per second, as against 1.31 ips for VHS. But the marginally slower speed of VHS, coupled with a larger format cassette capable of holding more tape, allowed for up to two hours of recording time. This was soon expanded to three and four hours, and by 1980 VHS had won 60% of the American market. Sony's L750 tape soon offered three-hour recording capability for the Betamax format, but there was no stopping VHS and the rival system slowly disappeared from the domestic market – although the format would endure as the professional Betacam system until 2016.

Now you can watch all your favourite TV shows... but not necessarily in the right order...

For anyone with an interest in film and television, old or new, the arrival of domestic video recording was a watershed moment. Home video recorders had, in fact, been around since the mid 60s, when an early open reel machine was offered as a prize in the TV Times. But the capabilities of those early machines were limited as to duration and quality. Surviving examples from the archive of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson (who taped episodes of Steptoe & Son which were later wiped by the BBC) reveal their shortcomings.

By the mid 70s, the technology was much improved, and the new, cassette-based systems took over from the old reel-to-reel technology. The first VCR I ever saw in operation was one of Sony’s U-Matic machines, which our grammar school owned (and, for the most part, kept a closely guarded secret). The player was big and quite cumbersome, the cassettes enormous, and capable of only an hour's recording time. But by the time I got to see it, in 1979, the first VHS and Betamax machines had already gone on sale here in Britain.

Now that domestic video recording technology had arrived, how was it to be known? The television industry had always abbreviated videotape to 'VT'. Now, the new breed of cassette-based recording systems were known generically as 'VCRs' – short for 'Video Cassette Recorder' which was a bit of a mouthful. In practise, most people simply used the word 'video' to refer to both the hardware and the recording media. Anyone asking 'shall we rent a video tonight' was referring to the tape rather than the machine. 'Oh, have we got a video?' asked Rik in an episode of The Young Ones, referring to their newly acquired VCR. 'Yes!' bawled Vivian, 'we've got a video!' Hadn't we all?

The first person I knew who owned a video recorder was (of course), Tim Beddows, who, at the age of just 16, was already a committed collector of vintage film and television: not that there was much material available to collect back then. He was too young to rent the machine himself, but somehow convinced his dad or an older brother that their household would be the better for owning one.

Tim had considered the two emerging formats and decided – correctly, as it turned out – that VHS was the way to go. A year or so later, Philips brought out their V2000 format, which offered increased runtime and the ability to record on both sides of the tape, like a conventional cassette, but despite these advantages, VHS was already too well established in the consumer market, and V2000 vanished from the scene. With Betamax sales in decline, VHS was soon the last man standing.

The first VHS recording I ever saw was a commercial. Quite famous in its day, it was an ad for Dunlop products, voiced by Richard Briers, with the tagline ‘you’d be surprised how much you’d miss Dunlop’. Tim was quite pleased at having nabbed this ad on his first evening as a VHS user. It had prefaced a broadcast of the satirical comedy film The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer, which he had also recorded, in full. Even though it had only been on the night before, we sat and watched the whole film again – for the sheer novelty value of being able to do so.

I was impressed at this new piece of technology, but wasn’t quite so quick to take advantage of it myself. It was another year before I managed to convince my mum and dad that, if they’d take care of the paperwork, I personally would pay the monthly rental on a VHS machine. We already rented our TV set from Radio Rentals, so adding a video recorder to the package was simple enough. The monthly fee was something like £10 or £15 which I shamefully paid out of my student grant. No loans in those days! By comparison, the full retail price of a VHS machine in 1980 was £495, while a typical Betamax machine was £545 (equivalent to around £2,000-£2,500 in 2026).

The tapes weren’t cheap either. One payed an average of £10-£12 for a three hour E180 cassette. In time the prices came down, but for the first couple of years, one considered oneself lucky to find them for as little as £7.99. Pre-recorded tapes sold for eye-watering prices: £75 or more for a single feature film. This over-pricing probably helped to drive the rental market which within a few years would become huge. In 1982, I paid £25 for a pre-recorded tape of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and considered it a bargain!

The video recorder arrived on Wednesday 11 November 1980. It was a Ferguson branded ‘Videostar’ model, with the familiar top-loading tape mechanism and so-called ‘piano key’ controls. It felt rugged and solidly put together. There was a corded remote control available, but I preferred to use the controls on the machine itself, holding it on ‘pause’ while I waited for a programme to begin (I didn’t want to record any of the between shows continuity or, heaven forbid, commercials).

Curiously, my diary mentions that, on Monday 8 December, less than a month after taking delivery of the VCR, the machine was replaced. What was wrong with it? I’m at a loss to remember. In all probability I had mistaken tape faults (white line dropouts were common) for something the matter with the hardware. Renting meant that it was simple to upgrade the units, but I always preferred that original Videostar with its huge, clunky controls. Within a year, it had been superceded by a new model with electronic, push-button controls which somehow felt less reassuring in operation. The video age had arrived in our house – yes, we'd got a video! Now, what were we to do with it?

In part two, I’ll look at some of the material I recorded and consider the ultimate fate of VHS.

Garden Star Trek

 

Or... I was a pre-teenage Vulcan

It was high summer when Star Trek began broadcasting on the BBC, which meant that, as soon as this week’s episode ended, you could run out into the back garden and re-enact it yourself – or make up your own adventure. The back garden wasn’t a great fit for most Star Trek landscapes – not enough polystyrene boulders (in fact, none) – but wasn’t so bad for episodes like Shore Leave or This Side of Paradise where they’d gone out on location.

I happened to have a mustard yellow polo neck shirt, with thin stripes around the neck and cuffs, which made an ideal Captain Kirk outfit – down to the waist, at any rate. When our class started football practice that same autumn, I opted for a blue jersey so I could wear it and pretend to be Mr. Spock. My friends thought I supported something called ‘Everton’, but I’d never heard of the place – no, my team was Vulcan.

I think I swapped roles in our Star Trek games fairly early on, though I was still wearing the ‘Kirk top’ as late as 1973, when it still fit me. I’d noticed that Captain Kirk had a tendency to get his shirt torn to ribbons in a fist fight (you’d have thought Star Fleet tailoring would be more hard wearing), and whilst I wasn’t going to start tearing up my own clothes, I came up with the perfect solution for those ‘ripped shirt’ moments: simply tug one arm out of your sleeve, exposing your shoulder. Instant Shatner! As the series progressed, I began to focus more on Mr Spock as the more interesting character. He was an alien, after all, which must have spoken to some repressed aspect of my personality: I’d felt like a bit of an outsider since moving to a new area and a new school back in 1967. He was also a problem solver, with a brilliant mind. Well, anyone can dream…

By 1970, our school photos (above) reveal how far I had immersed myself in this new role. Sadly, my ears were still Earth normal, but I’d gone for the full-on Spock hairstyle, wearing a dead straight fringe, courtesy of our local barber whose shop also, for some reason, sold teddy bears and James Bond action figures. My eyebrows were already roughly the right shape, and my face was also developing along Vulcanian (or Romulan?) lines, with high cheekbones beginning to appear.

At the age of nine going on ten, I not only looked like Mr. Spock, but I’d started thinking like him as well. I was fascinated by his ability to control his emotions, which I thought was a pretty cool trait, though probably not great DIY child psychology at the dawn of the 1970s. 

Our ‘Garden Star Trek’ games were enhanced by cardboard Enterprise badges that I think came off the back of a Cornflakes pack, and even a cut-out and glued-together cardboard communicator from a similar source. At this time, there were no Star Trek toys available in the shops – what I’d have given for a proper phaser toy – so improvisation was key. Fortunately, we had the perfect ersatz phaser in the form of two ‘Pifco’ branded ‘Zetaray’ guns, which dated from the mid 60s. The ‘Zetaray’ was essentially a low-powered torch set inside a typically 50s futurist-styled ray gun, which lit up when you squeezed the trigger. The guns each had a red cone on the front, which could be unscrewed in order to change bulbs and batteries, and without them in place, they looked a lot like phasers. Mine was bronze, my brother’s was blue, and thus more realistic. We even had our own ‘hand phaser’ – I’d seen the smaller ‘phaser number one’ deployed in various episodes, and once again, a torch provided the perfect stand-in. We’d both been given ‘Ever Ready’ branded torches as stocking fillers one Christmas, and they now did sterling service in Garden Star Trek. I’ve still got one of them, and its resemblance to ‘phaser number one’ can’t be denied. Fortunately, it never occurred to me to give it a paint job to improve its appearance.

'Phaser number one' as portrayed by an Ever Ready pocket torch – absolutely no use against the Horta

Had we owned one of the Merit-branded Dan Dare multicoloured torch guns from the 1950s, we could even have had a stab at doing The Menagerie where the original Enterprise crew were armed with a larger and clunker version of the phaser (carved from wood, apparently, although they looked exactly like shop bought toys). The Dan Dare gun would have made a perfect substitute – but our back garden games never went back to the Captain Pike era. That said, The Menagerie is an episode I can still vividly recall from those first broadcasts, because it looked so strange. Some of the planet ‘exteriors’ had the same eerie quality as the studio sets from The Singing, Ringing Tree – and there even was a ‘singing, ringing tree’ on the surface of Talos IV.

When we weren’t playing Star Trek in the garden, or watching it on TV, there were always  Star Trek paperbacks to be read, which I discovered a couple of years later, and from which I got to know certain episodes very well, despite them having been broadcast only once or twice. The paperbacks were American imports, with their distinctive yellow text blocks – I’ve never discovered why American paperbacks were printed like this. In time, British versions would become available, but for the first few years, booksellers routinely stocked the imported versions. By 1971, the first four volumes had appeared, alongside an original novel called ‘Spock Must Die’. The main series of books comprised short stories adapted from original scripts, which occasionally contained scenes that had been omitted from the final drafts. In the case of The Menagerie, writer James Blish chose to adapt the story in its original pilot form rather than the unweildy two-part version we’d seen on TV. His foreword to the story was the first bit of Star Trek production history I ever read about: so The Menagerie had started life as a series pilot? Fascinating… (I may even have raised a quasi-Vulcan eyebrow). Further detailed information followed within a year or so with the publication of The Making of Star Trek: surely a book that spawned a whole generation of similar ‘behind-the scenes of television’ endeavours.

Some of the first Star Trek merchandise I remember was the gum card set produced by A&BC, who had cut frames from a 35mm print of the episode What Are Little Girls Made Of? to provide a photo story told across the fifty-five cards in the set. One particular card remained elusive: in the end, we resorted to buying the remaining contents of a display box, along with the box itself, which finally yielded the missing item. Sadly, we never thought to retain the display box, which would be highly collectable today. The photo story idea was later done on a larger scale, when Bantam Books, who’d published the original set of novels, crafted some impressively realised ‘photo novels’. In the days before home video, these were as good as you could get to reliving episodes when the series was off the air.

What I most wanted as a young Star Trek fan was a model of the USS Enterprise. It wasn’t the kind of spaceship you could build from Lego, or even old washing-up liquid bottles. Even Blue Peter didn’t attempt it. The problem was that saucer section – that and getting all the bits to stand upright, so I never attempted a DIY Enterprise. One day, from a car window, I glimpsed what looked very much like an Enterprise kit box in a toy shop near our grandparents’ house. The shop was closed at the time, but when we next looked in, the kit had gone. I hadn’t imagined it: years later, I turned up an image of the original AMT Enterprise kit box, and the artwork matched my recollection. The kits were rare at the time, but soon became more readily available, in a re-designed carton. My brother and I were both given them as Christmas presents in 1971, and mine was assembled in fairly short order. The kit was moulded in white plastic, so you didn’t even need to paint it… so I thought. Some years later, a school friend and amateur model maker showed me his own Enterprise kit (and some ‘kit-bashed’ takes on other Star Fleet vessels), all of which were painted in a bluey off-white. The original studio model, which survives to this day, is a kind of taupe colour, as white would have caused exposure problems and flared out when filmed.

The AMT Enterprise kit was a very accurate reproduction of the hero vessel – so good that it had been used in the original series episode The Doomsday Machine as the wrecked USS Constellation. Viewing the episode reveals one of the model’s defects which became apparent to me when attempting to build it at Christmas 1971: those tubes along the back simply would not stay upright: the supporting pylons had a tendency to lean outwards. Model builders who knew their stuff found solutions to this, by strengthening the interior of the kit: but the model used in The Doomsday Machine betrays the same sagging rear tubes.

Dinky toys, who were always bang up to date with the latest Gerry Anderson releases, took a surprisingly long time to add the USS Enterprise to their range of die-cast models. The model didn’t appear until 1976, seven years after the series had debuted over here. By that time, I was fifteen and considered myself a little too old to be buying Dinky toys. It wasn’t the greatest Dinky creation, but it looked passably like the original and at least it was white… Dinky had become notorious for issuing sci fi vehicles in metallic dayglo colours that violently contrasted their original appearance, as witness their UFO Interceptor of 1971.

I don’t know when we played our last game of Garden Star Trek: I think most of our adventures were enacted during the ‘Indian Summer’ of 1969, although I still had the Spock haircut for a good few years afterwards. By 1971, the back garden game of choice was The Persuaders!, with me as Brett Sinclair and my brother as Danny Wilde. I had straight hair, his was curly – it made sense. We even had the cravates...

The Dinky USS Enterprise and a 'Pifco Zetaray' phaser

Frankly, Illogical...

Why Star Trek isn't sixty...

Okay, I’ll admit it: Star Trek is sixty. It's all a question of relativity, ie. where in the universe you happen to be. The iconic SF series debuted back in the fall of 1966. I say ‘fall’ as opposed to ‘autumn’ with good reason: Star Trek may be celebrating its sixtieth anniversary stateside, but here in the UK it is a youngster of just 57 summers. Viewers in Britain were first beamed on board in July of 1969, just in time for the real life space adventure of mankind’s first moon landing.

Why is any of this even worth mentioning? Because the Royal Mint (and it’s hard to think of a more quintessentially British institution) has just issued a commemorative 50p piece (what, another?) celebrating Star Trek’s anniversary. Every time I see it promoted online (and it’s being promoted a lot on social media), I feel like jumping on the thread and giving them this whole spiel. Celebrate Star Trek’s sixtieth anniversary, by all means. Strike a commemorative coin if you must… but surely it should be an American coin. Because to me, the idea of celebrating an American anniversary in British coinage is, well… illogical.

The trouble with this is twofold: for a start, I’m sure the Royal Mint don’t care a tinker’s damn about Star Trek. Commemorative coins like this are produced to lure collectors and persuade them to part with their hard earned Altarian dollars. How much do the coins cost? Here’s a rundown: the ‘Brilliant Uncirculated’ editions cost £19.95 each (I’m certain that absolutely none of this edition will enter general circulation). There are two different designs, and the two-coin set sells for £29.95 to £39.90. The limited edition ‘Silver Proof’ coin sells for ‘around’ £99.50, while for those with conspicuously greater amounts of cash than common sense, there is a deluxe gold edition which can be yours for two thousand, four hundred and ninety five of your Earth pounds.

Collectors… they’ve seen you coming. And it’s not just coins (or commemorative plates, or vintage cars or any of the myriad other collectable editions available from the Danbury Mint et al). This kind of madness has become rife in the guitar market, where a ‘Custom Shop’ edition of something like a Fender Stratocaster or Gibson Les Paul can sell for four, five, even ten times the price of an ‘ordinary’ edition. What makes them different? Artificial ageing, and the name of a noted house luthier to name but two. Do people pay these prices? They must do, because the ‘Custom Shop’ editions just keep on coming. Who is actually buying them? In the case of guitars, the demographic is generally older men, mostly white (don’t ask me why), either in retirement and with a huge pension fund to play with, or else coming to the end of some high end job that provides them with sufficient disposable income to justify blowing twenty grand on a single guitar (and yes, some of them are that expensive… and the rest).

Compared to a Custom Shop Les Paul, even the most expensive of the Star Trek coins is a snip. It’s hard to know which is the better investment – the coin is a lot less risky, but a lot of them will be sold, many of them to older collectors whose families will end up selling them off within the next five or ten years, which will drive down the resale value. If I had to choose, I’d go for the coin, but that’s only because I know that the market for guitars is tanking, and it’s almost impossible to see a return on instruments bought as investments, unless you’re prepared to hang onto them for an uncomfortably long time.

The other problem with the Royal Mint’s Star Trek coin is subtler but perhaps slightly more worrying for anybody who cares about historical accuracy. I’ve seen some of the social media threads promoting this release, and nobody that I’ve seen has raised the whole thorny problem of chronology that I mentioned at the beginning of this piece. Me, I’m a stickler for pop culture timelines and facts, but the internet isn’t bothered. The Royal Mint’s issue gives the false impression that Star Trek is sixty years old not only in America, but here in Britain as well. I’m certain that a lot of those drooling over the coins on social media couldn’t care less, or could even tell the difference between 1966 and 1969. It’s only three years, and it was the 1960s, so, frankly, who cares? Most of them probably weren’t even born.

The Royal Mint isn’t exactly guilty of fake news here, although I’d say that this could certainly be called a fake anniversary. Does it matter? It’s only Star Trek, after all. But even slight distortions like this can, if repeated, cause factual inaccuracies to take hold. One day, there won’t be anyone left alive who can even remember seeing Star Trek the first time around, and its British debut will have become conflated with its 1966 premiere in the USA. And while none of this really matters, if you apply the same principle to an important subject, like, say the rise of the Nazi party or the outcome of the Second World War, you can see where fake history can be potentially dangerous. Not knowing when Star Trek started in Britain is only the tip of an iceberg of general ignorance.

Let’s beam back in time for a second to Britain in 1966. Is anybody in the pubs talking about a great new series called Star Trek? No. Has anybody even heard of Star Trek? No. The same situation holds good right through 1967 and most of 1968. By the time we get to the end of 1968, a handful of people in Britain have heard of Star Trek… the BBC’s international programme buyers have purchased the series, intending to start broadcasting it early in the new year (in the event, Star Trek will be held back until the summer). Also, the editorial team at City Magazines, who are preparing a brand new comic – Joe 90 – have heard of Star Trek, even if they most likely haven’t seen a single episode, because they’re going to include it as a comic strip in their new publication. But right up until early July 1969, most of the general public in Britain still haven’t heard of Star Trek. Finally, on 12 July 1969 – and, by extension, for a few days before, allowing for the listing in that week’s Radio Times – Star Trek begins to percolate the collective consciousness of the British public (I blame that Vulcan mind-meld myself…)

And there you have it: Star Trek, utterly obscure, unknown and unloved by the great British viewing public in 1966, and equally obscure and unremarked for another three years. Ironically, by the time Star Trek made its BBC1 debut in the summer of 1969, it had already been cancelled by NBC. Which perhaps makes the British sixtieth anniversary, in 2029, less of a cause for celebration...

For me, Star Trek arrived at the perfect time. I’m sure I’d have watched it if we’d had it back in 1966, but aged five I’d have got less out of it. Even at the age of eight, I was still a bit too young to understand the sophistication of the writing, but I could better appreciate some of the classic episodes we got to see in the first BBC season. Between July and December, it quickly established itself as a new favourite, and a series not to be missed. And when it ended, it was replaced by a brand new series of Doctor Who, which I hadn’t watched up to that point in time. The trail shown after Star Trek’s last episode, The Galileo Seven, on 27 December, convinced me to be tuned in next Saturday for the first episode of Spearhead from Space… but that’s an anniversary for another occasion.

Next time: how we played at Star Trek back in the day...

Where Cult TV Began...

August 26, 1976

Fifty years ago this week, one of the most important repeat broadcasts in television history was under way. If that sounds like an over statement, bear with me. Back in 1976, the idea of cult television had barely taken hold. It was only a comparatively small number of diehard fans who cared at all about being able to see their favourite old shows again, and that potential fan community was scattered and disconnected. What they needed was something to bring them together.

As I’ve written elsewhere, 1976 was something of an annus mirabilis for anyone with an interest in old television series. There had been seasons of vintage repeats on both BBC and ITV, and the last stragglers of the late 60s ITC stable of action/adventure series were making what threartened to be their swansong appearances across the independent television regions.

On Saturday 10 July 1976, the Birmingham Evening Mail announced that the local ITV operator, ATV, would begin a repeat broadcast of Patrick McGoohan’s cult series The Prisoner later in the year. The Evening Mail had been instrumental in drumming up reader support for the return of favourite TV programmes, and a letter-writing campaign earlier in the year had led to a Saturday evening strand of selected repeats of vintage American series. Now, in response to the amount of interest the season had generated, ATV were promising home grown material. On Thursday 26 August, at 11pm, the repeat run of The Prisoner got under way. ‘Now see if you can follow it’ said the Evening Mail’s television column for the evening.

I was all for it. Back in July, I’d caught an episode of Danger Man whilst on holiday in Wales. Ironically, we’d driven right past the entrance to Portmeirion without knowing it was there or being aware of its significance. A school friend cautioned me that The Prisoner was strange and incomprehensible, and didn’t show much interest in the upcoming repeats. He’d formerly shared my enthusiasm for vintage television, and his muted response to the Prisoner repeats would mark a cooling phase in our relationship. He left school the following year, aged 16, and I never saw him again. By that time, however, a new name was on the scene: Tim Beddows. A classmate of my brother, two years younger than myself, I’d known him on and off for the past four years, gradually becoming aware that he shared my interest in pop culture icons like James Bond. In early 1976, I’d advised him to watch an afternoon repeat run of the ITC series Strange Report. Now, we were both primed and ready for The Prisoner. And we weren’t the only ones.

That 1976 repeat broadcast transformed the show’s reputation, both here in Britain and further afield. Until now, it had been remembered (if at all) for the controversy surrounding its final episode, and its first repeat run in 1970 had passed off largely unnoticed; certainly without attracting any attention. It was the letter from viewer Dave Barrie of Cheltenham, read out on air after the final episode of the 1976 repeats that lit the fuse. By spring of the following year, the nascent Six of One – the Prisoner Appreciation Society – was already organising its first gathering, in Portmeirion (where else?) In a pre-internet age, The Prisoner was, slowly, going viral, its reputation spreading largely by word of mouth, and acting as a lightning rod for like-minded individuals, many of whom were equally enthusiastic about other vintage television series.

The Prisoner wasn’t the first TV series to spawn a cult, nor the first to have its own appreciation society. Doctor Who preceded it by a few months, with its own appreciation society founded in May of 1976. The first true televisual cult was, of course, Star Trek, whose fans had granted it a reprieve from cancellation through an organised letter-writing campaign – but that was in the United States, where weight of numbers really counted. Here in Britain, the audience for cult television was much smaller: but the arrival of two key fan networks in the space of a year told its own story.

Evidence of the growing interest in The Prisoner, from late 1976: even before Dave Barrie's letter to ATV,
this Evening Mail article highlighted McGoohan's appearance in that week's episode of Columbo, Identity Crisis.

For me personally, the 1976 repeat run of The Prisoner put the seal on my friendship with Tim Beddows, which was to endure until his untimely death in 2022, aged just 59. By the following year, my diary was regularly recording his visits to our house, often armed with off-air audio recordings of Prisoner episodes and others. When I should have been revising for ‘O’ levels, I was spending evenings listening to Tim’s tapes, nattering about old television, and anything else that caught our imaginations. But if The Prisoner meant something to me, it was far more significant for Tim. His enthusiasm for the series spurred him on to begin collecting vintage television episodes on film formats – 8mm and 16mm – several years before domestic video recording was widely available. Ironically, he never discovered any 16mm prints of The Prisoner, but no matter – he later came to own the entire series in its 35mm broadcast format, including some of the very same physical prints that had been used for the ATV repeats back in 1976.

Tim’s passion for collecting and preserving archive television and film led to the formation of the Network DVD label – the first company that really took the business of archive TV releasing seriously. Without his efforts in locating and restoring rare and missing episodes, there woule be huge gaps in the schedule of broadcasters like Talking Pictures TV, whose roster of programmes owes a huge debt to his tenacity in tracking down vintage material and building an audience for it.

The cult fascination of The Prisoner led in time to a wider reappraisal of vintage televisual material. Gerry Anderson’s series were revived on ITV and, later BBC, to huge acclaim. Series like The Champions, The Baron and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) all saw complete repeat runs for the first time in fifteen years. Physical media releases began to appear, initially on VHS, then later, when the new format emerged, DVD.

As DVD arrived on the scene, it was finally possible for a label like Network to release complete box sets of series like The Saint, whose sheer volume of episodes was unsuited to the bulky VHS format. Tim wasn’t the first to release The Prisoner on DVD… indeed, he had to fight to convince ITV to let him have it. But unlike earlier releases, which simply made the best of the available material, Tim invested in a full restoration, which ultimately received the blessing of McGoohan himself. When Tim was invited to California to meet him in 2009, it was the culmination of a journey that had endured over 33 years. And it all got started on a Thursday evening back in August 1976.

Cult TV would, in time, have found its level, its audience, and taken advantage of the new physical media as they appeared. But that 1976 repeat of The Prisoner did something that few other TV series have ever achieved, rescuing a vintage item from obscurity to claim its rightful place in television history. It brought together fans whose weight of numbers would gradually convince broadcasters that old television series shouldn’t just be gathering dust on archive shelves, but were a serious commercial proposition. Today, cult television isn’t just the preserve of a few nerdy fans gathered in pubs and suburban living rooms – it’s a whole industry.

Back in the 1970s, the idea that anyone could own their own physical copy of any television series was more or less unthinkable. Today, it’s taken for granted. The Prisoner, and Tim Beddows, both played an important part in making that happen.

Bank Holiday Special: The War of the Worlds

 

Bank Holiday Monday, August 31 1970, was a minor televisual event – the first broadcast on British TV of Byron Haskin's 1953 epic adaptation of H.G. Wells' classic The War of the Worlds. ITV had been broadcasting in colour since the previous November, and had likely held back the seventeen-year-old blockbuster to take full advantage of the fact. Back in 1953, colour films were still quite a novelty, and the Technicolor treatment of Wells' story would have looked as stunning to moviegoers as it did to the television audience tuning in on a dull Bank Holiday evening almost two decades later.

I still remember that broadcast. ITV had taken a leaf out of Orson Welles' book – his notorious 1938 'radio verité' adaptation had apparently fooled some listeners into thinking it was all happening for real. There was no hoodwinking the televisually-aware viewers of 1970, but during the commercial breaks between the preceding programmes (Opportunity Knocks and Coronation Street), a teaser slide would flash up announcing 'The Martians are Coming!' accompanied by an image of the movie's iconic war machines. If only they'd got Reginald Bosanquet to make the announcement...

Despite its seventeen-year vintage, the film didn't look particularly dated to me. Seen today, it seems steeped in the fashions of the late 40s and early 50s, and the cars are a dead giveaway. None of that mattered when you saw the Martian machines with their manta ray bodies and swan necked heat-ray appendages. Viewers with colour sets would have fully appreciated the Academy Award-winning special effects, which were so far ahead of their time that, even in 1970, they didn't look dated at all. Wires? You couldn't see them.

At a mere 85 minutes in length, the film cuts along at a remarkable pace and, even with the romantic boy meets girl plot element (imposed by the studio to the dismay of screen writer Barré Lyndon), there's no time wasted as the action moves from one set piece to another. Many of Wells' original scenes are present: the famous 'unscrewing' of the Martian cylinder (in the film, it's a meteorite); the heat-ray; the close encounter with the Martians in a ruined house; and the manner in which the invaders meet their end. Wells' Martians were, famously, tripods, but the film makers decided – wisely – that walking tripod models would present too many problems and opted instead to have the machines supported on legs of 'magnetic flux', which are visible in the scenes of their initial appearance, but quietly forgotten thereafter.

This 1970 Bank Holiday broadcast was my second encounter with Wells' famous tale. I'd first discovered it earlier the same year as an abridgement in the 'improving' magazine Tell Me Why, which published it as a text serial over five issues during January and February. The illustrations of the fighting machines were highly convincing, rendered in a painterly style that left just enough to the imagination but achieved an impressionist realism. For me, these are still the definitive visualisation of the cowled tripods.

Tell Me Why magazine's depiction of a Martian tripod – artist unknown.

The television rights to the 1953 War of the Worlds remained with ITV for the next decade, and it was shown again in 1976, in an early evening slot; but by the time it next landed on television it had migrated to BBC2, where it formed part of the channel's 'SF Film Festival' which ran for several months early in 1983. In all, the movie clocked up seven broadcasts on the BBC between 1983 and 1997, six of them on BBC2; but regrettably, of recent years, it's been supplanted in the schedules by the Spielberg version, which is presumably deemed more palatable to 'modern' audiences.

Although I'd read the Tell Me Why abridgement of H.G. Wells' original novel several times, I didn't get to read the complete text until 1976. I'd picked up a battered old copy at a school booksale, without covers, and falling to pieces: it looked like it had been through an interplanetary war itself. But I'd been given a brand new Pan paperback for my birthday that year, and I finally got round to reading it on Tuesday 2 November, finishing it eight days later. Much as I liked the 1953 film adaptation (and still do), there was no surpassing the original novel, and I returned to it many times over the years. The cover of that Pan edition, however, left a lot to be desired. Had the artist even read the story?

Curiously, I was never drawn to Jeff Wayne's musical version of The War of the Worlds, feeling that 1970s pop music and a Victorian 'scientific romance' didn't quite belong together. But as the decades went by, I began to wonder why no one had ever attempted to film the novel in its original setting of Victorian London. Stephen Spielberg's 2005 version is arguably an update of the Byron Haskin movie rather than the novel, and the whole device of having the invaders emerge from beneath the Earth rather than from the sky didn't stand up to any kind of logical scrutiny (surely they'd have been uncovered by accident or during earthquakes?). Worse still, Tom Cruise's unsympathetic lead makes the film, for me, borderline unwatchable. Once again, the invasion was placed in a modern day context. Was anyone ever going to give the novel the movie treatment it deserved?

In 2015 it was announced that a new BBC adaptation was on the way, but production wasn't confirmed until May 2017. Early reports indicated that this would, at long last, be set in the Victorian era. It was a long time coming, and when it finally arrived on screen, in November 2019, it was soon apparent that it hadn't been worth waiting for. New character arcs obscured the novel's narrative thrust, aspects of the story had been altered for no obvious reason and to no benefit, and the narrative was confusingly interrupted by pointless 'flash forwards' (possibly the worst film making technique ever conceived). This was, apparently, an attempt to 'upend audience expectations' in which it entirely succeeded: my own expectations having been of a coherent narrative that was as faithful as possible to Wells' original. This was anything but. It's almost inconceivable that anyone could take such excellent source material and make such a dull, slow-paced tedious mess of it, but somehow the BBC managed it. They must have known it was a dud, as the broadcast date was constantly kicked into the long grass, and it's been quietly forgotten ever since.

As Julie Walters' character in Educating Rita famously suggested in answer to an essay question, wouldn't it have been easier to 'do it on the radio'? Orson Welles had proved how effective a radio adaptation could be, and there would be many more of them over the years. The BBC's first radio attempt at The War of the Worlds was in 1950, with a script by John Manchip White that was reused for another production in 1967 starring Paul Daneman. This has survived complete and was repeated on Radio 4 Extra in 2023. Less successful was a 2-part adaptation from 2017, which was simply too wordy and boring and utterly failed to convey the nightmarish atmosphere of the original. 

I've had to admit defeat in expecting anyone to produce a movie of The War of the Worlds that in any way matches up to the 'movie' I see in my imagination while reading the novel. The 1953 film is, for me, superior to Spielberg's effort in every conceivable way. It's fast paced, atmospheric, scary, well acted (Gene Barry is probably at his career best) and has the best ever Martian machines, even if they're not tripods.

* * *

Today's viewers and readers are so familiar with the idea of aliens invading the Earth as a subject for films, comics, books and television, that it seems pointless to keep revisiting the same old trope; but when H.G. Wells hit on it as an idea for a novel, it was staggeringly original, and his depictions of England under attack, and the population of London fleeing under the Martian onslaught look, in retrospect, like glimpses into the future of warfare between mankind rather than between ourselves and extra-terrestrials. 

By the time I got to see and read The War of the Worlds, it was barely credible that intelligent life could exist on the planet Mars. The Ladybird Book of The Night Sky (published in 1965) conceded that primitive life might exist on the surface but that it would consist of simple things like mosses and lichens. We now know this to be a disapppinting over estimation. Gerry Anderson's Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967) located its alien intelligence on the red planet, but by this time, the idea of Mars as home to a malevolent alien race was mostly played out in science fiction. Wells had based his story on 19th century contemporary ideas about Mars, deriving from the misapprehensions of Percival Lowell, who had, like others, observed 'canals' on the Martian surface and deduced them to be evidence of intelligent life. They were eventually found to be an optical illusion. I'd read about them in a bound volume of 1930s magazines, and for a while, believed in them myself.

A measure of the greatness and lasting power of H.G. Wells' story is that, even in the 21st century, when science has proven Mars to be a dead world, the reader is still more than willing to suspend disbelief and go along with his interplanetary war scenario: surely the great great grandfather of all alien invasion literature.